The Illegitimacy of Love

When a deeply embedded belief became my undoing

Jun 16, 2026

I already knew at 5 years old that I was different.

The kind of different that a child doesn’t have words for. The kind of different that the other kids can sense. The kind of different that garnered attention that I never wanted. The kind of different that kept me on the outskirts of general acceptance.

So, I adapted. Kind of. Okay, not really. I didn’t know how.

I didn’t know what was wrong with me. What made me a target? Why did other kids’ pain make me cry? Why the hell did Noel feel the need to drag me around the playground by my hair?

I guess it didn’t help being a very sensitive boy who loved playing with his sisters and their toys rather than playing flag football. I couldn’t jump my bike. I couldn’t climb the ropes…but I was great at jump rope.

The time and place that I grew up in was overall quite wholesome. I have many, many fond memories of playing outside in the high desert with my sisters and our friends. The fun we’d have making forts, riding our bikes, and playing games.

The pastime for the men was to go hunting, fishing, and do handy things. The women would tend the families and household duties. It was all very clear what was expected of each. Men bring home the bacon, and the women fry it up. This is just the way it was.

We all would go to church and fellowship and learn what the right kind of love was. Boys have girlfriends. Girls have boyfriends. They hold hands and they kiss. Find someone quickly, get married, make babies. It was encouraged and modeled all around us. Anything outside of that, well, there’s something wrong with you and you’re probably going to hell. Obviously.

This is what a normal life was supposed to be. I wanted it, and it was not meant for me.

Yes, I had “girlfriends” in elementary school and we’d hold hands or I’d buy little gifts for Valentine’s Day. I had one girlfriend in Jr. High and one in High School. I never went on a date with either of them. I made up every excuse I could find to avoid seeing them outside the context of school or church. I didn’t want them to find out how utterly mortifying I found the thought of boyfriend/girlfriend touching.

Praying and begging God to make me want to be like everyone else, but that didn’t work. I knew by my senior year of high school, definitively: I was not meant to be with girls, and I’d remain single my entire life. People like me were rare, out of my league, terrified me, and/or moved away to more accepting places.

Growing up in this environment did embed into my psyche a deeply rooted belief that when you find and choose your someone, it was meant to be “until death do us part.” That it was a commitment you stick to.

Of course, gays, well, they don’t get to marry. Their love is filthy, unholy, and temporary. What a weight to carry. Or was it? Is a weight still a weight if you don’t feel it anymore? When it is so embedded into you, you just accept it as normal?

I was 19 years old when I entered my relationship with a 31 year old that lasted 25 years. Yeah, I know. Reading those words now should have set off far, far bigger alarms than they did. Oh, the lessons we learn. He was a charming, exotic Middle Eastern man, accomplished and articulate. So far different than the people in the town I had moved away from a year and a half earlier.

I was bound and determined to prove that even a gay relationship can work. That it can be as devoted and long-lasting as any church or government blessed union. That it didn’t take a ring on the finger or a certificate to prove the validity of our love. To prove that gay men can be in long-term relationships that last. As any good Taurus would do, I dug my feet in and stayed. I had to prove my point, and in my own way, represent the gay community to the world I had grown up in — that our love was serious, durable, possible, lasting, and real.

The missing part of the equation, the one I didn’t know how to deal with, was this: how does one not feel like a failure when it’s time to walk away? That feeling of maybe everyone was right after all. I mean, 25 years isn’t something to balk at. It honestly should have been less than 25 months.

But when do we let go of the belief that the only success is “till death do us part”? Is it after you find out your partner is mostly closeted and homophobic, other than enjoying sex? After discovering he is a proud racist? A misogynist? Is it after the emotional, verbal, financial, and psychological abuse becomes too much? No. Absolutely not. I was committed even when I’d have a full-bodied visceral reaction to any one of those things. But that’s the right thing to do, right? Stay? Isn’t that what everything said we had to do to have a worthy relationship in the world’s eyes?

Oh wait. I’m gay. It still wouldn’t have mattered.

The decision to leave was generally met with a kind of casual, nonchalant dismissal. It wasn’t that big of a deal. The relationship, the effort, the sacrifice — whatever. Of course it didn’t last, “Gay men are just like that. It’s your culture.”

Twenty-five years reduced to a shrug and a suggestion. “Just go out. You’ll find someone else.” Their words tumbling out as though I had lost a casual situationship rather than a quarter of a century of my life.

A few people (most of them my own family) treated it with the gravity it deserved while the rest seemed to expect me to simply move on. Somewhere in the exhaustion of carrying grief and partially accepting maybe everyone was right, I gave in to what was expected. I numbed. I sought out connection that was shallow enough to feel something without risking anything. Physical proximity without emotional presence. The body showing up while the rest of me stayed safely locked away.

It was its own kind of departure from myself. A smaller one, but recognizable.

What I know now, that I could not see then, is that I was not just staying for him.

I was staying for the belief. The belief that was planted long before he arrived. The one that said the only worthy love is the love that endures, and the strong, dependable, worthy man is the one who does not walk away. That belief had been running quietly in the background of every decision I made for 25 years. It was invisible, unexamined, and organizing my entire life around a premise I had never consciously chosen and rarely, if ever, questioned.

Reflecting back on all of this, in experiencing my own return to self, was the invitation to look at what beliefs we hold so deeply that we don’t even know they are there. What I thought was nobility, commitment, pride, and defiance of a stereotype — I believed I was choosing those things freely. However, quietly, invisibly, in the background, I accepted the belief of what a good relationship looked like from the outside. I unconsciously accepted the burden of disproving that gay love was lesser.

Here is what I could not see then: the effort to disprove a belief is its own form of holding it.

One cannot spend 25 years trying to prove their love is valid without, somewhere beneath the surface, having accepted that its validity was ever in question. I was not free of the premise. I was living inside its logic while believing I was fighting against it.

The most insidious absorbed beliefs are the ones that dress themselves as choice, because nobody questions the thing that looks like courage and strength.

The courage, the real strength, came from finally accepting that I had nothing to prove to anyone, myself included. That my love was never illegitimate. It never was. That I am not less than anyone else because of who I love. I never was. That the world that indoctrinated these premises was the thing that needed examining. Not me.

Not us.

I am married now. Not to prove anything to the town I grew up in. Not to represent anyone. Not to demonstrate that gay men can commit, can stay, can build something lasting and real. I am married to a man who is wholly, completely, just mine, as I am his.

I am married because it is what we wanted. It is our declaration of love and devotion to each other. That is it. Simple.

It is not a demonstration. It doesn’t need proof. It never needed it.

We are not a statement. We are not evidence. We are not a rebuttal to anyone’s belief about what love between two men can or cannot be.

We are just us. Expansively, completely, without apology or explanation.

And this, finally, after everything, my dears, is what sovereignty actually feels like.

What belief are you living inside the logic of, while believing you are choosing freely? And what might become possible if you accepted that you had nothing to prove to begin with?

I’d love to hear what this brought up for you.

Your reflections are part of the medicine, and every voice adds to the remembering of our collective sovereignty.

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