letter to himself....

I have often enjoyed debates with friends about why it is that lesbian and gay relationships are typically short lived. We are surrounded by the straight married myth of ever-lasting love...and it is glaringly obvious that we, as a sexuality, fall far short of this fairy tale.  In vain do we quote divorce rates in the general population - the fact remains that most of us know very few gay or lesbian couples who have stood the test of time.  In fact, in my personal experience, this is doubly so for lesbians compared to gay men...then again, perhaps the boundaries of love are looser in many gay male long-lasting relationships.  My only fall back is that we lack both the binding rituals and the role models that inspire the "til death do us part" partnering.  Tonight in a fit of procrastination of the uni assignment I should be writing I came across Stephen Fry's letter to himself - "dearest absurd child"... it is a wonderful read, highly recommended.... and I include the following excerpt :

Stephen Fry's letter to himself

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/apr/30/stephen-fry-letter-gay-rights

I finally know now, as I easily knew then, that the most important thing is love. It doesn't matter in the slightest whether that love is for someone of your own sex or not. Gay issues are important and I shall come to them in a moment, but they shrivel like a salted snail when compared to the towering question of love. Gay people sometimes believe (to this very day, would you credit it, young Stephen?) that the preponderance of obstacles and terrors they encounter in their lives and relationships is intimately connected with the fact of their being gay. As it happens at least 90% of their problems are to do with love and love alone: the lack of it, the denial of it, the inequality of it, the missed reciprocity in it, the horrors and heartaches of it. Love cold, love hot, love fresh, love stale, love scorned, love missed, love denied, love betrayed ... the great joke of sexuality is that these problems bedevil straight people just as much as gay. The 10% of extra suffering and complexity that uniquely confronts the gay person is certainly not incidental or trifling, but it must be understood that love comes first. This is tough for straight people to work out.

Straight people are encouraged by culture and society to believe that their sexual impulses are the norm, and therefore when their affairs of the heart and loins go wrong (as they certainly will), when they are flummoxed, distraught and defeated by love, they are forced to believe that it must be their fault. We gay people at least have the advantage of being brought up to expect the world of love to be imponderably and unmanageably difficult, for we are perverted freaks and sick aberrations of nature.They - poor normal lambs - naturally find it harder to understand why, in Lysander's words, "the course of true love never did run smooth".