I got yanked out of the closet in 2003, and it goes without saying that my life changed. The first month after I left home as an out gay man was quite the whirlwind of rushed adulting, and it included core memories like my first gay bar (Bed), and my first LGBT Pride celebration in the form of Malate's annual White Party. That somehow defined a central part of how I view my life as a gay individual - one that almost needs to include celebrating with the community in a public space. But Malate is no more, and at least we have O Bar as our gay home for key periods like this.
Tobie and I have officially been together for over 16 years now, and have been living together for 17 years. It goes without saying that most of my adult gay life has while I've been spent in a relationship with him, and it's kind of daunting to consider things fully. In line with this Pride season, I found myself reflecting on the two of us and the interesting life we continue to lead.
We first got together because the spark between us felt undeniable. Our early interactions felt as ridiculous as many of the romantic comedies that Tobie loves so much. We had everything from songs that would play whenever we were together to a lot of cases of completing each other's sentences. We often referred to this early connection as our Wavelength - an inexplicable link between us that sort of amplified our feelings for one another, but also made keeping secrets a near impossibility.
After 17 years, our Wavelength is even stronger than when we started, I feel. Beyond just sparks of feelings or thoughts bleeding between us, at times it feels like we can have entire conversations without words. We don't just complete each other's sentences - we know what the other is about to say next. You can say this is inevitable when you share so much time with someone. But there are still instances that seem to defy logic - and I say this as a person who embraces facts and numbers and known things. But there are still so many cases when there are things I should not logically know or expect, and yet they happen again and again, and Tobie and I just look at each other and laugh. I'm sure our closest friends have repeatedly been subject to our strange, silent interactions like this, or how our words convey so much more than they actually do, because of countless inside jokes. It just reflects a degree of comfort and familiarity that often feels surreal.
I often joke that too much of our interactions are based on references. And I'm not just talking about going back to stories of our own life together and connecting events to past circumstances. It's really more pop culture things like lines from movies and TV shows that bubble up from the depths of childhood and surprise us again that we share so much in common despite being very different people. This further ties us together and adds whole other layers of meaning for our conversations that others may not pick up on. And that's fine because these things are often just for the two of us, and we get to smile at one another without everyone else being ignorant of what just transpired between us.
For Pride, I celebrate the magic of having found my true favorite person. Most of our day-to-day lives can get pretty mundane, but that's perfectly fine for us. We are together almost all the time, but we aren't necessarily actively interacting all the time either. There is a unique comfort in just sharing the same space together and being able to reach out across the table at random to just hold hands for a moment, then we go back to whatever we were doing prior. It means that we probably look like a couple who are in silent disagreement with one another when we eat out because we largely eat in silence while reading on our respective devices. But that's totally not the case, of course, it's just a thing we have come to enjoy doing, and I remain thankful that Tobie indulges me in my far too many eccentricities like reading while eating. But despite our many differences, we fit together impossibly well, so much so that I often find myself still surprised how we found each other and how we continue to be a couple despite...us? Words fail me in this moment.
We're waiting for the city government of Parañaque to release its official implementing rules and regulations for its Right to Care ordinance so that we can designate one another as decision-makers in medical matters. We still need to revisit discussions with our lawyer friend to draft living wills so that we can take care of each other should the worst happen. We don't have plans to get married in another country because it remains meaningless in this country, and we still don't have plans to migrate anywhere else because, for better or for worse, this is home. But Tobie is also my forever person at this point, and I cannot imagine a life without him. And thus, we probably say "I love you" to one another far too often. Like, we just randomly blurt it out several times a day when it's just the two of us.
With every Pride celebration that comes along, I hold out hope that things will change in this country and we'll get proper legal recognition as a couple. But until then, we remain happy in our shared silences full of meaning, and our secret references, and our little stories. We continue to live our weird rom-com-esque life. I'm proud to be with Tobie, and I'm even prouder of the man he has helped me to become. I would not be the Rocky that I am today were it not for him. And I hope everyone embraces the joy of Pride in their own lives and hopefully finds that kind of person to help elevate them to new heights.
