Also, I have a gay brother, and I have been close with many of his friends over the decades. The one thing that has always struck me is that they don’t really “bond” like male-females do. They are more like good friends who are roommates who have sex with each other. I’ll give a few examples. First, gay couples (at least, gay male couples) very, very often have multiple sexual partners. Orgies (and drugs) are common in gay culture. A lifelong, monogamous bond is very rare. Second, when gay men “get married” they almost never pool their resources fully the way that male-female couples do. If one comes into the relationship with a lot of money and the other with none, you can bet that the large sum of money is going to stay in an account in the rich guy’s name. But husbands routinely hand everything over to their wives and treat it as “community” property. People can disagree with me on these things, but I’ve seen them again and again and again over several decades with my brother’s friends. I know I am right. There is a very different and less bonded, less profound “feel” to a gay male relationship than to your typical male-female marriage. Third, when gay men get sick, of AIDS for example, their party boy friends disappear within a few months. The people you will find at their bedsides are their mothers, their sisters, their female friends, and occasionally a father, brother, or good male friend or two. That has been my experience. Lots of gay men can vouch for me on this one, but unfortunately they are all dead. The living gay men probably don’t want to acknowledge that this is true and that they are surrounded by so much temporary “loyalty.” A life lived without women is not much of a life.

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SH, your dilemma of wanting to show Christian love to people living in that lifestyle and yet making a stand for what our faith states is a real dilemma many Christians face. It is easy to jump to conclusions or to judge and condemn homosexuals or those living that lifestyle, when we need to remember too that heterosexuals are about as knee-deep in sins like fornication, sexual promiscuity and so on, and also, deep down inside, what homosexuals search for like all of us regardless of orientation is a need for meaningful relationship. Without meaningful relationship, all humans–homosexual, heterosexual, bisexual or whatever–are bound to fail in the way they understand themselves and their purpose in relation to God and the church too.

A few of my best friends are gay and live the homosexual lifestyle. Granted that some of them do not make the best of choices and enter relationships based more on the need to satiate sexual yearnings, with the element of the “utility” of human bodies thrown in(my best friend himself gets attracted to muscular men who are like himself, an alpha-male by American standards), I think that deep down inside, there is really an emptiness sitting in within the homosexual lifestyle, and it starts very much with the need for meaningful relationships of a platonic nature with the same sex for them. If many of them had been loved unconditionally regardless and despite of their sexuality, and loved for the image of God which still resides in them, then perhaps we as Christians would not have driven them away from the church and from Biblical scriptures as well, but would have admonished them in a way to come to seek healing in Christ.

My prayers for strength and guidance for all people like you.

There have always been men and women who never married; either by personal choice – or not. The terms: old maid, spinster, and perpetual-bachelor come to mind.

Many have the desire to marry, but aren’t able to because of physical, mental, and/or emotional disabilities, and/or physical deformities.