Dakota,
I think you are a nice guy and a very normal one too and that is what you should believe.
The fact that you are being attracted to a guy in your college class, it’s not a homosexual thing. Instead, it’s a desire of true frienship. The very concept of homosexuality takes away true friendship among men. You can’t find a true frienship-- the one you long for-- from a homosexual relationship, because homosexual relationship is always about sex. Sex is not what you desire as you constantly wrote in your many posts.
All humans are social beings. We begin our lives by knowing our parents, then later we learn to make friends. By the time we try to be independent from our parents, we hope we can rely on frienship apart from parents. Man will look for male friendship, and woman will look for female friendship to discuss life issues and strategizing and going through life apart from parents.
You are still very young. You may still at the above stage.
Human being then will reach maturity when he has become confident about himself, he will then enter the next stage of his life when he begin into making a family of his own.
Within the two stages, is man’s search for himself: this include things like what’s important and what’s not for him, how he want other’s to perceive him, how he perceive himself, what love (and sex) is, what is the purpose of life, what’s the meaning of relationships, etc. These questions may not come out as a logical thinking, rather a sequence of processes one must go through.
Your case, I do not know much about you, but from what you constantly wrote, I suppose you have never fallen in love with a girl yet, and this is normal because you are still very young. Instead you feel intense feeling of attraction towards guys. These facts shows that you are still at the stage of socializing (learning about friendship building).
Unfortunately, our modern society nowadays being loud about homosexuality-- a concept of sexuality that ignores human dignity, disregard human body and has no respect of the purpose of sex in itself-- so that young people like you-- who has never experienced any falling in love with the opposite sex yet-- these young people wrongly perceive themselves as homosexual, thus open themselves into a harmful concept of sexuality.
The truth is, human being usually fall in love with the opposite sex only once of twice in his life time.
Your search for true frienship is a part of a process of finding yourself and the meaning of good relationship. Friendship will teach a man about many things, it’s a part of finding himself eventually.
Be patient Dakota.
May God bless you.
Romantic friendship is an altogether better phrase to describe it than homosexual relationship.
Is a desire for physical intimacy really part of “true friendship”?
I’m no trying to become more independent from my parents, I’m trying to be a dutiful son.
I think you are making a mistake in waving off all homosexual relationships as about sex, I’ve seen plenty of cases where the people seem truly in love with each other. I think if we can provide a model where two people of the same sex can love each other chastely.
I am a very confident person regardless of whether I’m delivering a speech to 500 people or am 100 feet up on a rock face.
I have plenty of male friends and female friends, but this feels totally different. I feel no attraction to females at all, indeed some of my friends suspected I was gay because I didn’t seem to notice that girls were hitting on me. Also once a girl came up to me in the cafeteria and kissed me on the lips and I felt traumatized and violated…
First, my compliments. For 18 you are well read and exceptionally articulate in debate. Sadly, our society does not put much value upon friendship. This seems to be a fairly modern change, within the last 100 years or so. The sexual revolution also damaged the normal development of friendships because by becoming sexually active at ever younger ages teenagers began to pursue (generally heterosexual) sex rather than friends. The result is a confusion between emotional depth and sex. I incline to the view that many people are really seeking stable and emotionally satisfying relationships of a nonsexual kind, but our contemporary society does not encourage this. Instead people go from one quick romantic fix to another, whether heterosexual or homosexual. The whole of popular culture exists to uphold this practice, unfortunately.
Well read yes, articulate no, succinct perhaps.
Society places so little value on friendship that it is easily discarded, like a used condom. This is one of the reasons I immerse myself in the Middle Ages. I must warn you that if you are to dwell much on Mediaeval society one must toss out the modern lenses or all one will see is fruit…
In Mediaeval English literature extremely strong bonds, blood brothers if you will, are a recurring feature,
A Knight’s Tale by Chaucer, or
Adam Bell and Clim of the Clough and
Bewick and Graham in the Child Ballads. Heck, you can find it in real life monuments especially funerary ones such as Sir William Neville and Sir John Clanvowe (friends of Chaucer)
For John Bloxham and John Whytton here’s a sketch of the monument (notice how it is almost the same as one for a husband and wife)
gothiceye.com/images/large/CL016-2.jpg
And of course for a far more modern case we have Blessed Newman and Fr. Ambrose St. John (weren’t sexual involved obviously).
Although I really do wonder about affrèrement, very peculiar thing.
