By your standard you would have to know yourself perfectly, share everything from your entire life and have no secrets whatsoever just to be a friend. That high standard sounds extremely isolating to me. Idealistic but naive.
thanks for your post and sharing how you feel, but I think this particular statement is a bit unfair and exaggerated based on what I wrote. I never meant that you can't keep anything private to yourself. There's plenty that I keep private. I was specifically referring to not sharing your sexuality with your sexual partner. This is a more specific issue. Since sexual intimacy is what you share with one another, how can that intimacy be established if you're not honest about your sexuality?
But you have answered that you can establish that intimacy anyway. I suppose it could be a difference in temperament. I also think it may be more common in heterosexual relationships too to not understand everything about each other sexually. As someone who's had strictly homosexual relationships (or at least for the past fifteen years or so), I've never had to experience that.
Like I remember one of my straight friends opening up to me about how he was living in a small trailer with his girlfriend and he was terrified that she would catch him masturbating which would "devastate" him. They had been together for five years at this point. It absolutely baffled and confused me that his girlfriend of five years had never seen him masturbate and that it would hurt him so if he was caught. I would assume his girlfriend would be the person he'd be most comfortable with to catch him masturbating. I wound up asking more straight people about this issue and it was way more common than I ever could have imagined.
Just speaking for myself, I don't understand what the point would be of even having a sexual relationship with someone if you're not comfortable with them sexually. I thought finding someone who you're comfortable with sexually is the point of having a partner in the first place. But it's clear that I have my own preferences and definitions of comfort that others may not share. However, I don't think that's a naively high standard at all, I think it's perfectly reasonable, even if it's not for everyone.