Start your week with sex… or lack thereof. Delve into the jungle of the newly out and single every Monday morning in Sexual Disorientation.

Steering Things in a New Direction. Colorado Mountains, July 2009.

The modern gay romance, and maybe modern romance altogether, rarely begins as do the classic tales with which we’re all familiar. There is no “once upon a time” and, in most states, happily ever afters remain illegal. And yet, when we look beyond the surface of the shallow social scene, we can sometimes find traces of real romance surviving in its evolved modern form.

This is the story of how my twenty-two years of singleness came to an end, and how my myths about dating and romance were taken down with it.

Myth #1: The Online Thing Never Works, except for finding freaks and one-night stands. Despite the fact that this was my long-standing belief, I found myself a few Sundays back searching Connexion, the West’s facebook for homosexuals. It had a tendency to show me pictures of the same men over and over again, and as I logged in that morning I saw a familiar face that I had always found attractive and alluring.

The Boy was unreasonably cute and his profile suggested that he had an intellect and intrigue to go with it. Despite the warnings that wasn’t looking for a relationship, I decided to message him anyway. It began as all messages of this nature do – with me stating that I never do this, but decided to make an exception just this once.

I was surprised when thirty-six hours later – a year in modern homosexual time – I had a message from The Boy in my inbox. It was neither snide and dismissive nor filled with cheesy pick-up lines; it was just a nice email from a nice boy. I found out that he was my age, was a student at a nearby university, and lived just a couple of blocks away.

A few emails and a few days later, we agreed to meet for a drink at a bar between our two apartments.

Myth #2: You Can’t Hook Up On a First Date, at least not if you want there to be a second date. This was something that had always given me trouble. If things were going well with a guy and I felt a real connection, I had a hard time stopping things with just a kiss at the door. In fact, I had always seemed to miss that first kiss one way or the other, with dates either ending with an awkward wave or with both of us in bed. Neither seemed to be a starting point for anything serious.

The Boy seemed even more into speed and passion than I was. While we strolled through downtown after dinner and drinks, he told me that he had once gotten arrested for joyriding in a sports car at double the speed limit – while in a 75 mile-an-hour zone. But when I told him that for me, a one-night stand was too much work and investment for too small a gain, he had seemed to agree.

Before long I had invited him up to my apartment, which led to wine and talking. He was sweet and interesting, and I felt the drinks begin to take their effect. I found myself looking into his eyes and he into mine. And suddenly he leaned over and kissed me, not stopping with a peck. In fact, moments later he had knocked over his wine, though I couldn’t have cared less.

I led him by moonlight down to the bedroom. As he took off my shirt, he whispered, “Just to be clear, this isn’t a one-night stand. Maybe a two or three… hundred.” And somehow, I believed him.

Myth #3: If He Leaves in the Middle of the Night, He’s One of Those Guys. Sometimes he really does just have a stomachache. And he texted me the next morning to tell me so.

What was surprising was that, a few days later, he called me again to make plans. In fact, from that point on, we began to see each other every night. Sometimes we would just stay in and watch a movie, and sometimes we’d go for late-night walks through our always-open neighborhood.

I began to feel as though this one wasn’t running away any time soon, but that still left me with…

Myth #4: I’ll Never Get From Just Dating to Dating. We discussed this on one of our walks, particularly my ineptitude at starting relationships. “I just don’t know how to negotiate that kind of thing,” I said. “I don’t know how to get from sleeping with someone and dating them to having an actual relationship.”

But The Boy was a proponent of clear, honest communication. He had already told me how he valued this in bed, and I had already written a column about it, though I had acted cautiously and not attributed it to him.

One night at my kitchen table he began to open up on the details of his life – about his childhood, his challenges, his goals and ideals. The more he talked, the more I found myself drawn not only to him and his intelligence and his complexity, but also to the idea of honest communication.

So the next night in bed, when he playfully took me in his arms and said, “Mine,” I decided to roll with it. “Am I yours?” I asked. And he said, “Yes.”

But I pressed on. “Speaking of that, I’ve been thinking about it, and I’m not going to see other people. You don’t have to follow suit. But we spend every night together already, and I want to keep it that way.” It was empowering to just be clear and say what I wanted, and quite a shift from my normal policy of neurotic analysis replacing actual communication.

“I already made that decision about you,” he replied, to my great relief and surpirse. “I was seeing someone else before we met, but I ended that.”

“Then we’re each other’s,” I said. And just like that, it was true.

The Biggest Myth of All: I Will Always Be Single had come crashing down for the first time in my life. According to Zack, this is proof of the power of negative thinking. After years in the closet and even more struggling to find my way in the gay dating scene, I had become trapped in the mindset that I would never find someone. Slowly it had become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I could probably spend a good deal of time analyzing this and writing about it and wondering what mistakes I’ve made. But I have a guy I care about, a guy who gets me, a guy who I drove with to the mountains over the weekend, a guy who brings me movies to borrow and extra laundry detergent, a guy who I can picture really being with. And that feeling of excitement and new direction has quelled the disorientation I’ve written about so fervently over the past six months and felt for much of my life before that.

Suddenly I was no longer single, and miles from my old home in a metropolis of three million people, I had finally found one man to help me see things clearly.