I had a friend in high school, we’ll call him John. We actually met playin basketball during gym class. I was just sitting there, not being interested in basketball, and he came over with a basketball and the brightest yellow sweatpants. Ever. Hilarious. He asked if I wanted to play because everyone else was teamed up and he was so jovial and sincere that I reluctantly got up and we played the worse game of basketball ever. We became fast friends, me convincing him to join creative writing classes with me, then become a camera man for the high school soap opera club which annexed into a colleges level film class at Long Island University. We were close to inseparable.
This went on for about a year or two until we started getting closer and closer in weird ways that I would love to be able to capture in a fiction book one day. Finally we started hanging out longer and longer and finally going from Brooklyn to stay out all night in Manhattan. His mother freaked out—-his two brothers were criminal ne’er do wells, she had high, perhaps even priestly ambitions for John. My mother didn’t freak out so much—-she just lambasted me for wheeling around the groceries I was bringing home, in a shopping cart, all night.
We started flirting and just generally being closer and emotionally intimate and finally after some prodding he admitted that he really did love me. And that was amazing. What was so amazing about it was that we were deeply, emotionally simpatico but in differing mature ways. Finally he admitted to me some of his financial embarrassment because I was working and making so much money ($1000 a week in commissioned retail) and his family was on social services (he thought I didn’t know. I knew.) Of course years later, I would understand the social class differences.
So now we’re all giddy and he’s spending the night—-to this day, with the exception of LTRs, the safest and most comfortable I’ve ever slept with anyone. I simply felt safe with him because I was the extreme creative one and he was more of a balancing, foundational force—-he was the one person who could rev me up or calm me down in my creative writing/filming/directing/youthful flares. At 18, no credit (I had just gotten two credit cards and a credit line from my big retail job) he knew that an Amex would be best because it demanded immediate, monthly payments. He was more grounded than I was.
While I was seeing a counselor in school about sexuality, I hadn’t divulged anything to him until the week that precipitated the night out—-I was sitting outside of class at LIU listening to my CD player, “If Only You Knew” sung by Patti LaBelle and he came over and kept demanding to know what was wrong, why was I crying? And I was crying because I was listening to the answer and I realized that for all of his goofiness, I was genuinely in love with him.
Then we had our overnight love admittance then we had a day at my place, alone, where we talked and held each other. He later admitted after his shower and my making sausages for lunch and a bad attempt to braid his mass of hair, that we would have sex. We didn’t. We didn’t because while I was perhaps more sexually advanced that he was, not a virgin, I enjoyed the safety with him…but I didn't say that out loud. We often shared dreams, were keenly in tune with one another and attracted but divided by social class and I think a deep desire not to hurt the other.
So then he goes to the counselor and she tells me that she’s not sure but I might want to prepare myself for the fact that she doesn’t think he’s gay. I was gobsmacked, perplexed, hurt.
I decided that it was over. I sort of became suicidal because it was just he and I in this few week long bubble—-then I decided I didn’t want to die, he was just a bastard, so I ended the friendship.
I spent about 4–5 years really deeply, not pining over him in the sense of missed love, but in the sense that he was to be something else in my life. I felt hurt and ashamed when I realized that yes, I left high school a few weeks later, got my GED and went to work full time in the Manhattan and then a couple of years later went off to Buffalo.
I had left John.
So much of our connection was about him being my stabilizer but my being the engine that got us out of there, Brooklyn, from under our too attached mothers, past childhood poverty, into creative worlds. Spike Lee and Monty Ross, his business partner, came to LIU and we talked about how we could be them. We communicated artistically, personally, emotionally so deeply but alas, I was immature.
I lamented my immaturity at the loss of a soul mate because I assumed that sex and sexuality were to be compatible. What the counselor was trying to tell me was that John was willing to be gay…for me. To be with me. Maybe she was even hinting at that I should listen to his ambivalence, to his willingness to subsume parts of himself, to be with me. I heard rejection and took it from there, immaturely.
So yes, I believe you can have a soulmate who is more than a friend but less than a lover—-I got that from an Elizabeth Taylor movie on TV and immediately thought—-”That’s what it was!”
Why Then Again?
It sort of happened again in college, there was a college dude crushing and courting me, but this time I was more forthright and pointed out his girlfriend. And perhaps he too was a soulmate but he was freaked out by loving me, wanting me, being gay…and this might sound weird but you don’t want someone who is freaked out at wanting you. He talked about how I was perfect for him, how I loved him perfectly. And that freaked him out.
My reticence with him was all of his manipulative drama with me and her and not just simply “dating” me, romancing me, like a person not a gay-sex object—-”Mongo want to fuck you, ok?” he eventually offered.
(Yes, I wrote a book about it—-Stay With Me, available on Amazon.)
I found with both, that I missed the friendship most of all, the intimacy, the closeness. I even had an argument one of those bliss days with John when he mentioned how pretty a classmate was—-I was like—-”You want her? I’ll introduce you!” he just shook his head at what a snappish firebrand I was. I wasn’t threatened but, my sexuality being omnisexual, accepted his and the other guy’s could be just as bi or omni. But they were scared to have a definitive one, much less two or more.
What Could've Should've Happened
If you find yourself in this entanglement, if there’s space and affection and you can talk—-you can talk to him. One he knows about you and your feelings and feels some of the same—-though his romantic feelings may only be transitory, not infused. He’s willing to “experiment” with you because you’re so close, his friend, a soulmate. But again, all soulmates are not to be a loving and sexual relationship—-we physicalize the affection because that’s our bodies trying to fulfill the yearning of our emotions, minds, souls.
If you can, have sex. But make agreements beforehand. About doing it for awhile. I wish I had had the maturity to say ok, let’s just experiment and have safe, confidential fun together for 3 months but STAY friends. No matter what—-break up in 3 months and 1 day, that form of our relationship changes but we STAY friends.
See, I missed far more the emotional intimacy and safety with John than anything else. (Perhaps even the college dude too.) Trying to construct it with my teenage sexuality hands was messy and made me feel like I had failed him by so trivializing the physical and sexual to being mountainous, when it was the friendship that was suppose to change our lives. And yes, he may’ve found someone else but we'd be more than friends but less than lovers, even now.
He eventually got married, had kids, took me forever to find him on social media. And he seems happy so I’m even reticent to send an apology at my 18 year old immaturity. He was deeply congenial so I’m sure it would be kindly received but he skied a different slope so I don’t know how he would perceive our past.
But I do think about if we’d gotten the sexual out of the way (both high school and college) I could have a couple of those super duper best friends where the flirtation was genuine. I often think in male to male relationships, how much I miss the friendship when the romance is over, so sometimes I keep it shallow because they can only see it from a sexual-romantic perspective. I would rather have the lifelong friends. Then sometimes I think it would be wonderful to have some sort of French love affair with friends where when we were single, we were there for all kinds of comfort. I never seem to get that either.
What I will tell you that these connections can be for, the deep spiritual connection, is to gird us in life, for each to help the other. I always felt, saw that I was to help John escape poverty—-I was one of the opportunities, his life manifested others—-but he was also a better best friend, a stabilizing force in my life than the friends I ended up choosing. We of course get more opportunities to do and express and receive and give, the more we expose ourselves to the world but understanding it’s a constant merry go round and getting back on the bobbing horse can sometimes be delayed by the nursing of a wounded heart. It happens, again and again, perhaps 7 to 9 times in a long lifetime, but it doesn't have to. I often wonder how much farther along I could be, how much art they could’ve and would’ve created had our relationships-friendships matured rather than imploded. The art of soul mate maintenance is to not shatter the glass bow on the glass box.
But I will tell you from this side of the Seine—-go for it, express yourself, love him, negotiate to experiment but further negotiate that that deep spiritual connection you feel will not be sullied by the expression of other dimensions of your humanity and that nothing is permanent or damning.
And then somewhere in there you learn and hear and learn from others that we all have this deep early love, but some of us get shots of maturity in how to explore and preserve it.
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Kyle Phoenix is a teacher, certified adult educator, sexologist, sex coach and sexuality educator with over two decades of intensive experience. He studied at the University at Buffalo, SUNY, New York University, and Columbia University. He has worked, consulted and taught individuals and focused professional developments for the CDC, Department of Education, Gay Men's Health Crisis, New York City Department of Health, non-profits, Fortune 500 companies and unions. He began his career facilitating on-campus workshops addressing a wide range of sexuality and sexual health issues and then moved on to teaching at universities, non-profits, private groups and clients, hosting The Kyle Phoenix Show on television and multiple online webinars, including YouTube and Sclipo and writing extensively through his blog, Special Reports, articles and other print and E books in the Kyle Phoenix Series on relationships, finance, education, spirituality and culture. He lives in New York with his family.
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