Sex 101: Navigating Queer Dating with OCD
About the Series: Sex 101
With cuffing season just around the corner and Libra and Scorpio seasons in full swing, romance is in the air. Along with that, though, come rigid sexual norms, too many atrocious Tinder dates, and having to deal with our exes (and exes of exes, and so on). Are these just the things that we, as young people still understanding our own sexualities, have to go through?
Here at Camp Thirlby, we don’t think anyone should be denied the education and experiences that encompass their sexual and romantic lives across (and outside of) the gender spectrum. However, that usually isn’t the case for many of us, whether that means having to seek out alternative forms of sex and dating information for queer folks or using our own lived experiences in a religious upbringing to process our knowledge and feelings towards sexuality years later. That’s where “Sex 101” comes in — a series that highlights the educations and experiences — no matter how unconventional — of our Camp Counselors that have something to say about how they navigated, learned, and unlearned certain sex and dating norms.
I did some weird stuff as a kid. My parents didn’t really know what was wrong with me, but in fear of something actually being wrong, they seemed to ignore it. I washed my hands until they were raw and bloody, I checked the locks around the house before bed, I was irrationally afraid that I would come in contact with chemicals (road tripping to Maine with my family one summer, I tried to help my dad put gas in the car and some of it dripped on my shirt and I went bezerk). Strangely, none of these things seemed to raise an alarm to my parents that their child had OCD.
I spent my Junior year of high school in Denmark, where I spent a good quarter of the year in and out of doctor’s offices, convinced that I had throat cancer. This started a new trend of medical-related obsessions and a new pattern of seeking affirmation from doctors just to make sure that I was, in fact, healthy.
Upon returning to the states and American highschool, things were bad. My parents finally invested in my seeing a psychologist, and I was immediately diagnosed with OCD.
I was confused more than anything; I thought OCD was just images of compulsive cleaning and impeccable organizational skills. In highschool, I often heard “Oh my god, I’m so OCD” in relation to being hyper specific or organized, yet I am not an organized person, by any stretch of the word.
When I came out as gay my Sophmore year of highschool, I associated the feeling of loneliness with being shut in the closet. I had thought that coming out would open me up to the world of cute boys who would ask me to Homecoming, as in any new age dreamy highschool gay rom-com. That didn’t become my reality though; coming out was messy and confusing. I became “that gay kid” in my class and I was now hypervisible when I walked the halls, but people weren’t paying attention to me — they were paying attention to my sexuality.
As an adult, four years after my diagnosis and after coming into my identity, the haunting often feels like it is over. The place where I still notice it and it still feels as jarring to experience, as when I got teased for my bloody hands in elementary school, is when it comes to dating.
Those who know me might describe me as boy-crazy. I have spent a large part of my college years in the grey area, somewhere between hooking up and dating. Commitment to me was for a long time a dirty word; my OCD has always been such a burden on me and the idea of sharing that burden with another person has always terrified me.
I’ve been told a number of times that I am overly picky; the reality for me, though, is that I obsess over the notion of compatibility:
“Is this person right for me?”
“Oh he likes ____, I don’t like ____, can this work?”
“He’s tall, do I like tall, what if I’m not supposed to be with a tall person?”
These patterns of obsessive thinking build a wall between you and the other person. As hard as it is to let people in to begin with, the added often unrealistic and intrusive doubt about another person in relation to you makes letting people in all the more anxiety-inducing.
When I have let people in, it has taken a lot of work; it means that I spend everyday filtering out the intrusive, disingenuous OCD-driven thoughts about that person in relation to me. As with any kind of obsessive thinking, “filtering” it out is no easy task. This process of having to try and like someone, even when your brain is obsessing over all of their flaws and all of your flaws and how it can never work, is exhausting. It makes it hard for me to trust that I am right for people and that they are right for me.
Recently entering a relationship for the first time in a while, I have come to realize that I had not only been obsessing about compatibility but also about the notion of love and what love feels like. I have found myself deep in thought about the “sparks” — he touched me, why didn’t my heart fire up? Am I supposed to feel something all the time? Where’s the spark right now, I should be feeling a spark, right? This kind of intrusive thinking is not only hard in the sense that it confuses what is and isn’t true in the pursuit of love (whatever that may mean), but it also takes you out of the moment. When there are genuine sparks, I question them out of habit.
Sometimes I wish that I was worried about locking the doors before bed and germs on stair rails because at least those things didn’t intrude on my ability to feel comfortable with another person and with falling in love. I have trust issues, not only because of past relationship trauma, but also because my brain tests my love for another person at every possible moment.
With trust issues already present, when relationships get hard, when the going gets rough, I find myself so much more lost and challenged by the circumstances than perhaps necessary. “Why are they mad?,” “Did I say something wrong?,” “Can I trust them, after what they did?,” “What if we can’t get past this? Is the relationship supposed to end here?”
While doubts are present in the development of relationships and throughout relationships for most people, for me, doubts are more often than not anchored in intrusive, disingenuous, patterns of thinking and not in reality. This in turn makes it hard for me to discern what I am actually thinking and feeling in relation to another person.
The “gay scene,” for a person with OCD, is an absolute trip. After coming out and coming to terms with my sexuality, I was quickly pushed by my feelings of loneliness into destructive cycles of intimacy — ie. Grindr. For someone who struggles with relationships and trusting my own mind and thoughts in relation to others, I found Grindr to be a comfortable settlement. I was able to thrive in the lack of commitment, and my problems with OCD were isolated to my own experience. The pursuit of quick intimacy, while fun for a while, became a harmful quest. I found that I was filling the pit in my stomach with fleeting moments of attraction. I quickly found that Grindr and other mediums of this sort became a sort of compulsion — a way for me to affirm my self worth, without the strings of relationship. Noticing this, I changed my tune.
An old flame once told me, in response to me revealing all these struggles to him, that “everyone deserves to be loved.” While this may seem cliché, hearing this ignited my quest to loving myself and finding people who help me to do so. No one is unworthy of love, even someone whose brain tells them that is the case 24/7.
About the Author
Jake Pearce (he/him) is a senior at the George Washington University in Washington, DC. He is originally from Boulder, Colorado. He enjoys the mountains, craft beer and being queer.
