Tag: side

Confused, frustrated, angry

Published on by Harpreet ChhachhiaLeave a comment

It began with a sentence that stayed with me long after it was spoken. When I said it had been a month since we had made love, the partner I most desire looked at me and said, almost casually, that I was angry all the time. It wasn’t the first time. Over time, the language had been shifting. I was controlling. I was a perfectionist. Now, apparently, I was angry.

Maybe I am.

But I have begun to wonder if what he calls anger is actually frustration — the kind that comes from being starved of touch while being told you are difficult for wanting it. The kind that builds when you ask, quietly at first, to be held, to be wanted, to be made love to, and the asking itself becomes evidence against you. When longing is recast as a character flaw, something inside you hardens just enough to survive.

I don’t want constant sex. I want closeness. I want to be held at night. I want to feel a body reach for me without having to negotiate for it. I want desire to feel like an offering, not a concession. When those things don’t happen, when tenderness dries up and erotic attention becomes sporadic or withheld, the ache doesn’t disappear. It finds other outlets. I scroll, I watch porn, I masturbate daily — not because I am insatiable, but because something in me is trying to self-soothe what is not being met. And sometimes, lying there afterwards, I find myself asking the question I’m afraid to say out loud: if there are two men in my life, why do I still feel so alone?

In queer spaces, we are often encouraged to name ourselves early and clearly. To know whether we are tops or bottoms or sides, as if desire can be neatly categorised and remain stable across decades. I have moved between these words for years, trying to see which one fits. When I was a teen, I thought I was a bottom because surrender felt right in theory. Then, after I topped and tied bottoming, I didn’t like either experience. So, I thought I was a side because penetration was never central to my wanting. Then, with my last partner, there were moments when I surprised myself entirely, enjoying things I had once assumed were not for me. None of it followed a straight line. None of it stayed consistent. What I once mistook for confusion, I now recognise as responsiveness — to safety, to trust, to care, to timing.

What we rarely acknowledge is how deeply fear shapes desire. How avoidance can masquerade as preference. How wanting closeness without certain acts doesn’t make you less sexual, only more specific. And yet, there is pressure to present a stable, legible version of ourselves — one that partners can rely on, even if our own bodies are quietly asking for something different.

Alongside this uncertainty about sex lives something even more tender. I love being held. I love sleeping with an arm around me, the reassurance of touch in the dark. And yet, the partner I am most sexually drawn to is not the one who holds me at night. That care comes from my older partner, now, the one who steadies my day-to-day life. I sleep between them. Care on one side. Desire on the other. Somewhere in that arrangement, I began adjusting myself instead of asking to be met fully.

Over time, I taught myself how not to want. I stayed awake until exhaustion took over so I wouldn’t lie there missing what wasn’t coming. It’s a quiet grief, learning to dull a need because it feels inconvenient or unwelcome. From the outside, it might look like composure. On the inside, it feels like erasure.

When I confide in men outside this life, they sometimes say things that sound like promises. That they would never let me go untouched. That they would always hold me. I don’t dismiss them, but I don’t cling either. I’ve lived long enough to know how time works. How novelty softens. How desire changes. How even sincerity is no guarantee. So I accept the recognition, if not the reassurance.

All of this leaves me questioning structures I once took for granted. Whether committed relationships are meant to carry everything forever — desire, care, novelty, safety, touch — or whether that expectation itself is what exhausts us. Whether open relationships should be less of a scandal in queer lives and more of an honest response to how desire actually behaves. Whether love and sex are always meant to live in the same body, or whether insisting that they must is an unnecessary cruelty.

I don’t have answers. What I have is a growing refusal to be reduced — to a role, to a label, to an accusation of anger when what I am really expressing is hunger. Hunger for closeness. For tenderness. For being chosen without having to justify the wanting.

If any of this feels familiar, you are not alone. Many of us are renegotiating love quietly, in the middle of the night, teaching ourselves how to sleep, how to wait, how to endure without hardening. Confusion is not failure. It is what happens when we stop performing certainty and start telling the truth.

Sometimes, that is where living actually begins — not in neat resolutions, but in allowing ourselves to feel the full weight of what we want, and refusing to disappear just because it makes others uncomfortable.

Love Languages

Published on by Harpreet ChhachhiaLeave a comment

There’s a peculiar kind of grief in being surrounded by people you love and yet feeling untouched — not emotionally, not intellectually, but physically. For those of us whose love language is physical affection, the need to be held, touched, kissed, cuddled — is not a luxury, it’s a lifeline. Without it, we don’t just feel lonely; we feel withered.

I have always wanted to be held. Not just in fleeting embraces or in transactional foreplay, but in the quiet, steady ways that bodies communicate love — arms around shoulders, limbs entangled in sleep, breath synchronised in the hush of night. I fall asleep best when someone’s hand is atop my body, not in lust but in love. And yet, despite this deep yearning, I find myself in relationships with men who either cannot, or will not, offer that kind of touch.

It’s a cruel mismatch. A man whose language is touch falling in love with men who speak love in acts, or words, or in silence. And when you are six feet tall — tall enough to be imposing — it becomes even harder to fold yourself into someone’s arms and feel held. When the men I love are shorter, smaller, more delicate, they assume I am the one who will wrap them. I must become the blanket, the protector, the pillar. But I ache to collapse into someone too.

So then, there’s how I look. There’s a particular injustice in gay culture — assumptions wrapped in desire. Because I am tall and masculine-presenting, most men assume I’m a “top.” But I am not. Nor am I a “bottom.” I’m a side — someone who doesn’t enjoy penetrative sex but cherishes all the other physical intimacies: the grind, the kiss, the sensuality of skin on skin. And for the longest time, there was no ready vocabulary for all of that. So I get approached by men who want to be topped — who want from me the very thing I don’t find natural to give. They long for the same care and physical affection I do — to be cradled and dominated in a way I cannot perform without a deep dissonance.

And now I find myself in what many might envy or judge — a polyamorous relationship with two men. A throuple. But love doesn’t multiply without friction. One of them is deeply sexual. He identifies as versatile, but prefers anal sex. He tries to meet me halfway, because he loves me. I see that. But still, there is a chasm between my need for slow, non-sexual physicality and his need for release. And try as we might, love doesn’t always stitch the gaps between bodies.

My other partner, meanwhile, doesn’t like touch at all. His love language is acts of service. He’ll run errands for me, cook, fix things, do what needs doing. But in bed, he shrinks from closeness. And it is agonising to be in bed with two men, night after night, and feel untouched. To feel like a satellite in the very centre of love.

People think polyamory solves problems of lack. That if one person can’t give you something, the other will. But life and time touch all forms of love. What if the very thing your soul craves most — to be held, to be touched — becomes absent? And what if the only thing you are left holding is your own longing?

I don’t know if all relationships will end in heartbreak. I hope not. I believe I am loved. And I love them. But love feels incomplete, when your primary language is unheard. When you’re the one always reaching out, and no one ever quite meets your arms halfway.

There’s a wound in this. It bleeds in silence. And it aches most not in rejection, but in the quiet lack of reciprocity. Touch, for some of us, is not foreplay. It is prayer. It is home.

And I wait to be let in.

Am I Gay Enough? The Side Debate and the Pressures of Conformity

Published on by Harpreet ChhachhiaLeave a comment

I’ve been in a loving gay relationship for 25 years. I’ve been attracted to men for as long as I can remember—my first love was Superman when I was five. Yet, here I am, still having to defend my sexuality because I identify as a side. Apparently, for some, that disqualifies me from being “properly” gay. It’s absurd, but it’s also revealing. It shows how much pressure we, as gay men, place on each other to conform—not just to straight norms, but to the rigid sexual roles we’ve constructed within our own community.

Growing up, I knew that straight people expected me to conform to their world. They wanted me to be straight, to marry a woman, to have kids, to blend in. And when that failed, they at least wanted me to be the right kind of gay—either the tragic figure hiding in the closet or the overly sexualised stereotype. But what I didn’t expect was that, even after coming out, I’d have to deal with a different kind of policing—from my own people.

At some point, gay men started mimicking the worst aspects of straight culture, forcing labels on each other: top, bottom, versatile. As if our entire existence boils down to what we do in bed. It’s ironic—our community has fought against being reduced to just sex, yet we’ve turned around and done the same to ourselves. If you don’t fit into these roles, you’re treated as an anomaly, an incomplete gay man. Before I even knew what “side” meant, guys used to tell me I was into “body sex,” and I suppose that’s what they meant—that I preferred intimacy without penetration. But instead of that being just another way to be, it became something that needed justification.

When I first read the Huffington Post article in 2013 about sides, it was a revelation. Until then, I had internalised the idea that maybe I was broken, that I was missing some essential “gay” experience. Because that’s the message that gets drilled into us—not just from straight people but from within the LGBTQ+ community itself. The idea that real sex has to include penetration, that masculinity is tied to what you do in bed, that the spectrum of gay relationships has to mimic the dynamics of straight ones. And if you don’t fit in? You’re sidelined. (Pun fully intended.)

It’s exhausting to navigate a world where both straight and gay people are telling you how to be. Straight society pressures us to assimilate, while gay culture tells us to conform in a different way—be masc, be a top, be a bottom, fit into a category. If you’re anything outside of that, you’re made to feel less valid, less desirable, even less gay. It’s ridiculous. My 25-year relationship with a man, my lifelong attraction to men, my love, my desire—those define my sexuality. Not some arbitrary checklist of sexual acts.

The truth is, being gay isn’t about what you do in bed. It never was. It’s about who you love, who you desire, who you build a life with. And no one—not straight people, not other gay men—gets to tell you that you’re not gay enough.