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Edward Carpenter events and membership of our community can be life-changing and transformative. These pages offer a taste of what our events are like, and several of our members have shared their personal experiences. So, part of my job in couples counseling is to help gay men understand this, and to avoid making direct comparisons to straight relationships all the time some of the time is OK, particularly in confronting double-standards and internalized homophobia.

While this is not necessarily unique to gay men, a big factor can be finding time for sex, when often both partners are busy, high-level executives or professionals who work extraordinarily long hours or have jobs that require frequent travel. Household Chores — Perhaps surprisingly to a non-clinician, the issue of how to equitably and fairly divide the list of common household chores can be frequent topic in conjoint therapy.

While modern straight couples sometimes like to pretend that they are oh-so-liberated, in reality, in many or most cases, the woman is subtly expected to, and ends up doing, the majority of the household chores related to keeping things clean, organized, in good repair, supplied, delivered, monitored, and humming along in a domestic household.

In couples counseling, I generally recommend that a Master List of Required Household Chores be written down, which is exhaustive and comprehensive. Who pays the bills?

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Who does the cleaning? Or, who supervises the cleaning?

Who mows the lawn? Or, who pays the gardener to mow the lawn? Who supervises the gardener? Who changes the light bulbs? Who cooks? Who cleans up? Who grocery shops?

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Who picks up the dry cleaning? Often, making a list and then discussing how to divide it can be a discussion at home, or in session. Gay male relationships where there is a parenting factor involved differ from straight relationships mostly in that same-sex parenting needs extra support. Family — In gay male relationships, the role of one of the male partners in taking care of aging parents can be an issue, similar to straight couples.

Fortunately, for most of the gay couples I have worked with, there have been surprisingly few seriously hostile in-law conflicts.

More often, the son-in-law is treated as a full member of the family, which is a nice thing to be able to say about the current times we live in. Fun — Fortunately, one huge and consistent benefit I have observed in gay male relationships over straight ones is that gay couples consistently demonstrate a youthfulness, playfulness, and sense of fun, especially with peers but also alone with each other. While this is common to affluent gay male couples, even middle class or working class gay couples seem to have an extra sense of discovering fun, creative pastimes.

Men are physically larger than women, so they can go through a lot of alcohol and food at events hence the stories of the first all-gay cruises running out of alcohol on board!

But while Billy and Elijah prided themselves on their quick-witted sass, arguably a defense mechanism to survive the ruthlessness of the city and of their chosen careers, Cary is decidedly demure. By making Cary a working actor, a rather niche slice of life, The Other Two also manages to comment not just on a very specific type of gay man, but also on the way Hollywood mis understands LGBTQ representation. Take high-powered talent agent Pitzi Pyle played with crazed zeal by Kate Berlant. When she brings in Cary for a meeting at her pink-emblazoned office, she all but attacks him with the f-word as soon he shows up: Stunted, perhaps, from having only come out in his senior year of college, Cary is still dealing with a lot of internal struggles about his sexuality.

Matt requires such quotation marks because despite spending his free time watching Survivor reruns and boasting about cleaning his junk ahead of dates with women, he takes any chance he can get to kiss, grope, and at one point, even blow Cary. The crutch that is that kind of crush, unattainable but not quite unimaginable, blunts any actual attempt at healthy intimacy with anyone else.

Tapping into that sort of under-discussed yet all-too-prevalent aspect of the gay community is one of the joys of watching The Other Two. Take a scene from the latest episode where Cary takes Jeremy, a dashing soft-spoken high school teacher Daniel K.