Tonight Ex and I are finally fighting. I say "finally" because after days of feeling my own anger mounting, this feels like a release, a necessary but painful release.

Tonight was about statements, not questions. It began as (yet) an(other) earnest attempt to grapple with my confusion about the breakup. I'd been chatting with my sister on the computer while Ex was out shopping for a sofa bed and pricing out refrigerators for whichever of us ends up moving. She said, "it's a shame [Ex] isn't willing to work through this with you."

Previously my sister and I had been chatting about SSRIs. Both of us are prone to depression and severe anxiety; for awhile we were even taking the same dosage of the same drug to control our symptoms. My sister said she had changed medications because the old drug (the one I'm currently taking) killed her libido. My own libido, though not dead, certainly took a hit from the meds. This was one of Ex's biggest complaints: I simply didn't want to have sex as often as he did.

Several years ago I was seeing a therapist who called this "the sex piece" of our relationship. Often I spoke to her about my fear that Ex and I were not having enough sex. I watched Sex and the City just like any other, self-respecting gay man. Surely Samantha Jones had a point: if the sex isn't good (or frequent) enough between two people, something much deeper must be wrong.

My therapist disagreed. She spoke of my relationship with Ex in terms of many pieces, of which "the sex piece" was only one. There was "the friendship piece," "the creative partnership piece," "the trust and communication piece." Ex and I excelled at all of these (at least I thought we did). She never disputed that sex is an important part of a relationship. She did, however, express serious doubts about whether it's the most important piece, especially of a relationship which, by then, had already lasted about seven years.

I still can't claim to understand why Ex feels our relationship is unsalvageable, but I suspect "the sex piece" has something to do with it. If I'm honest with myself (and I really am trying to be), I too can point to our sex life as a problem. I also dislike my financial dependence on Ex (as does he) and recognize that we have as many drastically divergent interests as those we share.

With all of this in mind, I confronted Ex with an idea: why not call this a "trial separation?" I told him I agreed that we each needed our own space; in fact, I know of at least one older gay couple where each man resides his own apartment. Furthermore, I acknowledged that we have many different interests and our sex life could be better. But all is not lost. We still share many of the same passions, and we had one of the best nights of sex in our entire relationship only a few weeks ago. The difference between a "trial separation" and a breakup, I continued, was merely that both partners keep an open mind rather than permanently shutting down any chance of reconnection. Would he be interested in doing this? Would he be willing to keep an open mind?

Nope.

This, my friends, is when the anger inside me began to come to a lid-bursting boil. By the time the lid blew off, I was setting new terms: if you're saying you want a permanent split, then what you're saying is you don't love me, you don't trust me, you see nothing in me any longer that you once valued and that helped bring us together as best friends and lovers in the first place. If that's true, then how can we possibly be friends? If, on the other hand, you're saying that you do still love and trust me, that you want me to be your friend, that so much between us is still precious enough to protect, then why the fuck are you doing this?

Ex started to cry. For the first time in this process, he cried in front of me. Also for the first time, I partially assumed his role. I was the quiet and impenetrable one, unmoved by anything but anger. He shut himself into the bedroom. Twice he opened the door, walked the length of our hallway to the front door, then stopped, turned around, and walked back into the bedroom, shutting the door just forcefully enough to gently rattle the pictures on my wall. I started writing this entry, finally feeling in control again. It may be a painful and destructive form of control, but I needed it desperately. Ex emerged from the bedroom and said he would go out, presumably to dance. I told him to sleep over at a friend's, a fuck-buddy's, anyone's, but not to come back.

Near the end of the argument, as Ex's tears began to flow, I told him exactly what I was thinking: it's good to see you suffer. I know how horrible and deeply unsympathetic this sounds, but simply "getting over it" and "moving on" is not easy, particularly when 12 years of one's life and a good chunk of one's identity and self-esteem are involved.

Sometimes I used to imagine breaking up with Ex, if only to see what else was out there, to explore other possibilities. But this was years ago, when our relationship still had the youthful bloom of a mere five years. Seven years later, the only reason for this breakup that Ex can offer with any consistency is that he's certain better matches are "out there" for both of us. To me this sounds suspiciously like casting about for alternatives to something that might be ragged but is neither dead nor irreparably broken. Tonight I asked what kind of "match" he was looking for. He said someone like me, but also someone more like him. At best, I find this completely confounding - why break up with me so you can find someone else like me? At worst, it's deeply narcissistic. Why does the gay man cross the road? To stare at his own reflection.

If there's one thing I'm beginning to realize, it's that infrequent sex may not be the biggest threat to a long-term relationship. The biggest threat might be knowing too much about the other person, particularly what shames him. Ex always craved validation at the deepest level. He was adopted. His adoptive mother forced him to compete with her own biological daughter for attention and love, and Ex never won. For years before he met me, he sought validation through sex with strangers as well as in a series of short-term relationships that always ended in him being dumped. Many times he's expressed resentment over his college reputation. He was known as a slut, a kind-hearted but indefatigable slut. Tonight as I apologized for my low libido, Ex took umbrage: it wasn't just sex, he insisted. Didn't I remember how for most of this year I refused to compliment his looks? (By this he meant that I didn't compliment him every day, or at least three to four times a week. We had a joke that gradually devolved into a sad parody of itself. The joke came from an episode of The Golden Girls. Blanche - the kind-hearted but indefatigable slut of the show - insisted that her roommates compliment her by saying, "Blanche, no woman in the world has ever looked more beautiful than you do right now, and no woman ever will." Ex, only half-jokingly, would ask me to compliment him this way. Tonight he put an exclamation point on his complaint by reminding me that I didn't even use the line from The Golden Girls anymore.)

I'm in the midst of reading The Velvet Rage. Anyone familiar with Alan Downes' book will see obvious connections between Ex and the book's thesis. According to Downes, nearly all gay men harbor tremendous shame because straight society tells us there is something fundamentally wrong with who we are. Many gay men structure their entire lives around this shame, frequently seeking abnormally high doses of validation to compensate for it and lashing out with abnormal intensity at the slightest signs of invalidation.

Downes' argument may be overly simplistic - the friend who recommended his book to me cautioned that it contains many generalizations which he, himself, resisted - but there may still be some truth to it. Ex doesn't merely insist upon being complimented. Much like Snow White's stepmother, he literally wants to be told he's the most beautiful person in the universe, and no human being nor magic mirror can provide that much validation. There are connections to be made between myself and Downes' thesis as well. For example, were I not in some way chasing validation, I might be writing in a private diary rather than posting on a public blog.

I'm only 60-or-so pages into The Velvet Rage, but I'm wondering if Downes will address what happens when two gay men in a long-term relationship uncover each other's shame and refuse to feed it by providing what Downes calls "false validation" - validation for the inauthentic self that hides from shame rather than the authentic self that acknowledges it. It's true that for many months I refused to pronounce any Golden-Girls-style compliments. I simply couldn't bring myself to repeat a line or even some less contrived version of it to a man who effectively solicited praise of his beauty from everyone - colleagues, students, strangers at gay bars, you name it. Each time I provided a compliment on demand, it felt false. More painfully, it made me feel ugly, as though there weren't enough room in our relationship for two beautiful people. I have no delusions about being handsomer than Ex, but the false praise made me feel worse. I reached a point where I didn't want to compliment Ex at all, not even sincerely.

I withheld. During the course of our relationship, I withheld compliments for the last year or so. Prior to that I withheld sex - not consciously, I think, but because I never saw myself as especially sexual or beautiful, and once I started taking medication I felt even less sexually inclined. But when we did have sex, it could be wonderful, sometimes astonishingly so. And when, unprompted, I saw beauty in Ex's face, in his body, in his eyes, it was a beauty as genuine and overwhelming as any I have ever seen.

I wish he could have these thoughts, could see us as I do. If he did, surely he could imagine some chance of the two of us working though this.