So I got an email from a friend the other day and he made the following comment:

"Is there something about...for gay boys, the quest for the father figure, especially if we did not connect that well, that often with our own fathers? And if some of us didn't connect to them, then do we seek, either subliminally or consciously, mates who embody some element that our fathers did not?

And is this quest for perhaps complimentary partners just an offshoot of that quest?

I don't know. It's very fuzzy to me. But like a shadow on the other side of opaque glass, I think there's something there. Could be a monster, could be a mouse, but there's a truth to the types of guys who turn us on, (beyond just the looks) and what we perhaps didn't get as boys.

AND...this is the kicker...perhaps we get older, and wiser, and learn, and then the men who inspired us when we were "boys", no longer inspire the AWE as we are "men." And perhaps that's why we grow apart from our first partners in ways that would never allow us to go back."

My first reaction was ewwwwww, I don't want to be with anyone like my Dad. Don't get me wrong I love my father, but the thought of being in love with him is another story. And yet when I look at who I have chosen to be with, he is very much like my Dad and the roles in our relationship are very similar to that of my mother and father. I am not talking about silly shallow card-board assumption of who is passive or aggressive or who is fem and butch. Rather I am blunt, pragmatic, more of doer, whereas my bf is more spacey, cerebral, repressed. We all fall in to roles no matter how much we try to avoid it.