Telesocial Relationships

Fair warning I just need to vent so a lot of this post may seem repetitive and retracing old ground.

I live in a city that really has no business calling itself that because it's about the same size as a small town. City status in the UK is a bit of an odd concept because it has its traditions rooted in archaic practices rather than being relative to the size of the population or some other metric that would imply it has reached a certain milestone. This city in particular gained city status because of the number of cathedrals that were built in it, which again is quite an archaic concept but harkens back to the fact that the UK is technically a Theocracy as the Head of State is also the Head of the Church and as a monarch if you believe in the Divine Right of Kings supposedly was chosen by God to rule.

That's sort of a tangent to the main focus of this post but will become relevant later. I am gay, single, 36 years old, and did not expect to still be single at this point in my life if I am honest. Meeting guys here is difficult though, like I said this is essentially a small town and like any small town when you use apps or dating websites where you're inevitably presented with a grid, the faces on that grid might as well be static because they never change. When you've explored those options and come to the conclusion for each that either they're not interested in you or you're not interested in them, you're left with the conclusion that you're going to be single for the foreseeable future.

This city has a few tourist attractions but they are minor and they don't draw that many people, and it's by no means a holiday destination, the only real turnover in faces on that grid come from people who are coming of age, or recently moved here, the former is a trickle and the latter is seemingly rare despite the population ostensibly growing at a near constant rate.

I'm not naive enough to say that living in a city with a larger population would instantly fix this problem but it couldn't make it any worse. When you live in a city with a population of 20,000 people, if 1 in 10 are gay then there are 2,000 gay people, with a mean distribution around 1%-2% per year of age means there are about 20 to 40 gay people my age, multiply that by whatever age bracket you want to extend it to, the point is made though the options are limited. Whereas living in a city with 9 million people, some 900,000 are gay, making that pool 9,000 to 18,000 gay people my age.

I've formed deeper friendships with people who live thousands of miles away from me than those that live in the same city as me, and that fucks with your mind quite a bit. I've mentioned Parasocial relationships before but this is a bit different as it's a two way interaction with communication on both ends, if I had to give it a name I'd call them Telesocial Relationships since the prefix "tele-" means at a distance. They hold many of the same problems as Parasocial Relationships except they're not based solely on a curated presentation at least as long as the other person is being honest that is.

As much as I loved the movie You've Got Mail as a child, the idea that you're going to meet someone online, and have a budding romance that blossoms into something more is, a fantasy or a fairytale with a modern twist. There is something of a trope that manifests itself where you embody the damsel in distress holding out for a hero, waiting for a white knight upon a shining steed to come and whisk you away - that doesn't happen in the real world, well apart from a friend of a friend I've told the story of before who rang a call centre and started flirting with the guy on the other end who lived in Liverpool, fast forward and she eventually went to meet him and moved to Liverpool to be together.

When you live in a small town or a city that is one in effect, social media becomes a blessing and a curse, it often ends up being your only connection to the wider gay community, but with that you also see gay people who have found love and achieve lots of life goals, something that isn't unique to the gay community. I don't feel bitter or jealous of what they have but it does make the pang and the longing for it for myself intensify.

My recent efforts to find a job have all run aground, my health problems still go unresolved, I'm still waiting for yet more results - on that note I called to check the progress of my coeliac test and was told that the regional lab it was sent to has forwarded it to a central lab, why, I don't know, I wasn't given a reason why and naturally my mind has gone to all the worst case scenarios and tried to find the most probable outcome; I'm trying not to fall into a depressive funk over this I know I can't control of influence the outcome but still as much as I try to distract myself with games, music, and social media, those quiet moments when everything comes to a stop and my mind is still, that's the first place it returns to and it's made it increasingly difficult to focus on anything else.

My only ray of sunshine recently came when a debt collector offered a settlement on one of the debts I owed which wrote off close to £2k which I gladly took. I could conceivably be debt free this time next year which would be quite an achievement for me personally considering some of it I have had since graduating University in 2009 - a sobering reminder that if I ever did want to live somewhere like London again I would nee a generous income to support myself or I'd end up in that much debt again, 15 years so far and some of it still isn't paid.

I know it has been said before many times but the media we consumed growing up really did give us unrealistic expectations about the affordability of living in a large city. The Friends apartment being the most cited example but even taking You've Got Mail as an example, Kathleen Kelly played by Meg Ryan lives in an apartment on the Upper West Side, and runs a book store also on the Upper West Side that made $350,000 a year (this figure is specifically mentioned in the movie) before Joe Fox played by Tom Hanks essentially nukes it - and she had four staff including herself, take away the running costs and overheads and you'd never make those margins work today, I don't even know if you could have afforded to live there when the movie was released for that.

The bottom line is that I feel trapped, by my health, finances, lack of romance, lack of opportunity, and lack of room to live and grow as a person. My life is stagnating and no amount of agitation to try and generate momentum is paying off. I don't really have much else to add to this post so I will leave you with a quote from You've Got Mail as written by Nora Ephron.

“Sometimes I wonder about my life. I lead a small life - well, valuable, but small - and sometimes I wonder, do I do it because I like it, or because I haven't been brave? So much of what I see reminds me of something I read in a book, when shouldn't it be the other way around? I don't really want an answer. I just want to send this cosmic question out into the void. So good night, dear void."