I’m a 19-year-old male dealing with a lot of uncertainty around my sexuality and relationships. Because I went to a gender-segregated school, my interactions with women were very limited growing up. Rather than diminishing my desire for a relationship, this lack of early interaction has left me feeling like I completely lack the social skills to initiate one. Even though I currently have many female friends, my interactions with women always seem to remain strictly platonic. Romantically, I’ve always envisioned myself with a girlfriend and eventually having a family, but deep-seated insecurities—like feeling ‘not enough’ and fearing I can’t maintain interest—cause me to avoid dating. Furthermore, my hesitation is rooted in a fear of hurting someone; because I am still unsure of what I want, I refuse to get involved with a woman only to later realize my orientation is different, which could make her feel like I played with her feelings. Additionally, I’ve consumed gay pornography since a very young age. I’m currently trying to figure out if this long-term habit shaped my sexual attraction to men, or if it’s a reflection of my true orientation, which adds to my overall confusion.
Hi Paul,
It sounds like you’re trying to solve quite a few problems at once: whether you’re ready to date, whether you have enough experience to know how to date, what your attraction to men means, what your attraction to women means, whether pornography has affected any of that, and whether dating while uncertain would be unfair to someone else.
You seem to be treating dating as though there’s a body of knowledge everyone else acquired during adolescence that you’re missing out on, but that’s not the case. There’s a lot you’ve learned over the years that you might not think will come in handy during dating, but you might be surprised. You don’t need to have dating all figured out before you dive into it. Part of dating is getting that experience so you know what works for you and what doesn’t. Not many people will stay with the first person they go on a date with.
You mention a feeling that you’re “not enough,” and that’s something I’d be wary of letting become another requirement you have to meet before you start dating.
You don’t have to become more confident, more experienced, more attractive, more interesting, or fulfill some sort of criteria before you start dating. A date isn’t an audition where you prove that you’re sufficiently qualified to be someone’s partner. Rather, it’s a setting for two people to find out whether they enjoy being in each other’s company – and things can move on from there.
While this can help remove some of the pressure that comes with dating, initiating something in the first place can be daunting – because what if it doesn’t work out? But you don’t have to know whether a date will definitely have long-term potential, or whether a relationship will last before you start one.
The thing is, no one who enters a relationship can promise they’ll never lose interest, change, realize they want something different, or discover something new about themselves – even realize something about their sexuality.
You’re holding yourself to a standard that’s just not realistic. You can’t promise these things, but you can promise honesty and respect, and that’s what we can give others. And you’re further along than you think: You say you have lots of female friends, even if your relationships are platonic. That shows that you can talk to women and form meaningful relationships with them. Sure, there are other dynamics involved in romantic relationships – attraction, of course, as well as more vulnerability and uncertainty, and the potential for rejection, of course, but the actual human interaction isn’t completely different.
Being uncertain is not the same thing as misleading someone. I feel like your concern about potentially being gay is actually quite thoughtful; you don’t want to waste a female partner’s time. But there’s a difference between knowingly pretending your sexuality is one thing or another, and genuinely wanting to explore something, even if you’re figuring things out for the time being.
You don’t need to announce every single question or uncertainty you have before asking someone on a date, regardless of their gender. But if you are becoming romantically or sexually involved with someone, honesty about where you’re at does become important. Ultimately though, if you did realize that you’re not heterosexual in a year’s time, or in five years’ time, and you were in a relationship with a woman during that time, you wouldn’t have automatically deceived her. If you had genuinely been attracted to her and honest about where you were at, discovering something new about yourself further down the line isn’t the same thing as deliberately misleading someone.
You’re allowed to be questioning things about yourself, whether you’re hoping to find a word to describe your sexuality or not. Questioning doesn’t always mean that you haven’t solved a puzzle, because not everyone wants to, or does. It can mean that you’re noticing things about yourself, and who you’re attracted to, and you’re giving yourself the time to explore.
Down the line, you might identify as straight, gay, bisexual, pansexual, queer, or something else – or even decline to name your orientation all, for now or even for a lifetime, if you want. You don’t need to define your orientation with a word if you don’t want to, just because you feel like adulthood, or a dating app, requires it.
In the meantime, it’s perfectly fine to explore dating. You can’t guarantee that nobody will ever get hurt by dating you – if, for example, you date a woman and later realize that you’re gay – but you can make a commitment not to knowingly mislead them. Sure, people’s feelings can change, and relationships end – people can get hurt sometimes, and that’s life as well as intimate relationships. People can get hurt even when everybody involved has behaved kindly and honestly, particularly because we’re vulnerable in relationships, so it’s a place our feelings can be hurt. You are not responsible for someone’s emotional safety from every possible future outcome. All you’re responsible for is treating them like a person, rather than as a test of your sexuality. Nothing in your question gives anyone a reliable way to determine your sexual orientation, and it’s not something you need to solve now anyway – names for sexual identities can be really useful, but you don’t need to feel pressure to find one that applies to you if you aren’t ready.
You say that you’ve been watching gay pornography from a young age. Porn isn’t some sort of sexual orientation test – it can affect what you’re used to finding sexually stimulating, of course, but your viewing habits aren’t a reflection of your sexuality in themselves.
Rather than trying to work backwards from what you’ve watched to determine your orientation, you might find it more useful to pay attention to what you actually experience as attraction in your day-to-day life.
For example, who do you get crushes on, or think about kissing? Who do you imagine dating, or being physically intimate or in a relationship with? You might not get a definitive answer, but by asking yourself these sorts of questions, you can pay attention to yourself and your desires. These aren’t questions you need to answer with a pen and paper like a questionnaire in which you’ll tally up your answers at the end and read the answer for “Mostly As” or “Mostly Bs” – you can just sit with them.
Remember, too, that sexual and romantic attraction can differ. You might want to have sex with someone but not feel the desire for a relationship with them – that’s sexual attraction. Or, you might want a romantic relationship with someone but without feeling the same sort of sexual desire – that’s romantic attraction. Romantic and sexual attraction can be extremely variable. You might feel sexually attracted to women, for example, but romantically attracted to men, or non-binary people, or any other group or combination of people. Associating different feelings with differing genders is not uncommon, nor is it deceptive. The spectrum of human relationships is very diverse.
It’s also worth remembering that fantasy doesn’t always map perfectly onto what we want in real life. People can be curious about things they wouldn’t necessarily want to do, fantasize about people or situations they wouldn’t pursue, or find something sexually exciting without wanting a romantic or sexual relationship involving it. That doesn’t mean those feelings are meaningless, but they don’t have to function as evidence in a case you’re building against yourself, either.
What I think could help is shifting your attention from all the things you can’t know to the things you do have control over. Like these, for instance:
- Whether you ask someone on a date or tell someone you like
- Whether you are honest and upfront when it comes to communication
- Whether you take things slowly
- Whether you notice how you feel and sit with it, rather than interrogating yourself
- Whether you allow yourself to change your mind
- Whether you choose any labels
- Whether you date at all at the moment
If you think you might like to date, why not start with something small? If there’s someone you like, or you think you like, why not ask them if they’d like to spend time together one-on-one?
You don’t need to come away asking whether you’re straight or gay, whether you think you could marry them, or whether you might hurt them in the future. Think, did I enjoy spending time with them? Did I feel attracted to them? Did I feel comfortable? Do I want to see them again?
If the idea of asking someone out feels completely alien, or you think you’d rather do literally anything else instead, it can help to minimize it in your head. You don’t need to deliver an impassioned speech about your feelings, or tell your potential date that you’re looking for a potential partner. You can simply invite someone you like to spend some time with you one-on-one. All you need to do is ask them if they’d like to grab a coffee or something equally low-key. If you’re already on friendly terms with them, you could suggest something connected to a conversation you’ve had before. If they mentioned a new movie they want to see, a band they like playing in your city, or even a local fast-food place they want to try, you’ve already got an in. Your suggestion doesn’t have to be too elaborate, and it doesn’t even have to involve the word “date” if that feels like a lot of pressure. Even something as simple as, “Would you like to grab a coffee sometime/over the weekend, just the two of us?” works.
You might be wondering how to know whether someone will interpret your invitation as a sign you’re interested in them – but the truth is that sometimes people just don’t know in these situations.
If you want to make your intentions more explicit, you can do so, of course. Even if you still don’t want to use the word “date” outright, saying something like, “I’d like to take you out sometime, if you’re interested?” gives a signal that you might want to be a little more than friends. Of course, you may get a no. They might be busy, not feel the same way, or be seeing someone already. This will be disappointing sometimes, but it doesn’t mean that you’ve failed. Sometimes, you won’t necessarily know why someone says no, but that doesn’t mean it’s anything to do with you personally.
All it means is that you’ve got more experience and can try again the next time you feel comfortable.
If they say yes, that’s great. But you don’t need to know what happens next – just take things one date at a time. Even if you have lots of fun on the first date and decide to see each other again, it doesn’t mean that you’ll necessarily be compatible forever, or say anything about your sexuality. However, it will give you the chance to experience having a good time with someone you like. Maybe you’ll come away wanting a second date, or realizing you got on well but there’s no romantic connection. You never know until you give it a try. Just don’t decide beforehand that dating them will prove a sexuality, that they’re going to be a potential future partner, or that being attracted to them will mean you can’t also be attracted to people of different genders. It’s better simply just to see what happens.
At 19, you’re certainly not behind, and you haven’t missed some magical point where everyone else figured dating out. You are at an age when you’re allowed to discover things about yourself, including things you didn’t expect to discover.
You don’t need to know exactly who you’ll love, what kind of relationship you’ll eventually have, whether you’ll want children, or what words for your sexuality or relationships you’ll use forever. You just need to be honest about where you are now, and that’s enough information to get started with.
