When Chemistry Feels Like a Warning Sign
Why some gay men confuse unpredictability, distance and emotional tension with attraction.
Often, chemistry is the holy grail when it comes to dating. There appears to be an expectation that within the first, second, or third date, a magical spark will erupt, indicating that this is the person. Yet I often see that the absence of the spark is usually a way out of dating someone who, on paper, seems promising.
I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve heard a version of “He’s good on paper, but there were no sparks.”
What follows are examples of how this plays out amongst gay men.
The Text That Arrives Late
You’ve heard it before. Why hasn’t he texted me back? Or that constant behavior of keeping to look at your mobile phone for a text from the person you went on a date with.
When no text comes, adrenaline and cortisol increase. These are stress hormones, and they shoot up. We come up with different versions of why the person doesn’t like us anymore or what we did badly on our date. The self-sabotage is a way of dealing with this unpredictability.
When the text arrives, the opposite happens: dopamine goes up. Emotional unpredictability (panic) turns into desire (relief). This is experienced as a magnetic attraction, where as it’s really a stress cycle mistaking the threat of abandonment for the thrill of desire.
A client in his early thirties told me he keeps time (yes, with a watch) of how long he waits before checking his phone. Fifteen minutes if it’s someone new. Two hours if he wants to seem unbothered. He knows the math doesn’t mean anything but he does it anyway.
Dismissing Men With Emotional Awareness
We all have a friend or someone we know that does this. They go on two to three dates with somebody who communicates well, has empathy, has a great emotional vocabulary, and is an all-round nice guy. Then they lose interest, concluding that there was no spark.
Mystery becomes a familiar ground, with emotional ambiguity and sense of possible rejection mirroring experiences growing up.
This can be described as a flat or unexciting person. A gay man who grew up witnessing his parents in a constant state of conflict. The mother who often walked out on arguments. The child who wondered whether his father loved him, never receiving the attention and affection he wanted from his father. These become the bedrock of how we start to see relationships when you grow up with mystery instead of red flags.
Then there are men who are noncommittal or emotionally guarded. Here sits a known recognition of emotional unavailability. This distance gets confused with intimacy, and we explain this to ourselves by intellectualizing and romanticizing what’s going on. We start seeing this person as a complex person, with “depth”. Instead, this is a subconscious quest to find love from someone who withholds it. A childhood need for validation, and not receiving it when things are peaceful.
Some men are in long-term relationships, stable and have no major issues. Things are going well. Except, they don’t feel that way. They experience being hyper-aroused and feeling unsafe in the silence. They constantly think that this is the “calm before the storm.” Where they actually need to break the peace so things feel familiar. It can be nitpicking, or micro-arguments, or it can be analyzing the smallest shift in their partner’s voice. Anything to get to the experience of increased adrenaline returning to a high-stress state.
I worked with a couple who had been together for one year. One partner started picking fights over the smallest of things. The kind of arguments where complaining about dish soap had nothing to do with dish soap. We all know the kind.
He, like many other partners I see, told me later he felt scared when things were okay between them with nothing going wrong. Nothing going wrong meant nothing good in his house growing up.
Feeling Horny When He’s Emotional Distant
Sex and libido have a way of being reactive to the state of a romantic relationship. When a partner pulls away or is emotionally absent, libido increases. The person feels sexually excited to be intimate with his partner, only to feel rejection from a lack of interest.
When sexual desire is high in the partner, sexual desire comes down. Sexual desire decreases when the partner is vulnerable, more affectionate, and perhaps needy. Here we use sex to disconnect from the partner.
A client once described how he wanted his husband most when his husband was working late or traveling on business. When the husband came home from work early or sat close, he found reasons of being the first to go to bed.
Post-Breakup Obsessions
Breakups are difficult, but what is harder is not being able to let go of a short-term, volatile fling. Three-month relationships seem to leave a bigger scar than a three-year relationship.
Some gay men spend months analyzing what went wrong before the breakup, mimicking hypervigilance and rejections. Questions like: what happened? Was I a mistake? Did I ask too much? The perfect playground for the inner critic to have its say.
I recall a man who, after a 10-week relationship, spent four months checking his ex’s Instagram stories every morning. A previous relationship that lasted six years was easier for him to let go of. Ten weeks, with someone unpredictable, took four months to move on.
Many of the things that I’ve discussed here form part of a psychological pattern: not being attracted to stable, emotionally available partners, and where partners who are predictable are seen as being boring or lacking sexual energy.
The holy grail of dating actually has nothing to do with chemistry and sparks. It has to do with how we have come to see relationship patterns created through our formative experiences, both early and later in life.
The question worth asking when it comes to dating and romantic relationships is often less about the other person having a spark and more to do with what’s going on with us or what’s playing out on our side.
This then lands on the question worth asking oneself in any situation, “What am I responding to when I call something chemistry?”
Until next week,
Gino x
Gino Cosme is a gay therapist writing for gay men who are done performing. New essays are always free. Paid subscriptions hold the archive open and keep the work independent.
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.