Verified by 
Relationships
Who Does What?: Choosing Roles for Gay Couples
Male couples don't have others' blueprints, so how do you figure out what works?
Posted September 15, 2024 Reviewed by Gary Drevitch
Key points
- The straight community showers couples with affirmation; that's still not true for gay men
- Male couples need to work hard to find role models, but it's worth it.
- It's easier to be protective as male couple.
Male relationships can run into challenges from the start, because two men coexisting as men don’t have a lot of historical role models. Working out how to be together isn’t intuitive. Some men have internalized homophobic images of masculinity, and have had to be hyper-masculine in order to get by. Others aren’t comfortable with any expressions of perceived femininity in themselves…or in their partners, because of how they see these traits reflecting back on them.
If you’re like most gay men, you probably grew up feeling somehow “different.” Because you grew up feeling disenfranchised and/or flawed, you may have completely disowned the masculine energy inside yourself, and encountering it in a partner can be disconcerting.
A lack of role models
Most gay couples aren’t exactly surrounded by helpful community resources. The communities in which you live and work may not know the nuances of gay couples’ lives. It’s also probable that you’ve been careful in terms of the breadth and depth of the information you’ve shared with your families. Even friends aren’t necessarily helpful, as their advice may come from a different model of being a couple.
For men who grew up in certain cultural, ethnical, and/or religious milieus, it’s enormously difficult to come out at all, much less figure out how to live with another man as a couple. As a white couples therapist, it’s been clear to me through my work and my research that the danger of being out as a gay male couple can be strong.
In addition—and it’s sad to need to say this—there are few long-term gay couples to serve as role models. Some older couples may not have survived due to the AIDS epidemic; additionally, older men have been encouraged to not discuss intimate or emotional matters with each other. In other words, even if you’re gay, you may have learned how to be a man without input from other gay men.
But now you have the options of doing things differently, if you push yourself. You can take the necessary time to explore and celebrate what unique and beautiful attributes partners in a male relationship bring to themselves and to each other.
And there are role models out there, even if you don’t know them personally. There are others in your community who are living examples how others have survived and dealt with the struggles you are experiencing. Consider:
- You don’t always have to use gay couples as role models; you can watch what men and women do in heterosexual couples and choose what components of those relationships make sense for you.
- There are many couples in the gay community if you allow yourself to look deeply enough by seeking out intimate and sustaining settings in which to encounter successful male couples.
- We can all be ageist, so move beyond it to appreciate what older couples can teach you about long-term relationships. Understanding our masculinity can be informed by those who have preceded us. I remember that when I was a young man, older gay couples seemed prissy, fussy, and frankly stereotypical. But hearing stories turns out to be beneficial for young gay men, who can take the experiences of older male couples to help inform their own.
Who does what?
Although straight couples today are—rightly—challenging gender roles within marriages and relationships, they do at least have a starting-point, an accepted norm. We don’t have that. So we’re floundering around, trying to navigate everything from tenderness to chores to caregiving to receiving love. How do we ask for what we need? How can we respond to our partner’s needs? How do you show up for him? How can you make yourself vulnerable? What does masculinity mean in the context of male couples?
Many factors come into play, but one I’d like to highlight is competition. We’re socialized from the cradle to be competitive. This gets reflected in nearly every facet of our lives: open relationships, social experiences, career and financial achievements, a sense of respect in the world, betting, sports, overachievement…the list is endless.
There’s no blueprint, and the opportunities for competition are also endless, given that the role of masculinity is a propeller in people’s lives, whether they realize it or not. How many of us have heard, “You’re not enough of a man”? That’s the negative unconscious energy living inside every one of us, and if we only had a range of different kinds of role models we might be a lot closer to self-acceptance and self-actualization.
Conclusion: You do you
- Ditch any accepted definitions of ideal couples: this is about the two of you.
- Create your own chosen family by surrounding yourselves with people who inspire and motivate you.
- Successful relationships include being who you and your partner are, no matter whether your traits are judged “masculine” or “feminine.” Embodying both qualities in your partnership is an option.
- Choose to be bold rather than self-protective in making connections.
Take your time and find out what makes sense for you as a couple. There are a lot of questions you need to answer—and I’ll be talking about some of them here—but there’s no timeline on which they need to be answered. Take the time you need, and pull in whatever resources you can, to define our own male couplehood—and then, share that, so that other male couples can use you as a model.
