He left close to midnight. The text came at seven the next morning. Warm, casual tone, nothing wrong with it. Kevin told me about it five days later in a session. The text wasn’t what he wanted to talk about.
What he wanted to talk about in his therapy session with me was how flat he felt the next day. The sex was good, he was clear on that. And still his baseline returned, except this time it landed harder.
For an hour the attention had made him feel that he mattered. And it did make him feel that way, but only for a short period because being wanted and being valued are not the same thing.
Unfiltered Clarity is a weekly essay for gay men
who want the pattern named, not softened.
Attention happens in the moment. It’s instantaneous. Value is different. It’s a claim about the future. It says I want more of this, next week, and the week after that.
Our nervous systems often read both as the same thing. Being wanted for a night and being wanted for a life can produce a similar chemical hit, so the mind fills in the gap and files the first one under the second.
This confusion doesn’t disappear once you’re in a relationship. In some ways, it becomes easier to miss.
This is especially true for gay men who are in a relationship that should feel safe, yet somehow it doesn’t. Letting someone in and telling them who you are isn’t easy. Letting yourself experience the slow kind of intimacy, the kind where another man gets to know you over months of dinners and small arguments, feels too vulnerable to even contemplate.
Feeling wanted by another man, even if it is brief or anonymous, is usually the first proof some of us got that we existed to anyone. It arrived with little or no conversation attached. In a bathroom. A message on an app. You could experience the whole thing in silence. Nothing about you had to survive beyond the moment.
I had a client, a composite of a few men I’ve worked with over the years, who grew up in a house where no one commented on him at all.
When I asked him to name something good his parents had said to him, he couldn’t. What he could describe was the first time a man on a train held his eye contact a second too long. He was sixteen. Nothing happened. He told me that he felt more visible in that one moment than he ever did living at home for eighteen years.
Experiences like these are examples of how easy it can be to mistake desire for love. For this client, desire was the first thing that made him feel seen.
We develop this habit early. Unknowingly. Sexual attention becomes the thing that makes us feel wanted. After a while, we start to treat this attention as the only real measure of our worth.
At twenty-four, mistaking attention for genuine interest costs you a rough morning and checking your phone too many times. Things start to change and affect you differently later on, when you’re more settled, in a relationship, still using sexual attention to measure your value.
I recall working with a couple for a stretch. Together for six years, one of them kept track of how often his partner initiated sex.
When the sex slowed down for a few months, ordinary reasons, a stressful job, a dying dog, he became convinced the relationship was ending.
His partner was still calling him at lunch. Still remembered his mother’s chemo schedule better than he did. None of that registered as proof of how much his partner loved him.
Here was a man, who was six years into a committed relationship and still measuring his value in the same way he’d used at nineteen with strangers.
I’ve worked with men who can remember how they felt when a stranger reacted positively to their body six months prior but struggle to remember what their partner said the previous week. They continue to measure closeness as when they were in their twenties, when sexual attention felt like connection.
Being valued feels different. It develops over time. It’s when a friend remembers you don’t like a restaurant and books somewhere else without telling you. When a partner sees you stressed, unshaven, tired, but still books that weekend getaway you go to each year.
Value develops when those moments like these keep showing up without the “rush.” Like when a promise is kept, a Tuesday is just an ordinary Tuesday, and having a conversation where nothing felt like you needed to perform.
You experience value not when someone wants you tonight. Most people can want another person tonight, given the right room and, perhaps, enough to drink. The question worth asking is who keeps choosing you once there’s nothing left to perform.
Have the sex. Enjoy being wanted while you experience it. Just remember to keep the two separate in your head.
One arrives in a moment. Wanted. The other takes time to prove itself, when the excitement is gone and you’re just another person in the room. Value.
Kevin stopped waiting on a morning text to tell him his worth. He started paying attention to who was still there three months later, asking nothing of him except that he keep showing up as himself.
It takes longer to trust that kind of proof. This kind of proof doesn’t disappear by lunchtime.
I’d love to know what you think. Do you remember when you realized you’d been measuring value with attention?
Until next week,
Gino x
Gino Cosme is a gay therapist offering professional support to clients across the UK and Europe, and coaching for clients in the US and Canada. More at psycosme.com.
Unfiltered Clarity is a weekly essay for gay men
who want the pattern named, not softened.
All examples in this piece are composites drawn from patterns observed across therapeutic work with gay men. Details have been altered to protect confidentiality. No single story represents an individual person.
This newsletter is for educational and informational purposes only. It does not replace therapy, diagnose, treat, or prevent any condition.
This article is making me wonder what I want vs what I value. Not just what people want from, or value in me. Most of my life I wasn't allowed to want what I wanted and was required to value things that I no longer see the need for.
OMG. I feel like Prince Henry (RWRB) when he talked about not being interested in the people he dated and not being able to have the people he valued.
It’s difficult to get out of the spiral of validation. It takes a lot of self-development as to your own worth, I’ve been there plenty. And it’s a continuous journey. Totally agree too, that noticing the ‘smaller’ or the more ‘mundane’ as acts of love is the evidence that you’re progressing.
Great read, Gino!