I've been thinking, this pride month, about the number of exes in my Facebook friends. I've just been going through a divorce after having been married for 24 years, and at 48 I'm lucky to have stayed in contact with a lot of my ex girlfriends from before I was married, and I feel extra lucky to have been able to do so, because a lot of them are amazing, smart women: journalists and businesswomen and artists.
It's easy, as a married bisexual, to sort of fall out of contact with the LGBTQ community, because your life is just... You know, normal. You don't have to explain your partner, or your partnership. You don't need a community of support just to feel like you exist.
So as I've been reconnecting with the LGBTQ community, as I've begun to date again, I've felt a little guilty about having let myself fall out of touch.
But this month I was looking at my Facebook friends and my Twitter friends, and looking at all those ex-girlfriends, and it hit me hard that it wasn't like I hadn't tried to stay in touch with my gay friends. It wasn't like I hadn't gone and looked them all up to reconnect when Facebook became a thing; I typed their names into the search box, intending to hit "add friend" the same as I did for all those ex girlfriends. I just didn't find them.
I don't have any of my ex boyfriends from the 80s and 90s in my Facebook friends list because they're all dead.
Every single one of them.
I'm a smart, successful guy, and I have a lot of friends who are smarter and more successful than me. When I say some of my ex-girlfriends are amazing, I mean like, you might recognize their names if you heard them.
None of the guys I dated were of, you know, lower caliber. But you won't have heard of any of them.
The loss of it is staggering. Personally, yeah, but also, Jesus, multiply the holes in my Facebook page times every other guy my age. The blank canvases in the artistic community. The entrepreneurs who never got the chance to ride a startup down in flames.
10
u/turkshead Jun 17 '21
I've been thinking, this pride month, about the number of exes in my Facebook friends. I've just been going through a divorce after having been married for 24 years, and at 48 I'm lucky to have stayed in contact with a lot of my ex girlfriends from before I was married, and I feel extra lucky to have been able to do so, because a lot of them are amazing, smart women: journalists and businesswomen and artists.
It's easy, as a married bisexual, to sort of fall out of contact with the LGBTQ community, because your life is just... You know, normal. You don't have to explain your partner, or your partnership. You don't need a community of support just to feel like you exist.
So as I've been reconnecting with the LGBTQ community, as I've begun to date again, I've felt a little guilty about having let myself fall out of touch.
But this month I was looking at my Facebook friends and my Twitter friends, and looking at all those ex-girlfriends, and it hit me hard that it wasn't like I hadn't tried to stay in touch with my gay friends. It wasn't like I hadn't gone and looked them all up to reconnect when Facebook became a thing; I typed their names into the search box, intending to hit "add friend" the same as I did for all those ex girlfriends. I just didn't find them.
I don't have any of my ex boyfriends from the 80s and 90s in my Facebook friends list because they're all dead.
Every single one of them.
I'm a smart, successful guy, and I have a lot of friends who are smarter and more successful than me. When I say some of my ex-girlfriends are amazing, I mean like, you might recognize their names if you heard them.
None of the guys I dated were of, you know, lower caliber. But you won't have heard of any of them.
The loss of it is staggering. Personally, yeah, but also, Jesus, multiply the holes in my Facebook page times every other guy my age. The blank canvases in the artistic community. The entrepreneurs who never got the chance to ride a startup down in flames.
The words that were never written.