Connections

A week before Christmas, I realized that I was going to spend it as a single gay man for the first time in years. The last five Christmases were memorable: the first year I spent it with Alex's family, the second year he spent it with mine, the third year we traveled to Vigan, the fourth year we camped in Zambales, and the fifth year we spent it with Adam, Dan and Mike in Antipolo. They all belonged in the past now, and my present was looking bleak. Alex and I were supposed to be celebrating our fifth anniversary today, and feeling lonely and desperate, I did something that I swore I would never do: I created an account in Guys4Men. 

I've heard so much about the online dating site from Adam, who used it as his personal dial a fuck. I wasn't sure I was going to meet anyone I could take seriously, but desperate times called for desperate measures, and if I don't find boyfriend materials, I could at least hope to gain new friends, not that I need more. I didn't know what to expect, but I was certainly not expecting to be immediately scandalized. In the first few hours after I created an account, I received several offers of no-strings-attached sex from headless bodies who also demanded for my dick pics. Other messages were from girly boys who seemed too prepubescent to be allowed accounts on the site. I began to feel despair that all this effort to make the profile and upload photos were all for naught and I thought about all the gay men throughout history who must have had the same problem as mine: where to find eligible gay men that are worthy companions in this journey called life? 

In 1995, with Dan tired from the anonymous sex in the dark of cinemas and after dark in city parks, he decided to do something he had never done before: call a party line. Into the telephone, men and women were shouting details about themselves, what they were looking for, and what their landlines were, a cacophony of desire and loneliness freely articulated because of anonymity. Dan listened but didn't say anything, until he realized he should at least be writing phone numbers down of the men who said they were also looking for men. He wrote down a few, put asterisks on the ones whose voice sounded best to him, and after listening a while, put the phone down and gave himself two few hours before he started to call the numbers. Among all the ones he called, two stood out, which he then both agreed to meet, and two whittled to one, and there was Mike. 

In 2003, at eighteen the desire that Uno was trying to control got the better of him, and he did something he had never done before: log in to MIRC. He hadn't admitted to himself that he liked men yet, so he introduced himself as one of those who would try anything once. In the same chatroom that Uno joined Adam was in too, a veteran chatter who had already met and bedded many of the men from there. Seeing an unfamiliar handle he went for the kill, and after a long winding exchange of messages, some misdirections and denials, a few soothing and encouraging words, slight flirtations and a promise of a good time, Uno did something else that night he had never done before: given his mobile number to a stranger and agreeing to meet him. But two months later, Adam and Uno called it quits, and three years from then they have become the best of friends. 

Now here I was in the same situation as my friends had been. Amidst all those messages that I chose to ignore was a beacon of hope that prevented me from going ahead and deleting my profile hours after I created it. His name was Nico. My profile name was a reference to a character in one of Almodovar's films, and Nico had caught it. That alone piqued my interest. His profile photo wasn't much to look at, three photos of his unremarkable face, but he wasn't bad looking to neglect. What followed was a witty exchange about movies, with bits and pieces of questions about ourselves thrown in the mix. The exchange led to an exchange in phone numbers, where we continued our conversation via text after we both gotten offline, followed by a fifteen-minute phone call where I heard that his voice wasn't bad sounding like I feared it to be. When he offered to meet the next day for coffee, I couldn't think of a reason not to agree. 

I didn't much prepare for it as well as I did with my date with Jacob, but at least I turned up on time at Starbucks 6750. He was already waiting for me, and I was relieved to discover that he was better looking in person than his photos make him to be. He had many stories that kept me interested, and mostly I listened while he kept me entertained. The date was going casually with no flirtations at all, and I found myself enjoying the date, feeling secured that there was no sex in our immediate future which I very much preferred. The most we exchanged was a hug before we took our separate cabs home, and as my cab turned right to EDSA, I received a text from him telling me that he had fun and he would like to see me again. The spark that I was looking for I didn't find with him, and I knew I was only settling for him because I didn't want to be alone. I wish I could say that I did the right thing that night but I didn't. Against my better judgment I said I'd like to see him again too, and as the cab went over Magallanes interchange, I wondered if Nico and I were going either in the way of Dan and Mike or of Uno and Adam, or if fate had something else in store for us. Were we going to be lovers or were we going to be friends? Or were we going to be strangers disappointed with love? Only time will tell.