I can accept polyamory, but I draw the line at...

Bisexuality, non-monogamy, and the weight of expectation.

For some reason — I do not know what that reason could be — Insider, the publication originally known as Business Insider, has been running a lot of personal essays about queerness. They only come across my desk when they mention bisexuality, but my Google alerts have had a swell of Insider personal essays lately. They’re usually… maybe bad is a little harsh but definitely mired in 101 levels of sexuality and identity and whatnot, so generally I ignore them. But I have to admit feeling intrigued by a recent essay by a bi non-binary person whose queer friends apparently got irate when their decision to open their marriage led, not to a flurry of female and non-binary paramours, but dating a new man alongside their husband.

The essay itself is… fine. It weirdly seems to accept the logic that an AFAB non-binary person married to a man is functionally a straight woman — the writer does note that being married to a man made them feel “less queer,” despite the very obvious argument that a non-binary person is always in a queer relationship by virtue of being non-binary — and there’s an uncomfortable bit where they write that when they got a boyfriend, no one stopped to ask if the boyfriend was cis or trans, which… IDK guys, I’d be super uncomfortable if that was the first thing my friends asked me if I started dating a dude.

But the central premise of the piece, this idea that if you are bi and non-monogamous, you are somehow required to have partners of multiple genders lest your bisexuality be called into question, well. That I found compelling enough to write an essay about.

The thing that’s interesting about both bisexuality and polyamory/non-monogamy is that these are labels that point to a possibility and yet get read as a description of an obligation. If you have enough friends who’ve eschewed monogamy, you’ll undoubtedly have some who sheepishly admit they’re more non-monogamous in theory than in practice. Yes, they’ve abandoned the bourgeois shackles of compulsory monogamy, but no, they don’t have the time or energy to actually pursue anyone, and also they haven’t really found anyone they want to make time for anyway? When you are in this situation, it’s easy to feel like a “bad” poly person, one who’s failing to explore the potential set forth by their lifestyle, failing to live life to the fullest, and so on and so forth.

And yet: how fucked up would it be to date and fuck people you’re not super interested in and don’t really have the time or energy for just to check a box on a list, you know? Deciding that you’re not monogamous is simply making a choice about how you want to structure your relationships, about what kinds of relationships and connections are and are not acceptable to pursue with other people. I, personally, reject the framework of monogamy, not necessarily because I’m trying to bang as many people as possible — or even necessarily more than one person! — but because monogamy always seems to lead to discussions about things like “emotional affairs” and “is flirting cheating” and frankly, I would prefer not to be policed like that. And to say that my rejection of monogamy requires me to simultaneously have multiple partners, or to constantly be on the dating circuit, is to insist that my openness to multiple relationships is an obligation to fill a quota, which, yuck.

[A quick aside here: does the “lazy non-monogamist” who only has one partner face different challenges than the person in the eight person polycule? Of course, just like the folks in the “open marriage” who only explore extracurricular activities at parties face different challenges from the triad co-raising kids. Lots of things fall under the umbrella of non-monogamy/polyamory and they’re often different from each other, united only by the decision to eschew the iron clad rules of monogamous expectation.]

You see something similar with bisexuality. I have this joke about how I’m not straight, I’m just unlikeable; it’s not that I’m not attracted to women, it’s that women’s standards are way too high to want to date a total trash pile like me. Is my sexuality invalidated because no one reciprocates my affection? Are all virgins technically aces because they haven’t had sex? If you give it two seconds of thought you can see how bizarre it would be to say that a person couldn’t claim to be straight just because they’d never dated or slept with someone. And yet people with more expansive identities are always expected to be exploring our sexualities to the fullest lest we be accused of being pretenders rather than, uh… just people who want to keep our options open, I guess.

But back to the Insider essay. For whatever it’s worth, I’ve been in non-monogamous setups where I was dating people of multiple genders; I’ve also been in ones where I was only dating men. This wasn’t really a conscious choice, and certainly not a conscious choice to only date men at certain points of my life — to the extent that I’ve ever consciously chosen anything, it was largely prioritizing dating women by setting my dating profiles to women only. But if I was exclusively looking to date women but happened to feel mutual attraction with a man, saying no to that potential connection just felt… kind of self-defeating, you know? To say that I wasn’t “allowed” to date more than one man if I wasn’t dating any women because my bisexuality necessitated some equal balance of gender among partners — it’s just creating arbitrary rules even as the whole point of queerness is ostensibly tossing rules in the trash.

The essay doesn’t really explicitly say that. It hews to the more yawn worthy “yes I’m dating two men but I’m still bi because I’ve dated non-binary people and women in the past and may date them in the future” which, while technically true, still adheres to this belief that bi people must “prove” or somehow justify our bisexuality, that we must tick a bunch of boxes off on a list if we want to “earn” that bisexual badge. Gross. I knew I was bisexual before I’d even been kissed, people. You don’t need to actively do anything to be bi or poly or whatever.

You just need to to be open to a world of possibility.

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