At first I stayed away from him. I went back to college for a year and obsessed about how much I wanted this to be something important even though there was nothing happening. Finally, I got so obsessive about it that I started fantasizing about kidnapping him. It was not something real, and I didn't think I'd ever do it, but it was still quite an upsetting kind of obsession to have. It seemed to be overtaking my esthetic life in a way that I definitely didn't appreciate. Every spare moment I'd be planning this little secret fantasy of spiriting him off to the Canadian back woods in a stolen car. But eventually I broke through my own barrier against dealing with him and called him up and asked if I could see him. It turned out that he had found a lover, but we decided that we could take walks in the park.

That one phone call completely broke through all the obsessions I had about wanting something important to happen between us, because now I could actually deal with him, I was actually dealing with reality. I didn't mind at all that he had a lover, but Paul decided that I was ready to embrace what we would now call a three-dimensional involvement, and I went along with it because I couldn't stand the thought of turning back now. Since it turned out that his relationship with Gerry was basically over anyway, within a few weeks I was living with him.

Entering Paul's life completely lifted my obsessive burdens, but I still didn't feel homosexual. Paul said that in psychoanalysis it was always the repressed homosexual feelings that were the hardest to uncover, and he reassured me with this story about a male pigeon he once saw that had its tail feather pulled out and started submitting to other males. He said that since everybody was latently homosexual, all you needed was to have your tail feather pulled out. It took me years to find out I wasn't a pigeon!

But eventually very simple, small-scale, healthy mechanisms that were largely esthetic arose from nowhere -- like the vine falling on a man trapped in quicksand that lets him climb out and rescue himself. It was this esthetic life that reduced to a manageable level both my hysteria about feeling I had no say in what was going on around me and the anxiety attacks and bouts of depression that Paul was suffering from. We could now just simply enjoy a meal or learn how to enjoy watching stupid television shows. He would watch game shows and make nasty cracks at the contestants, and I would laugh hysterically and act like this was the funniest thing in the world. And for a moment in time, it was. We learned to enjoy one another, to goof off when nobody was looking. My dominance grew not because I was controlling his life, but because I was learning how to feel my own purposes in life and my own needs independently of whether it would please him.

Another false start was that he wanted me to just completely retire from the world and rewrite his books. He'd say, "Dean, you're the only person who can explain my ideas in a way that people will understand them. You're not coming from a dense theoretical background and you're just starting out in life. You're the first person who will be trained to see life in this new way. The very tissues of your brain will be saturated with this new way of looking at human nature." He said I would be like an Arthur Koestler or an Alan Watts, someone who interpreted the times for the general educated public but who was not necessarily an original thinker himself. I'd write a dozen books and maybe win a Nobel prize, and maybe in five hundred years they'd build a monument to our collaboration.

I often wonder how he would have handled a bright sixty-year-old masculine guy who had spent his own life living as creatively and as independently as Paul had. Of course, he never found it, so he had to make do with a few young men who were at most impressed with his intellectual attainments without knowing how to make much personal use of them or having comparable moral attainments for him to idealize. And that pattern left the door open for a certain self-indulgence to take root in his personality about what he could put over on us. He did lighten up over time, but there was always a little of that overbearing know-it-all quality in Paul. It took awhile before I got wise enough to peek behind the curtain and see that this wizard was just a kind-hearted guy bellowing into a microphone.

I remember at the time when I asked you why you had broken up with him, you said very bluntly, "Well, he was too aggressive." One of his classic formulas is that masculines have the power to stop being obsessive but they don't know when they're in that state, while feminines know when they're being compulsive only they don't have the power to stop. He just didn't know how to stop being a 500-pound gorilla sometimes. And nowadays I'm pretty sure that at a lot of his emotional volatility was due to undiagnosed cerebral arteriosclerosis as well.

In our first year together, after we'd been through a number of flare-ups, he said to me that he needed somebody to "sit on him" -- that was the phrase he would use -- someone I guess to just put up a stop light and say, "Ok, that's enough, make my dinner!" I tried, and sometimes it worked. But I didn't really know what masculine firmness was. I thought it was like nastiness, so sometimes I would just be nasty in a kind of effeminate way towards him. And he would shake his head sadly and say, "No, that's not it. If you want to talk like that to me then I'll start fucking you instead of you fucking me."

It took years for me to figure out how to be firm enough to get my way more than once in a while. But I also figured out that my having the role of policeman in his life was not the most creative role for me to have. It certainly didn't help to develop other aspects of my personality, like sensitivity to the subtleties of my own growth. I need to feel a simple security to respond to the attractiveness of gay men, for example, but fighting these battles left me cold and hateful even when I thought I'd won my point.

I moved out after eight years because I felt living in his apartment was still a victimizing experience in some way. But we were friends and we stayed together like a family. I don't believe that shared misery is a necessary foundation for important relationships, but our capacity for sticking with difficult situations stood us in good stead as the years went by. We found that we had developed a shared vocabulary to discuss the world that made it easier for us to communicate with one another than he could with some other people. I think also that we had in common a devotion to a big picture of what life is about, a sense of greatness, a sense of wanting to leave something behind that is astoundingly important, of staying true to your ambitions and following through and giving something more than lip service. He always used to tell me, even when we were not getting along and couldn't communicate about our problems, that he was grateful that we always shared this loyalty to greatness or bigness or the importance of having big goals. That was something that kept us together.

Well, if I sometimes think of Jung, for instance, whose answer to theology was to say, "I don't need to believe in God," I think of that as an example of truth. The only thing I'm really aware of with Freud is that he was the first one to really make scientific the process of human understanding. Maybe he wasn't the first one, but he was the first one to really concentrate on it and make it something that was helpful to us.

I think that in the next phase of the Center the masculines are going to have to take on more responsibility for showing what masculinity is all about. What we express can serve as a working model of right just as what the feminines express has been the working model of truth. It's simply our job. It can't come out of feminines writing books about what the word "right" means to them. It has to come out of us setting an example, of living it, of discovering it in ourselves.