Blackpool FC’s Jake Daniels, 18, has revealed he’s met his ‘soulmate’ after coming out as gay, saying he met his 46-year-old partner on Instagram.
The man, who is definitely NOT named Philip Schofield, slid into teenager Jake’s DMs after he became the first UK male footballer to come out as gay since John Fashanu in 1990.
Previously, Jake had wanted to wait until retirement to come out, but now says it’s the best thing he ever did:
“Since I’ve come out to my family, my club and my teammates, that period of overthinking everything and the stress it created has gone. It was impacting my mental health. Now I am just confident and happy to be myself finally.”
He added that he knew he was gay since the age of five or six, but feared his sexuality wasn’t compatible with his dream of becoming a professional footballer.
This week, he’s spoken to Rylan Clark on BBC’s How To Be A Man about how happy he is to be in a relationship with ‘Mark’, who is 28 years his senior:
“I came out and had my Instagram, my Twitter taken off me.
So I didn’t see anything. I think when I had my Instagram back I had 20,000 message requests or something ridiculous like that, I’d never seen that in my life.
There was one day, I was about to get on a train and I went on my message requests just to have a gander and the top message was from my [now] partner, just congratulating me.
I had a sneaky look on his Instagram and I was like, ‘Alright!’ Dropped a message back and said ‘Thank you so much’ – and at the end asked something like ‘Is there anything else I can do for you?’ I knew what my motive was!
We got chatting from then, we FaceTimed a few times, met up a few days later in Blackpool and we’ve been together ever since.”
He added that Mark was ‘definitely’ his ‘soulmate’, saying he ‘couldn’t be any more happy’.
Now obviously there’s an elephant in the room here and that’s a 46-year-old man sliding into the DMs of an 18-year-old lad who just came out as gay. All 100% legal of course, but does that make it OK? After all, you can imagine the uproar if a nearly 50-year-old man had been found to be chasing an 18-year-old girl. Can we at least check this Mark’s hard-drive before giving our blessing to the happy couple?
For now I think we’ll give them the benefit of the doubt as Jake seems like a mature guy with a good head on his shoulders and solid support system around him, so if he says he’s found a soulmate old enough to be his dad on Instagram, who are we to argue? Best of luck, fellas!
For the time superstar DJ Diplo said he likes to get blown my men but doesn’t consider it ‘gay’, click HERE.
