Ask Lemmy

I (23M) grew up in an environment where my parents initially showed me affection and played with me when I was very young, but stopped doing so around age 3. After this point, they were cold and emotionally abusive, with my dad being downright threatening and physically abusive. They told me that I was too old to be smothered in kisses or played with anymore. But the memories of those moments and the yearning to experience them again kept bouncing around in my head... and they never disappeared. I only became more and more ashamed of them.

As a young child, I kept trying to find ways to elicit this kind of attention from strangers, which I did by acting cute. This worked for a while, but soon I got old enough that the nice ladies in the supermarket stopped paying attention to me, and I believed that I would never receive this kind of love again. Things only got worse when I learned about gender roles -- the man was the strong, stoic knight who worked tirelessly and quietly endured pain for his damsel in distress, all for a pittance of affection. In all of the media I had ever watched, not once was a male character absolutely drowned in smooches like I had wished for.

In middle school, I was often called "gay" by people for expressing the cuteness and emotional expressiveness that used to get positive attention. I didn't know how to be stoic, so I felt trapped. It felt like they were attacking my unspoken desires to be soft and vulnerable with a woman and asserting that they were undesirable in straight relationships, a claim that I didn't know how to refute. In defense of those desires, I felt solidarity with queer, kinky, and gender nonconforming people and channeled my nihilistic rage into bullying any sexists or homophobes I could get power over.

Since then, I've mostly gone underground and retreated to various progressive online spaces, not really engaging with real life. Eventually I discovered terms like "gentle femdom" and "role reversal," which showed some of what I liked, but it also made me believe that what I wanted was an exotic kink and not a real thing IRL.

I just want lots of kisses and praise and comfort. I don't want someone in charge of me and I don't want to be "the woman" in the relationship. I just want to feel precious and adored by a partner just as much as I would do the same for her, and that feels like asking for too much.

I've been going to therapy for this because the shame has become crippling and caused a learned helplessness that has made it difficult to leave my abusive situation. I didn't have any motivation to try in life because I'm tired of hiding my true soft self and thought I could never find a partner or safe spaces in public to be me. My therapist says that my desires aren't unusual, but that doesn't make it feel easier to find people I can feel safe with.