Boyfriends ~ I’ve Only Had a Few

World Traveller Series III ~ Relationships ~ Episode 10

by Brett Hayhoe

Introduction

You could count the number of partners I have had on one hand. Literally. Five fingers, five relationships, and — if I am being honest, which is rather the point of this series — five variations on the same unmitigated disaster.

This is not the episode where I complain about being unlucky in love. I was, on occasion, spectacularly lucky. What I did with that luck is another matter entirely.

The Late Start

I was a late bloomer and didn’t lose my virginity until I was seventeen. The girl in question was a lot of fun — genuinely — but she wanted considerably more from the arrangement than I was prepared to give. That she already had a child from a previous relationship was, to my teenage mind, entirely beside the point. I had no objection to it whatsoever.

What I did have was a complete inability to read the room, which I demonstrated by using the phrase “I love you” a good deal earlier than the situation warranted. The effect was immediate and alarming: she began, more or less on the spot, mentally booking the church and selecting bridesmaids’ dresses.

Emotionally, I was nowhere near equipped for what followed. My solution — and I use the word generously — was to withdraw. Less contact, then less again, until the message landed without my having to actually deliver it. It is not a chapter I am proud of. It is, however, an accurate one, and accuracy is the only standard this series holds itself to.

The Textbook Marriage

The next chapter was considerably longer, and considerably more consequential. She and I were high school sweethearts toward the end of school, and we continued moving in the same circle of friends for a good twelve months after graduation. At some point after that we lost contact — I understood she had moved away — and life, as it does, carried on without her in it.

I never stopped remembering her birthday, though. Some years later I found myself in her parents’ office and asked her mother, quite casually, to pass on my best wishes for the day. Her mother, I later learned, was genuinely taken aback that I still knew it.

That small act of memory turned out to be considerably more consequential than intended. A phone call followed. Then a night at the movies. Then, with a speed that still surprises me in hindsight, a relationship formally underway.

What followed was almost suspiciously orderly for two people who otherwise ran their lives on instinct. We dated for a year. Engaged for a year. Married for a year. Our son arrived on schedule, as though the whole thing had been plotted on a spreadsheet — which, knowing us, it very nearly had been.

Parenthood did not open gently. My son required open-heart surgery at five days old. That is a story that deserves its own telling in full, and I will give it one — but not here, not folded into someone else’s chapter as a footnote. Some things are too large to share the page.

My wife and I were married for seven years. We did not separate because I was gay. We simply could not find our way back to each other once I was honest about being gay, which is a distinction I have always thought worth making, and rarely bother to.

Sydney, and the Wrong Time

Not long after I left the family home — and the marriage — I met a man from Sydney. Ours was not a relationship marked by fighting or drama. It was marked, instead, by timing so poor it might as well have been engineered. His affections arrived exactly when I had none to spare, still mid-repair from everything I had just walked away from. I did not anticipate how significantly that would affect me. It did.

A couple of years further along came the second boyfriend, who moved into my home with what I can only describe as good intentions and the wrong emotional constitution for what I needed at the time. That one ran its course within a year, amicably enough, but without much left over once it ended.

Melbourne, for Love

I left Cairns and spent a few months in Brisbane, staying with one of my sisters. It was during that stretch that I met a man online and grew genuinely fond of him — fond enough to fly to Melbourne to meet him properly, and fond enough, when he then came up to visit me, to know something real was forming. Not long after, I moved permanently to Melbourne to be with him.

Seven months later, I was single again.

I should mention, for the record, that not one of the people named so far remains in contact with me, nor I with them. There must be something about the number seven.

The Long Gap, and the Last One

Seventeen years passed before the next — and, to date, the last — boyfriend arrived. That one has already had a complete episode of his own, and I do not intend to compress him back down into a paragraph here. Three years after that relationship ended, I found myself single, somewhat broken, entirely alone, and reasonably resigned to a life spent without a partner. C’est la vie.

Conclusion

Of the five, two stand apart from the others in my memory, and probably always will: my ex-wife, and the man I moved to Melbourne for. Whether that says something flattering about my capacity for love or something less flattering about my timing, I genuinely could not tell you.

Five relationships. Five endings. No court cases, no restraining orders, and — as far as I am aware — no lasting grudges on either side, mine included. I have never been one to mend a bridge I did not burn, but in fairness, most of these bridges simply weathered away on their own.

No expectations. No disappointments. It applies rather neatly here too.

The World Traveller Series is written and produced by Brett Hayhoe — publisher, editor and administrator of Q Magazine.

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