Germany Diary 2018: Dating a Man 16 Years My Senior
By: Liam Heitmann-Ryce
Tags: Relationships, Travel, LGBTQ, Dating, Creative Non Fiction

Germany Diary 2018: Dating a Man 16 Years My Senior

Love and life in Deutschland

Little 21-year-old Liam [Image courtesy of Vera Drewke]

Notes from our first date — Köln, June 17th, 2018

Stefan is a bit shorter than me, with glossy brown hair and incredible light brown eyes: amber-coloured with small fragments of duck-egg blue scattered around the pupil. They glitter when he looks into the sunlight, and his eyes wrinkle when he speaks because he is always grinning. He does laugh a lot, and he makes for very easy company as a result; his speech invites laughter, for he laughs at much at his own successful, lame jokes as he does at the person he has shared them with.

I met Stefan outside a DM store by the Rudolfplatz tram stop at 1pm — and said goodbye at 21:30, so eight-and-a-half hours very quickly and amusingly passed by. I was heartened by the discovery that he is a fan of science fiction, noting his delighted gasp of recognition as I removed my copy of 2001: A Space Odyssey from my bag while looking for a water bottle. We also discussed Spielberg’s criminally ignored masterwork A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (2001) as we watched Germany play against Mexico in the soccer World Cup on a huge outdoor TV screen on Zulpicherstraße.

We continued our big screen experience in his apartment, watching An Audience with Joan Rivers through a home-cinema projector. It was one of the more random things to watch on a first date but I am deep into an baffling Joan Rivers obsession at the moment. Stefan is old enough to remember her legacy as it had unfolded in real time, so he was amused, if somewhat baffled, by my decision to project this onto his loungeroom wall.

It was as he lay between my legs, while I ran my fingers through his hair, that Stefan told me I had been a lovely surprise, as he hadn’t known what to expect from an abruptly arranged date with a 21-year-old he’d met on Grindr only one evening prior. We have agreed to see one another again next week, and I really hope we do.

June 19th, 2018

I have enjoyed the bubble of hope Stefan has offered me lately — it sounds very melodramatic, and pre-emptive, but the thought of him is really making me want to stay here. It has been quite lonely here at times, particularly due to the language barrier, and I am very much besotted by the thought of him, often relaying within my mind the expression “livin’ for the weekend,” as this is when we will next see each other.

I have a tremendous amount of anticipation for “Date #2,” having christened it as such when talking to Mum over WhatsApp tonight (she is in the middle of packing for her flight here tomorrow!), because Stefan seems especially… genuine, whatever I mean by that. He just seems very good-intentioned, in that he is interested in my own interests in film and photography, and he makes me feel as though I am an attractive personality. That I am worth sticking with.

Of course, there is a mutual physical attraction between us — I love the lines around his eyes, which are never more than a few words away from crinkling. He is rather a lot like Christopher Isherwood, who punctuated the end of every sentence with a thoughtful pause and a flash of grin, that flicker of gold that made his speech shine.

But I don’t want to accelerate all this, and spoil it, by having sex with him.

I want to touch him, and I want him to touch me, but I am going to tell him that I have serious thoughts about the two of us being together while I am here in Köln (ha! aren’t these grand designs I have in my little head after just a single date! How bright and ecstatic the honeymoon, good grief!) I know sex can complicate things — or, indeed, sabotage them — and so I want to see if I am really engaged with Stefan in a capacity beyond mere lust. I want to do the American thing of abstaining until the third date before we ‘do the deed,’ so I can at least ascertain how I feel about the two of us.

We did share a kiss in his apartment on Sunday, though. He was pouring two glasses of white wine and I came up behind him, resting my chin on his left shoulder; he turned around, looking up at me with a big squinting smile… but I did not make much of this. I held my face close to his, our noses touching. A quick kiss, barely any tongue. How chaste of me.

Having told her about Stefan, Mum says she would love to meet him when we watch Germany play on the big outdoor screens in Rathenauplatz. This is a relief as I did wonder how Mum and Jonas would take to the situation, particularly given the 16-year age gap between the two of us.

Hm.

Strolling around Otto-Maigler-See [Image courtesy of the author]

But I imagine Stefan will make a good impression on them, based on how stupendously friendly he was to the confused old woman who approached us outside the Lebanese restaurant we went to recently: he was like an air steward, pointing out to her the items we had ordered and what he would personally recommend, gracing his speech with a cheerfully polite intonation and immense interest in the topic being discussed.

All the same, I assured Stefan the soccer game wouldn’t be a meet-the-parents venture, and he texted back, “Right now i wanna enjoy some time with you,” which I was really delighted by! I am increasingly hopeful against the likelihood of his ghosting me — I think he is really interested in spending time with me. I said I would also like to spend more time with him, so that we can get to know each other better, and he responded, “Good. Just would love to take you home with me afterwards. Or would that be weird?”

I assured him of Mum’s unshakeable tolerance of my nocturnal proclivities.

June 26th, 2018

I visited a nice apartment in the centre of town today (located right on Zulpicherstraße, not even five minutes from my office) and saw the room I could potentially move into from the start of August. It’s very spacious, with cool white paint and sleek colourless furniture; it even has its own little breakfast balcony where I can sit with a beer and a book in the evenings. The view is nothing special — the tops of other apartments and a small Biergarten, surrounded by lots of pubs and restaurants — but I still like the idea of sitting outside to eat and read.

The room is also just a two minutes’ walk down the road from Stefan’s apartment, should we still be seeing each other by August… We are having dinner at his place on Wednesday, as we apparently need to talk over exactly what it is we want out of this relationship. This follows from the conversation we had on the weekend, sitting on a bench at the big lake he drove us to, just outside of the city. I had talked about my visits to the gay bars on Schaafenstraße before I met him, as well as my other gay escapades in Australia over the past couple years, and said that I was interested in checking out some of the gay saunas around Belgisches Viertel. These comments put the idea in his head that I wanted to continue fucking around, getting something on the side...

I sent him a text that evening, asking if he wanted to talk any more about it, and he responded,

Sure, I definitely planned to talk to you about it. Just want to figure out what it is that annoys me about the idea right now.

“You said we need to reach a fair understanding of how we we are going to behave with one another,” I wrote back, “and I fully intend to be open and honest with you.”

I really do enjoy spending time with Stefan and I like how much he smiles and the silly ‘shop voice’ he uses when ordering things in German and I like the small shards of blue around his pupils, and I like how much he touches my arms and shoulders and I like that he makes me feel special. He works so hard in his career and I don’t want his scant amount of free time to be wasted on someone he can’t trust. My fear is that he will conclude that I am just Frischfleisch here on holiday, out to have a good time, that this is nothing serious and that I’m not worth the drama.

I need to be very careful with what I say on Wednesday. I want to give him reasons to stay with me.