Telling the man you love the that he has hurt you is one of the most difficult yet necessary parts of a loving relationships. Start the conversation by telling him that you don’t want to make him necessarily wrong or the bad guy, but that you are struggling, can’t get past what has happened, and that it would be very helpful if you could leave this conversation feeling heard. It’s hard for men, even when we have done harm, to accept that we have harmed the man we love the most. It’s sometimes so painful that we can’t even admit it to ourselves. That can come across as “I didn’t do it.” When what we really mean to say is “I never meant to hurt you.”
The biggest mistake a man often makes when having a difficult conversation with the man he loves is to allow the anger over having been hurt, or conversely the anger over having hurt, to control his words. Never start a conversation when you feel the righteous voice of anger filling your mind, it will only cause you to lose sight of your objective. And what is your objective? To replace the pain of anger and sadness with the joy you once felt in his presence.
The most important lesson we can learn about difficult conversations is that what we really crave from the man who hurt us is not an abject apology, no matter how much that fantasy persists in our minds. Apologies are cheap and rarely satisfy us as we imagine. No, what we deeply crave from the man we love is to be truly seen and heard. You don’t have to make him wrong, or worse, the enemy to heal the hurt in your heart. Create a safe, non-judgemental, and loving space, and speak your pain. it requires grace on your part to give him the opportunity to hear what you have to say, and time to process his own pain and anger with himself for having hurt you.
Because of the shame of our distant past, many gay men aren’t very comfortable expressing the hurt that happens in their relationships. Instead, we are very practiced at putting on a smile and once again slipping into the closet of hiding our true feelings. How will you ever be seen and heard if you remain locked behind the doors of that well-fortified closet? And most importantly, how can he love you if he doesn’t have the opportunity to know you?
We all harm the ones we love the most—it is the nature of being human. Our love does not have to be diminished by the wounds we inflict, but rather it can be strengthened by our willingness to own the injury we have created, learn from our mistake, and as Maya Angelou famously said, “when I knew better, I did better.”