“The guy is mixed up,” confirms the sixty-year-old in the eternal search for a “blonde”, recently met in front of a filter coffee, in a grocery store in Sainte-Agathe. “He scraped some, relationships, because of that,” he says, “that” being what he calls his “compulsions.”

Shaved head, face just as much, Denis arrives at our interview with several pages of printed notes. He is as prepared as he is stressed. And it seems.

His discovery of sexuality? Late, replies the man, raised in a Catholic family and rather practicing. “I wanted a blonde,” he recalls. But I didn’t bite. It was not obvious. And that’s kind of the story of his life.

Parenthesis: Around 12 years old, “something” happened between him and another boy. It was a “game”. And no, the adventure does not challenge him, in terms of orientation. He does not budge: “I try to have blondes, but it does not work. »

It must be said that even at CEGEP, it is always dead calm. But then one drunken night, after a party, her brother-in-law, a Jehovah’s Witness, gives her an unusual invitation: “Why don’t you study the Bible with me?” »

Denis accepts, always with the aim of finding “a good girl” there, he justifies. He’s 17 or 18 years old. “You’re fragile at that age…”

In the “Witnesses”, as he says, he makes a nice circle of friends, but above all and finally a girlfriend. “We were going door to door together. They hold hands, but that is where their closeness ends. “Not allowed to do it before marriage,” he recalls. Yes, it’s “suffering”: “I was masturbating, we weren’t really supposed to […], but at some point…”

Still, the young man is not at the end of his troubles: his girlfriend, a few days before their engagement, leaves him. She’s not ready to have “relationships.” “I thought about suicide,” says Denis. She was the love of my life…”

In the months that followed, “frustrated”, he went to a first strip club. He is 20 years old.

And then he meets a second girl, still with the “Witnesses”, whom he ends up marrying, in his mid-twenties. And then ? Let’s say that the wedding night is not exactly as expected. “It didn’t go well. She said I was hurting her…”

Their sexuality therefore begins in pain, and quasi-abstinence. “We made love every 3-4 months…”

It was at this time that Denis turned to massage parlors. “My only way to get anything was this…” He’s got the “hormones all over the place” and he knows it: “it’s got to be.” This is also where he receives his very first blowjob. “That’s it, you’ve known paradise,” even said the masseuse.

We’ll spare you the details, but despite the remorse, the secrets to his wife, he returns to it repeatedly, multiplies the experiences (“I even caught a chlamydia”) and eventually ends up being excluded from his congregation.

He is 30 years old, and suddenly, Denis loses all his social circle. We kind of lose track (“we could write a book, that’s no joke!”), but long story short, let’s say after a new affair with a “friend” with whom “stuff happens” , Denis meets a woman with whom he finally lives a few memorable nights. It’s a first. “She gave me more sexuality than my wife in five years. […] I felt appreciated, and it gave me confidence in myself. »

As proof, Denis later becomes a blonde (a few months), then another (three years). But despite his marital bliss and “at-home” sexuality, he can’t help it: he goes back to get “massage.” And he doesn’t understand himself. “I always believed that my compulsion was because I didn’t have sex at home. Well, that was fine, but I went to the massage parlor anyway! Why this “sabotage”?, he asks.

He ends up consulting and that’s where a sex therapist puts his finger on his “addiction” and his “compulsions”. The verdict frightens his wife at the time, who leaves him just as dry. “I just scrapped my relationship…”, laments Denis.

That’s not all. At the same time, he went bankrupt. In short, “it’s not going well”. What does Dennis do? He goes back for a massage, but this time by a man.

“But I would never fall in love with a man, specifies our interlocutor here. In my head, it’s very clear. It’s a compulsion. Like an alcoholic. It gets me a high, then I regret it. »

Denis is 40 years old and he multiplies the meetings with men. “I’m not gay, that’s for sure, I like women too much,” he clarifies again. Still, men turn her on. Bisexual, perhaps? “It’s out of the question in my head to think about it,” he replies. And then, we didn’t talk about that too much at the time. ” It was 20 years ago.

Above all, he still has this same goal: “to be with a woman”.

Ten years ago, Denis falls in love with an escort. He pays for her groceries, takes her kids to the water slides. “I didn’t see it as prostitution,” he said. Except that over time and the pandemic, Madame ended up cutting ties. From ? “I have the female dog to meet. I don’t know where to go anymore, he drops. I don’t trust myself anymore…”

He forgets bits of it, then changes his mind. “Ah! yes, in March, I saw a guy. But that’s just “bestial,” he clarifies. “There is a gap that is there…”

And he still keeps hoping, “At some point, there’s one that it’s going to click with, and maybe if I’m happy and it’s going well with her, it’s going to cut me off. ‘a man ? That would be my ideal. But does the ideal exist? Denis asks the question, then storms off into the parking lot.