Emotional Immaturity

Previously on Here's To Hope:

As time went on and we talked more, my anxiety about sitting there with an attractive gay Mormon subsided and I was able to just be normal and view him as a friend.


The following takes place between 12:36 and 12:52

If you didn't watch 24, then you won't find that amusing, you'll just think I'm an idiot. Anyway, I wanted to write about my emotional immaturity.

On Monday, after wading through the awkwardness of meeting an attractive gay Mormon guy, and both of us knowing it, I thought I was doing well. John used a phrase something like "friendship desexualization." The act of getting in control of your sexual desires for other people, and just viewing them as friends. By the end of our hanging out on Monday, and even on Tuesday when I wrote the post about Monday night, I thought that I had sufficiently desexualized our friendship. I was wrong.

My mind is still whirling around with that one little voice telling me not to be friends, but to "be friends" with John. And that voice is directly connected to the boys downstairs.

I know what I really want out of life. I know which path I want to follow. I've made all of those decisions previously, and I plan on sticking to them. Why is it, then, that I meet someone and just completely lose it?

I'm 34 years old for crying out loud! Most people have had the wonderful opportunity in their lives of dating and being in relationships from the time they were teenagers. By the time they are my age they have had a plethora of experiences that have helped them overcome the awkwardness of relationships and their emotional immaturity. They grew up. I, on the other hand, have been in the closet my whole life. I've only ever dated one person (female) for more than a couple of weeks. I've never had the opportunity to develop emotional maturity through relationships with other people. I am a complete and utter idiot around other people.

One of my problems, as I see it, is that I don't have any close friends. I've blogged about that previously. I don't share any deep emotional ties with anyone. So, when I meet a really cool person that I could become great friends with and share desexualized ties of friendship with, my brain doesn't know how to process it. It just automatically wants to bow-chiga-bow-now (I'm not sure how to spell that). Whereas if I already had lots of deep, emotional ties with other people, my brain would be capable of sorting gay Mormons into the proper bins.

I think I'm just starting to ramble now. Anybody have any suggestions on how to pull my head out of my @$$ and grow up emotionally?