I Almost Broke Up With My Boyfriend Last Month. Here's What Saved Us
Completely contradicted everything I believe about relationships, but it worked for us.
The first 90-days of relationship are when you put all those butterflies in your stomach to work.
You’ve got the number, done the first date investigation, sent the good morning texts, now you’re working out the details of how this dating arrangement is going to work.
The figuring out process is intentionally trying. Every decision and consideration that just came second nature for you as a single person is now topic of conversation for you as a couple. And anytime you put so much of one’s life under that kind of microscope, tensions tend to flare.
It had gotten to such a fevered pitch between my boyfriend and I that I thought it might break us, until resolve found us in an unexpected place.
And it all happened at the altar
Kevonté and I met at church. He was the cute boy giving a demure praise on the pew in front of me. Every Sunday I could smell his cologne and admire his conviction. He dressed well and smiled big.
One day, I mustered enough courage to ask him out and our love story began, even though in my head we’d been together since the first time I saw him.
For months, we’d shared life experiences. Told each other of our family woes and professional trials. Our reflex, as two men, is to present our tribulations (churchy) in ways that sound like we’re managing. “I dealt with…” “I learned…” and capped off with an “I’ll be alright.”
But sometimes, the facade gets too hard to hold up and we have to let it fall—shatter—hoping that someone will love whatever they discover underneath. Two Sundays in a row that happened for Kevonté and I.
You’re on my row, Pastor
We attend an affirming church. It’s commonplace for same gender couples to openly worship alongside other gender couples throughout the congregation. One particular Sunday, our pastor was preaching a message the pricked me deep.
I was dealing with something personally and the message felt as if he was in my seat. So when he opened the altar and called for us to join in prayer, I came down immediately.
This was my first show of deep vulnerability with Kevonté in eye shot. While my pastor has seen me cry, he hadn’t. “Who would I be to him if he saw me break down?” The tension between who I want to be for/with him (strong and dependable) and who I actually am in this moment (vulnerable and heart broken) stifled me.
But whatever I was holding was so heavy that I had to let it fall. I cried that day at the altar and, as I walked back to my seat, there Kevonté was to love and support who I was underneath.
He was strong…
Two weeks later our roles reversed. Difference is I’ve been a ball of emotions throughout our months long love affair. I’ve expressed insecurities and jealousies, joys and sorrows, and I cried at the altar.
Kevonté is the paragon of strength because he thought he had to be—until that day. He let his facade fall at the altar just as I did. It fell hard and I knew, because of my time at the altar, how important standing with him was.
We bonded more deeply in these moments than any sex, or conversation, or date night, or pillow talk. Between these two moments at the altar we hadn’t exchanged a single word, yet I saw him and I truly believe he saw me.
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The Bigger Lesson
The difficulty in culture is that Black men don’t have these opportunities to drop the mask. Kevonté and I attend an affirming church in one of the Blackest, gayest cities in the world surrounded by a culture that affirms who we are at our core.
I have a podcast and cultivated a community of support around my Black gay life. While the level of liberation I’m able to walk in is what I hope to create for everyone that taps in to Dear Black Gay Men, it’d be naive to think that our situation is normal or easily duplicated.
But the one thing each of us can do is look for opportunities to shed a little bit of our mask. I don’t know that the vulnerability Kevonté expressed at the altar would be possible if I hadn’t gone first.
Yes, the situation could have gone exactly the same if the roles were reversed, but it also could not have. In order to illicit the vulnerability and courage in Kevonté, I had to be vulnerable and courageous. And that’s the big lesson we can all walk away with.
In order to have friends, he must show himself friendly.
What you are looking for is also looking for you if you’re courageous enough to be that first. If you’re looking for friends, you have to be friendly first. If you’re looking for dates, you have to be dateable first. But on the deepest level, you absolutely are looking for vulnerability even if you don’t have the words to name it, so you must first be vulnerable.
When you let the facade fall, when you show people who you really are and how soft yet strong you are underneath, culture and the universe will conspire in your favor.
But manifesting your sphere of support only goes to who you actually are and not to who you present to the world. Our job is to self-actualize on a level that affirms our true self—that connects our outward expression to our authentic being. Then, whomever and whatever we need will in fact find us just as sure as Kevonté sat on that pew in front of me at church.
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Thank you for being vulnerable. 🫶🏾