Steven LaChance Blog

It was around 1998. I was dating a man who lived in Columbia, Missouri. He was a tennis player. A handsome man who looked a little like a young Robert Redford. I fell hard for those blue eyes and that chiseled jaw.

At the time I was raising my three children on my own.

On Friday nights after work I would get in the car and drive the two hours to see him. Then early Saturday morning I would turn around and drive back so I could pick up my kids from my mom. It was the only personal time I had that belonged to me. The rest of my life was work and being a father.

I fell pretty hard for him, but even then I knew there was a problem hanging quietly over everything.

We could never fully be together.

In the nineteen nineties courts were still taking children away from gay parents. I had already had one relationship fall apart because of that reality. That man had lived with us as my “roommate,” but he was much more than that.

The relationship ended badly. We got into a large fight over the children and I kicked him out. I remember sitting there afterward, heartbroken, on the phone with my mother while she tried to comfort me. She told me that someday the right one would come along.

So when I began seeing this man in Columbia, I already knew how the story would likely end. I was just holding on to something good for as long as I could.

I had actually decided that I was going to break it off.

But he did it for me.

One Friday I did not make the trip. I had just had surgery for appendicitis and was recovering from having my appendix removed. That night he called me and told me it was over.

Not because he did not love me.

Because he loved me too much.

He said he knew that eventually I would have to choose between him and my children, and that he already knew what my choice would be.

He was right.

I would have chosen my children every single time.

Those were complicated days for gay men. They were even more complicated if you were a single gay father. Every decision carried a seriousness most people never had to think about.

My first responsibility was always to protect my children. That meant being careful about who knew what about my life and sometimes letting go of people I loved.

In the end, my mother was right. Neither of those relationships were right for me or my family. The right one came later, when Rick stepped into my life after my children were grown.

Life has a strange way of working like that. The things that feel like heartbreak at the time sometimes turn out to be the very things that protect the path you are meant to walk.

Sometimes I think about those years when I watch the world changing again.

I hope we never go back to those days.

Back then I remember listening to the song Iris by the Goo Goo Dolls. It spoke to me because it captured exactly how I felt. I just wanted to be able to tell the world who I was. At the time I could not, and it was tearing me apart.

He was my last relationship until Rick.

For many years after that I simply focused on raising my children and building a life that kept them safe. I could not step into anything else until I knew I could truly commit to it.

That did not happen until I was fifty years old.

That is when Rick came into my life.

Now I understand the meaning of true love, and I am glad I waited.