How to Love Many Things: Coming Out and Into a New Reality
Love may be love. But straight or gay, it’s never easy. Finding love later in life — with our accumulated experiences, emotional attachments, inevitable losses, and lived complexities — is humbling. Coming out late and finding love is even more so.
Through all of this, there is Grace (which can be amazingly quiet to live with but often leaves notes around the house.)
∞
Love is complex and everything but binary; so many shades coloring-in the lines of our lives.
I loved a woman, faithfully, for 40 years; she died. Now I love a man.
Friends are puzzled. “How does that work?” they ask.
I quote Vincent Van Gogh: To love many things is the source of all strength.
This helps. Few would dispute that Van Gogh had an eye for many beautiful things and the strength to find them in the darkest places. His was a luminous, starry generosity.
Such is the power of love, even if we’re not Van Gogh.
When my wife died, the beautiful, generous world I shared with her ended; that reality will never again exist. Grace filled the void. Here’s how it’s helping me learn to love many things.
Grace Note: Give Your self Away.
Make a gift to others of what you’re most afraid to give away. Give the gift of radical vulnerability; give your self away. The ‘self’ I’m talking about here is the constructed self, not the greater Self of Eastern traditions or the enduring, essential Self of Christianity.
We are taught to believe in our selves and give up any part of that self with great reluctance.
You won’t die, though it may feel like you will.
I was most afraid of giving away the person I’d spent a lifetime becoming — all the attitudes, affections, and afflictions of what I believed to be a skillfully lived life. But my world had collapsed; I had no choice.
To pick up the pieces, I had to put down what I’d been carrying.
My wife had been incurably ill for more than a decade, and I could see the end of our world. I spent time shedding parts of my self I thought I wouldn’t need: my job as a successful CEO; my propensity to plan everything to the last detail; my desire, always, to look and act a certain way; my reticence to show what I was feeling because people might get too close; my sense of self as largely a reflection of other people. That self was something I had necessarily invented as a child and tinkered with over time — as we all do. But now, it was isolating.
Through loss, grace teaches that we’re not isolated fragments but part of a larger and more beautiful Whole, and that we can give up some of who we believe we are to make more of what we’ve always been and will be (i.e., part of that enduring, essential Self.)
In an infusion unit or in the presence of a hospice team camped out in your spare bedroom, you learn this. Your résumé doesn’t matter; you’re another being who needs care, and the Whole reaches out to sustain you.
Be warned: the act of relinquishing self requires both a cosmic and a comic consciousness, an expansive and compassionate view of your self in the world. Not taking your self too seriously means you won’t hold on to it quite so tightly and may lose your grip.
You must be willing to be ridiculous. Read on.
Grace Note: Don’t Label.
Don’t label yourself or anyone else.
Eckhart Tolle has said it profoundly: Labeling is a form of emotional violence. It is a monstrous act of reductionism to take the gorgeous complexity of anything in the natural world, especially human beings, and define them based on a single aspect of their existence. When we label someone or something, we hurt that which we’ve so narrowly named. But we hurt ourselves even more.
I came out to my future wife a year into our relationship, eight years before we married. Her refusal to label me as anything other than someone she loved made me whole, let us flourish, and kept our marriage thriving for decades. (Please understand, I’m not being prescriptive here. This is what worked for us.)
Then I forgot what our life had taught me.
Labeling…as I walked down Commercial Street in Provincetown on a sizzling summer afternoon for the first time after coming out, dodging a drag queen on a hover board:
I’m not that kind of queer, say I.
Yes, sweetie, you are, and, if you don’t get over yourself, you’ll miss the parade!
After my parents and wife died, I had to peel off layers of labels, mostly because they no longer applied: husband, caregiver, son, half of a cute couple. My local priest had ripped the “Good Catholic” label off me years earlier when I married a Jew.
When we’re young, as we author our own stories to figure out who we are (and aren’t) and to explain ourselves to others, labels are placeholders for a more complete and nuanced narrative. But the older we get, the more limiting labels become, and we should wear them, as with plaid pants, with caution, and put them on others, not at all.
Grace Note: Don’t Judge.
Labels create distance — we can “other” other people. Then we can judge them with impunity without calling our own identities into question. Isn’t that nice?
Shortly after coming out, I joined Scruff, the gay dating site. I judged the haiku of Scruff harshly:
Dick pic, dude?
After weeks of this, I got so frustrated that I rewrote my profile to say, “No torso-only shots, boys. We’re in enough trouble without losing our heads.”
As in all forums of human interaction — workplaces, schools, small towns — there are pathologies on dating sites, which thrive on labels. They help with the judging, which apps have elevated to a swipable offense: top, bottom, clean, [+].
But before I signed off permanently from Scruff, which I was days away from doing, I was ‘woofed’ (liked) by a silver-haired, blue-eyed guy with a beautiful smile.
He was a PhD scientist, an amateur photographer, a bit older, had been married to a woman, and had children and grandchildren. He’d included a torso shot (though tasteful) in his profile. And the app told me that he was only 865 feet away from me at the very moment he was texting me.
I judged, again, harshly: He’s a geek on Medicare with lots of chest hair and lots of baggage — and, also, probably, a stalker, hiding in the woods near my rented cabin on the pond, taking pictures. How had he found me!?
Then I channeled my decade of mindfulness practice, took three deep breaths, closed the drapes, and sent a response:
“Hey, handsome!”
(Ironically, of course, I was labeling him! But look, he is!)
We’re now engaged.
Grace Note: Don’t Think Too Much (About Anything.)
COVID trained us all to think a lot about a lot of unthinkable things. But thinking is a limited form of intelligence focused on achieving maximum utility or avoiding mortal risk.
Thinking is not the best way to discern beauty, bring beauty into the world, or love many things. It’s not meant to do that.
Beauty enters our lives when we make space for creativity to flourish and a different kind of intelligence to take over. Love comes to us when we suspend disbelief that we can love someone as much as ourselves.
By creativity, here, I mean the ability to imagine a future life when the one you’ve been living has fallen apart or dissolved entirely. None of us will ever do anything more creative than this. And all of us will have to do it at some point.
Most of my work as a health and wellness coach could be considered creative visualization: What can I do now that life is no longer working for me?
Had I applied executive reasoning and mental filters to my decision to leave the comfortable nest of a house my wife and I had built; move to a tiny boathouse on Cape Cod, to a town I hadn’t visited for 30 years, where I knew only one other person; come out (on Zoom, no less!) only a few months after this; and enter the gay dating scene at 58 in the middle of a pandemic, I’d never have done it. No thinking person would have.
Being with a dying person taught me to have what Ram Das called, faith in the unfolding — a different kind of cleverness, where you step into the flow and let universal intelligence think for you, at least, for a while.
You can’t control what’s coming, so you take what comes, as it comes, and make it your own. As if you’d chosen it. This is a visceral, not a mental act. Gut instinct.
Grace Note: Do Less, Be More.
Grace writes this note a lot: let it be.
And there’s a reason.
We live in a pulverized world. Reshaping it into something whole… something with integrity, something beautiful, something lovable…becomes the challenge of being alive right now.
Each of us must create our own world and invite others to share it, and it should be beautiful. But beauty is a present moment phenomenon. You must be awake and aware to conjure and keep it. This means more being, less doing.
I’m living now in the place that inspired Katherine Lee Bates (who was queer, by the way) to write America the Beautiful. Beauty, here, is assaultive; it grabs and holds you and forces presence on you: The silver waves of summer (“sea to shining sea”), the osprey painting the clouds, the incandescent winter sunsets.
But beauty is everywhere, of course. A client living in Eastern Europe finds gentler beauty in the kitchen bulb that lights the family table when the power comes back on after being out for days at a time, letting her see the faces of her children.
If you’re doing something all the time, then being present for beauty becomes too hard — another task to be crossed-off the list like paying bills or doing yoga or walking the dog. For the last 18 months, just after waking, my Blue-Eyed Guy and I sit in bed for an hour, with a couple of coffees (and no devices), and be present for one another, sharing whatever comes up.
We’re crazy busy; it’s not that we can afford to do this. It’s that we can’t afford not to do it.
∞
In her final few weeks, my wife lost consciousness, and her breathing became the only remaining rhythm of our life together. But as it grew more labored and painful to hear from my chair near her bed, I slipped on my earbuds and retreated into the gorgeous world of the Anglo-Irish poet, David Whyte, whose wordful wisdom in What to Remember When Waking, kept me going.
I began by quoting one beautiful artist and end by quoting another: Be a provenance of something gathered a summation of previous intuitions.
Whyte reminds us that the force of character is cumulative. Regardless of which season of life we find ourselves in, even if unsure of our path or our footing, we have the instinctive ability to conjure that enduring strength of character, intuit what’s essential, clear away the rest, and see the beauty that surrounds us.
In other words, to love many things.
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Notes: Vincent Van Gogh quotation from a letter to his brother Theo, from Amsterdam, April 3, 1878; David Whyte quotation from the poem, Seven Streams; “The force of character is cumulative,” Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance.
