Currently as of today there are over a dozen pages filled with postings of many same sex couples who have had, enjoyed, and continue to enjoy long term relationships. There is no such thing as the word "easy" in a long term relationship because it involves the failings and frailties of people in general.
Many years ago I was at a 70th Anniversary Party for a couple, who while both in their 90's, were still mentally extremely sharp. I asked the husband a very pointed question. That question was: "To what do you attribute your relationship?"
He looked at me with a twinkle in his eye, and gave me the following answer.
"Love, respect, kindness, patience, consideration, understanding, selective deafness, selective blindness, and learning when to keep my mouth shut which is as important as learning when to open it."
I then asked him if in the 70 years together he had ever considered divorce.
His answer to that question was equally interesting, and it was: "Divorce never! Homicide, many times!"
One of the largest things that one finds in the gay community is the near invisibility of long term couples when compared to young singles out sewing their oats in the younger years.
In my lifetime, I was very lucky in having two very special friends who were a gay couple. This couple had been together 11 years when in the final years of the 1980's the first was diagnosed with HIV. The diagnosis came in for the partner about a week later. The first years of their relationship were good, but what really proved the love to me were the hard times that started after their diagnoses. One partner had been an x-marine and was in fact when I came to know him basic centerfold material. Towards the end, he was wracked by the virus and though everything he had once been was totally gone the love between the partners never faltered. The first to leave this world was "Ed". His life partner "John" had been told to start making the arrangements for "Ed" at the end. Remember that this was the first years of the 1990's in Los Angeles. Here he was trying to make funeral arrangements for the ultimate loved one and my friend John was horribly mistreated by multiple funeral homes. One actually told him that they "didn't do fag funerals". It tool a total of 7 funeral homes to find one who actually treated him right. Others would not acknowledge the relationship and wanted "Ed's" x-wife divorced from "Ed" at that time for over 20 years and re-married to another man to make the arrangements because his life-partner and love of over ten years had no legal standing. It had been a horrible day and when it was finally done and over we went back to an Orange County, CA Hospital. At that time, Ed, now down to about 80 pounds, covered with warts on top of warts and Kaposii's lesions was in and out of consciousness. As he drifted off, we were getting ready to leave. Initially John walked out of the room in front of me. As we reached the door, he stopped and abruptly turned me around physically to face his dying life partner. Still holding me he said: "Isn't he the most handsome man you've ever seen?" At that moment, I realized that John did not see Ed as he was at all, what he saw, because of his love for Ed, was the man he had given his life to eleven years before. Ed, by that time, was so disfigured from the weight loss and the wart viruses, he looked like something created by a CGI special effects department in that he was grotesque in appearance to say the least. After Ed's death, John called me as his own health declined. He would call me crying in the early hours of the morning clutching a picture of Ed. Ed died in 1992 and John died four years later on Christmas Eve of 1996.
That event changed my life, and, had it not been for that event, I would not have found my life-partner. It changed everything about my life in meeting people, dating, sex and every other part. I wanted love on the level that John and Ed had. By the final years of the 1990's, I met my future husband and I have only looked back at the two now deceased friends who without knowing it, gave me the greatest gift of all.
Before meeting my life-partner, I had experienced other relationships, and I simply did not have the knowledge to know what I really and honestly wanted. I would say the same of those whom I dated and with which I had attempted relationships.
Looking back twenty years, I would far rather have what I have now than the youth of those years and the parade of variety I had then.
I have learned that the hug and the cup of cocoa in front of a fireplace on a cold snowing winter's night can be just as if not more important than an extended time of complete uncontrolled lust. We still have the lust, but it has just been the shift in priority that made the difference.