A Homo With FOMO

There's a man I know and love as my very close friend. Things have been a bit tense with us lately, mostly from my perspective as an over-apologizing, self-loathing pleaser. You see, I admitted to my friend that I cared for him very deeply, in defiance of a previous warning he had issued about the grim future he sees for us should he and I become romantically and sexually entwined.

My admission was followed by several episodes of my friend simply ceasing to communicate with me, usually while a conversation is underway via SMS messaging, for entire days and nights at a time. That terrified me the first time and has infuriated me all the subsequent times.

Anyway, as I was saying, my friend tries his best to go with the flow when it comes to me, which is challenging due to the amount of emotionally charged baggage I carry with me. He absolutely slips up now and then, and he hurls razor-tipped arrows directly at my heart, but he usually realizes it soon after doing so and tries to fix it. I let him slide a LOT.

Now, for someone that patient and accommodating, you wouldn't automatically think, "This handsome fellow looks as if he has a subconscious fear of missing out on anything, anytime." But you know what? He does! His FOMO manifests itself in so many ways, too!

Chief among the examples of this fear showing up and fucking shit up is when he is almost off work and starts to think about what he wants to do when he clocks out. Will he hang with a fuck buddy somewhere up in North Seattle for a while and then go to the bath house, or should he be going home and maybe inviting me over, doing some laundry, and perhaps eating a bit of dinner or smoking a little weed?

Still, there are more options for him to consider, because his phone is perpetually filled with notifications on Scruff and Grindr - dudes who dig him and want him to put that junk in their trunk. Good for Friend! Really! He's been well received since moving back to the area in February. Being new and one of the dwindling local supply of bonafide, honest to god, butt-fucking tops, he's been received by more bottoms than he can even shake his stick at.

Say his better angel prevails and nudges him toward the homeward decision. He messages me, or responds to one of a dozen of my text messages piled up and waiting for his response. We make a quick plan to meet up, hang out, and maybe have me sleep over. It actually happens pretty often, so don't let my cynicism infect your perception of my friend. He's a good guy. Well, he tries to be. Okay, he'd like to be! (I kid!)

Imagine happy me dashing hither and thither packing up laundry, grabbing essentials to bring with, all while wearing a real, honest to god smile on my face. Fast forward an hour or two later, when he resurfaces in text message format and admits that he's been double, triple, even quadruple booking his social activities, mostly, I'd wager, due to how much of his time I've lately begun consuming like a damned drug.

He's been on the phone trying not to let anything slip between his fingers. The thought of a hot and sexy experience with one of his other friends does to my friend what catnip will do to even the most refined, laid back feline when sprinkled around on the floor. He does everything the cat would do except perhaps for rolling on his back and trying to wriggle some of the thought into his skin somehow.

He overextends himself so often and to such an untenable degree, though, that what ends up happening is someone, often multiple someones, are going to be disappointed, inconvenienced, made angry, or jealous. As you might have read in this blog before, it's frequently been my lot to enjoy the jealousy toward his other friends.

His relationship with the whole truth is like my relationship with clean work clothes. I always want to have and use them, and I do my best to make sure that I always have some on deck, but if push comes to shove one obnoxious morning, you can believe I'm going into the office wearing whatever is the least wrinkled in the hamper. So you might say his excuses can be categorized sometimes as temporally asynchronous stories of obligations that he actually might have had - FOMO is going to be the death of me, or of our relationship if I have to keep finding myself juggled between 5 other obligations he's made for himself at once, or thrown into uncomfortable, sometimes hurtful situations where he imagines I'd be alright with shedding my clothes and jumping right into some group sex with him. (I strongly suspect that somewhere in his mind, he is counting that as two or more birds with one stone. He gets his rocks off, fucks some strange, and fulfills his quota for spending time with me as well.)

Except, remember the part where I admitted feelings for him? And may I refer back to the section where I labeled myself a self-loathing pleaser? Those things haven't gone away since you set out on the journey of reading of this post, leaving me A-OK and painlessly fallen out of love with him. No! It fucking hurts ten times WORSE now because he is aware of my feelings and still lets his dick make decisions about how to incorporate me into some of his extemporaneous hook ups and orgies. (Sorry - but even remembering that made me queasy with heartache.)

So, my friend isn't able to give to me all of the parts of our friendship that actually exist. I'm forbidden or at least heavily throttled from being regularly sexual with him, because he fears that our fucking too often will cause him to begin feeling too attached in a way he doesn't want to be attached. He gets to determine which touches are okay, and which ones aren't. There are significant pieces to our friendship that I feel have been stripped and locked away as if to protect them from me.

When I have to watch or listen to him fucking someone else, I feel physically ill. I literally get nauseated, because that other piece of shit twink or bear or daddy is getting access to some of those coveted, stripped away friendship perks, and my only reward is being invited to be included and adjacent while it happens to someone else. WTF?

It's cruel! I wouldn't put anyone into such a situation if they had spoken to me at length about their feelings for me. Doing so would seem intentionally hurtful, and I would feel terrible afterward. His dick doesn't suffer the same moral dilemmas. It just points him where it wants to go and leaves him to clean up the aftermath once it pukes all over some guy.

"Hey, man. I bet we can get another 3 guys!"

Friend, I beg you - slow down a little. Take things on one at a time. I understand you feel you can juggle half a dozen things sufficiently well to get them all done, but you actually don't. You drop people and chip or break them a little every time you propose meeting up but end up breaking that date in favor of some other task or obligation or a more persistent piece of ass. The same is true of your non-people obligations. You try so hard to do everything at the same time and end up getting none of it done as quickly or to the same standard you wanted to have done. You aren't going to miss out, I promise. Those people will still be there, and they'll appreciate their time with you more because it will have been devoted exclusively to the two of you. (Three if your dick is involved.)

No more throwing me into your sex parties with other men, especially bottoms that you fuck on the regular. I am not a second bird for you to hit with that one stone, and our taste in men are usually at completely opposite ends of the spectrum, except for some universal overlap in the middle. You're hurting me deeply when you suggest it, and sometimes I feel obligated to agree to it because you've had to leave one or turn down one before thanks to my fragility. There are now three such cases for you to think back on as examples. I was hurting in each and every one of those. Hurting badly. I know you wouldn't want to do that if you knew, so now you know.

And still, I love the shit out of you. Let's fix this shit.