I want to talk about something I believe we do not discuss nearly enough in the gay, queer, bisexual, pansexual and wider LGBTQ+ community. It is something I have been thinking about for a long time, partly as a bisexual man, partly as a counsellor, and partly as someone who has spent years trying to understand what actually makes relationships work. The question is this: What happens when we use heterosexual relationships as the blueprint for relationships between men? Because for years, that is essentially what I did. I assumed that if I wanted to understand what a healthy long term relationship looked like, I should look at heterosexual couples who had managed to stay together. I looked at my parents, I looked at older couples, and I looked at relationship psychology. I read about attachment, communication, conflict and intimacy, learning about John Gottman’s Four Horsemen of criticism, contempt, defensiveness and stonewalling, alongside repair attempts, emotional bids, secure attachment and healthy communication. And much of it is enormously useful, because the fundamental psychology of human connection does not suddenly disappear simply because two men fall in love. We still need respect, emotional safety, honesty, boundaries, affection, the ability to repair after conflict, and the need to feel seen, wanted and valued. Queer relationships often have to negotiate roles, power, sex, care, money, masculinity and intimacy in ways that heterosexual relationship models do not always teach us how to navigate.
Two truths at the same time
There can be two truths at the same time: the principles of healthy relationships can be universal while the experience of living inside those relationships is not always interchangeable. And I think queer men sometimes need to talk about that more honestly, because two men entering a relationship are not necessarily entering it with the same assumptions, scripts, expectations or social conditioning as a heterosexual couple. There may be no obvious script, and that can be both incredibly liberating and incredibly difficult. Most of us do not consciously sit down one morning and decide what a relationship should look like; rather, we inherit it. We absorb it from our parents, television, religion, school, friends, pornography, culture, the marriages we witnessed growing up, the relationships we saw celebrated or condemned, and increasingly from social media. A heterosexual boy may grow up watching his parents occupy roles that have already been culturally defined for him, such as who earns the money, who takes time off when the children are sick, who cooks, who organises the household, who proposes, who pays for dinner, and who is expected to be emotionally expressive, sexually assertive, initiate, provide, and care.
Inheriting scripts and navigating explicit negotiation
Those roles may be negotiated within the individual relationship, of course, as modern heterosexual relationships are not simply reproductions of 1950s marriage. But the cultural script exists, the roles have names, and the institutions surrounding the relationship already exist with historical expectations about sex, money, property, inheritance, fidelity, children, domestic labour and care. Queer relationships often have to negotiate many of these questions much more explicitly, and that negotiation matters because when two men enter a relationship, there may not be an obvious answer to the question of who is supposed to do what. That sounds trivial until you actually live it and face questions like: Who initiates sex? Who makes the first move after an argument? Who earns more, who pays, who cooks, who cleans, and who organises the holiday? Who takes responsibility when one person becomes ill, and who looks after the other when they are older? Who is expected to be emotionally strong, and who is allowed to be vulnerable? Who gets to say no, and what happens when one person’s libido or sexuality changes? What happens when erectile difficulties enter the relationship, or when one person wants monogamy while the other wants something more open? What happens when one partner identifies strongly as a top, the other as a bottom, or both identify as versatile, and when those sexual identities begin to influence the psychological identities that the couple has constructed around themselves? These are not merely sexual questions; they are relationship questions.
Sex is not separate from power
This is one of the areas where I think queer men need to be able to have much more sophisticated conversations, because sex is not simply something two people do. Sex can also be a system of power, just as money, emotional availability, physical size, social status, age, experience, confidence, desirability and sexual roles can be. A relationship between two men who both earn £60,000 a year is not necessarily organised around money in the same way as a relationship in which one man earns £150,000 and the other earns £25,000. A relationship between two men who both identify as sides may develop different sexual expectations from a relationship in which one man strongly identifies as a top and the other as a bottom. A relationship between two men with similar levels of sexual experience may feel different from a relationship in which one partner is considerably more experienced and the other is entering queer sexual life for the first time. None of these things automatically make a relationship healthy or unhealthy, which is precisely the point: the difference itself is not the problem, but rather what the couple does with the difference. Can it be discussed and negotiated? Can someone change their mind or say no without punishment? Can somebody move outside the role they have historically occupied, and can the relationship survive a change in sexual identity? Can the person who earns less still feel that they have equal power, can the person who is more sexually dominant tolerate their partner establishing a boundary, and can the person who is more emotionally avoidant learn to stay present when things become uncomfortable? These are questions about power, consent, autonomy and attachment, and I think queer relationships deserve relationship psychology that takes those realities seriously.
We were never taught how to have these conversations
There is another layer to this: many men were simply never taught how to have these conversations. A lot of boys grow up without having meaningful conversations about sex, intimacy, consent, emotional boundaries, coercive control, manipulation, vulnerability or relational power. We are often taught what it means to be a man long before we are taught what it means to be a partner. And for queer men, there can be another complication, as some of us spent years trying to understand our sexuality while simultaneously trying to hide it. We learnt secrecy before intimacy, how to read people’s reactions before learning how to express our own needs, how to avoid being discovered, how to manage shame, how to compartmentalize, and how to survive environments in which being attracted to another man could feel dangerous, embarrassing, confusing or simply impossible to talk about. And then eventually we enter adulthood and someone tells us to now have a healthy relationship, leaving us to wonder where exactly we were supposed to learn how to do that. For some men, the first real conversations about sex happen through pornography, while for others they happen through Grindr, dating apps, hookups, older sexual partners, friends, or barely happen at all. Knowing how to have sex is not the same as knowing how to negotiate sex, knowing what turns you on is not the same as knowing how to communicate desire, and being sexually confident is not the same as understanding consent. Being submissive sexually does not mean being submissive emotionally, being dominant sexually does not give someone authority over their partner outside the bedroom, and being the person who earns more money does not mean becoming the decision maker. These distinctions matter.
The father-son relationship is not a rehearsal
There is another area that I think deserves more attention, which is that many men learn about masculinity through their relationships with other men—whether fathers, stepfathers, brothers, coaches, teachers, older men, or unfortunately, nobody at all. But the relationship between a father and his son is fundamentally different from the relationship between two adult men who are romantically and sexually involved. That may sound obvious, yet many men carry relational expectations from childhood into adult relationships without ever examining them. Perhaps you learnt that men do not talk about feelings, that affection between men is uncomfortable, that disagreement means withdrawal, that vulnerability gives someone ammunition, that the person with the most power makes the decision, that love is expressed through providing rather than talking, or that problems should simply be endured. And then you fall in love with another man and are suddenly expected to communicate, disclose, negotiate, be emotionally intimate, talk about sex, explain what you want or do not want, repair conflict, say “That hurt me,” hear “I am frightened,” tolerate your partner’s vulnerability, and allow yourself to be vulnerable. There is no wonder some men struggle when they are being asked to perform an entirely different kind of masculinity inside their relationship.
We need queer relationship role models
This is why I think queer men need other queer men—not because heterosexual couples have nothing to teach us, as there is enormous wisdom in long lasting relationships of every kind and we should learn from couples who have discovered how to forgive, communicate, remain curious, survive illness, care for each other, navigate ageing, deal with financial pressure, raise children, survive grief, and remain lovers when life becomes complicated. But we should not assume that one relationship structure is the universal template. We need queer relationship role models too, and not just the Instagram version of the couple who have been together for twelve years and post photographs from Mykonos. I mean the real couples: the couples who have had affairs and repaired them, negotiated non-monogamy or chose monogamy, survived one partner coming out later in life, dealt with differences in libido, navigated illness, cared for one another through ageing, negotiated money, had children, separated respectfully, realized they were incompatible, stayed, left, and learnt. Because sometimes we need to see not just what a successful relationship looks like, but what healthy negotiation looks like.
Stopping the confusion of sameness with equality
There is something else I have become increasingly aware of, which is that equality does not necessarily mean sameness. Two men can have completely different personalities, sexual preferences, incomes, levels of emotional openness and relationships with masculinity and still have an equal relationship, because equality is not necessarily fifty-fifty. Sometimes one person carries more financially while the other carries more domestically, sometimes one partner needs more care because they are ill, sometimes one person is emotionally stronger during one period of life while the other becomes the stronger one later, and sometimes one person wants more sex while another wants less, or one needs reassurance while the other needs space. The question is not whether the relationship is perfectly symmetrical, but whether both people have agency, can speak, can disagree, can say no, can change, can leave, and can remain themselves. That is where I think the conversation about power becomes much more important than simply asking whether a relationship “looks equal.”
The roles we create can become cages
There is also a danger in the queer community of creating our own rigid scripts, escaping one set of gender expectations only to accidentally create another through labels like top, bottom, vers, masc, femme, bear, twink, daddy, side, provider, caregiver, emotionally unavailable, or emotionally expressive. These identities can be meaningful, playful, liberating, and helpful for understanding oneself and finding community, but they can also become expectations. A top can become expected to be dominant, a bottom to be submissive, a masculine man to be emotionally stoic, a more feminine man to be emotionally expressive, the man who earns more to be the provider, the younger man to be the dependent, and the older man to be the mentor. Suddenly the couple has created a hierarchy without consciously deciding to do so, and the role that initially helped two people understand their attraction can eventually become the role that prevents them from growing. People change, bodies change, sexuality changes, libido changes, money changes, age changes, illness changes, desire changes, and relationships have to change with them.
Negotiation as the real queer relationship skill
Maybe this is what I am ultimately trying to say: I do not think queer relationships need to reinvent relationship psychology, but rather that we need to expand it. We can take everything psychology has taught us about attachment, communication, emotional regulation, conflict, trauma and intimacy, alongside what heterosexual couples have learnt from marriages that have survived decades, divorces, parents, and grandparents. But we also need to learn from ourselves, from other queer couples, from gay men who have been together for forty years, from bisexual couples navigating changing identities, from couples negotiating open relationships, from men who have learnt to communicate after years of emotional avoidance, from couples who have discovered that sexual roles do not have to determine emotional roles, and from people who have learnt that consent is not a one-time conversation but something that continues throughout a relationship. And perhaps most importantly, we must learn from couples who have learnt how to negotiate, because that may be one of the defining skills of queer relationships. When there is no obvious script, you have to write one together and sit down to ask: What does commitment, fidelity, and sex mean to us? What happens when one of us does not want sex? How do we handle pornography and money? Who pays, how do we divide domestic labour, and what happens if our income, sexuality, or health changes? How do we want to age, who looks after whom, what does emotional intimacy look like, how do we fight and repair, and what are our boundaries and deal breakers?
And perhaps the hardest question of all is whether we are actually building the relationship we want, or simply reproducing the relationships we were taught to want. That is a question I think every queer man should ask himself, because there is an extraordinary freedom in not having a predetermined script, though freedom comes with responsibility. If nobody tells you exactly what your relationship is supposed to look like, you have to decide, negotiate, communicate, tolerate uncertainty, learn your partner, and keep learning yourself. Maybe that is not a weakness of queer relationships, but one of their greatest possibilities: we are not necessarily handed the blueprint, so perhaps we should stop looking for one and start learning how to build together.
Queer Relationship Counselling for Gay, Bisexual and Queer Men
If you are a gay, bisexual, pansexual or queer man struggling with relationships, intimacy, communication, sex, boundaries, attachment or conflict, you do not have to navigate it alone. At Male Minds Counselling, I provide counselling and psychotherapy for boys and men, including support around LGBTQ+ relationships, masculinity, sexuality, self-esteem, emotional intimacy and relationship difficulties.
Queer relationship counselling can provide a space to explore the patterns you bring into relationships, the expectations you have inherited about masculinity and partnership, and the ways power, sex, money, attachment and emotional vulnerability can shape your relationship. It can also help you and your partner communicate more openly, understand recurring conflict, establish boundaries, navigate differences in sexual desire or relationship structure, and develop healthier ways of negotiating your needs.
I work with gay, bisexual and queer men in Reading, Berkshire and surrounding areas, as well as offering online counselling. Whether you are experiencing relationship problems, struggling with intimacy, questioning your relationship patterns, navigating a break-up, exploring non-monogamy, dealing with differences in sexual desire, or simply wanting to understand yourself more deeply, counselling can give you somewhere to have the conversations that can be difficult to have elsewhere.
Male Minds Counselling offers inclusive, culturally aware and masculinity-informed counselling and psychotherapy for boys and men. You can find out more about counselling for men, LGBTQ+ relationship support and the services available in Reading and online at Male Minds Counselling.
Explore relationships between gay, bisexual and queer men, including masculinity, sex, power, intimacy, attachment and communication. LGBTQ+ counselling in Reading and online with Male Minds Counselling.