It's funny how as a gay man, your headline resonates with me too. It's a little different because of the underwear-model trope that gay men of a certain age relate to. It's not as applicable now in the age of the Internet, but before you could do an image search on just about anything you wanted, gay adolescents like me often flipped through catalogs to see the only male bodies readily available for viewing – underwear models.

We gay men have our problems with matching. Not only are models unrealistic ideals, but we've built large subcultures centered around attaining and centering physical perfection.

See gay Instagram. 🤣

If you listen carefully, you'll hear a prominent undercurrent of conversation among certain gay men about how the quest for physical perfection deprives them of partners. It's sort of analogous to incel conversations among straight men, except we generally are conscious that we're doing it to ourselves and that we need to fix our culture.

How to fix it is less than obvious given the popularity of "thirst traps" (sexy, often Photoshopped images of preternaturally gorgeous, fit men) and the notion that many hours in the gym every week are needed for good gay social health.

Of course, if you look around, the real world is filled with loving gay couples with ordinary bodies and looks, but sometimes it seems like we make loving matches harder to achieve by imposing impossible ideals upon ourselves.