It's been three years.

What I've learned in that time.

Three years ago — about three months into a world disrupting pandemic, and right at the end of a month of an entirely virtual celebration of Pride — I found myself crying in my kitchen. I’d been mentally drafting a Twitter thread, I think something about feeling rejected and ostracized in queer spaces, when I stopped myself. The intensity of emotion I felt in that moment, it seemed like it must mean something.

A few moments later, I was tweeting out a wholly different thread than I had expected to write.

That thread — and more than that, the revelation about myself that it represented — changed my life. I had spent years thinking of myself as a “bad bisexual,” sexually attracted to women but romantically available only to men. But now I was reckoning with the possibility that that was my internalized biphobia, and not lack of attraction, that had led me to largely avoid romantic relationships with women. Now I was contending with the idea that it was biphobia, and not my own desire patterns, that had trapped me in this prison of “bad” bisexuality.

And realizing that, well. It was the key moment that helped me understand that I even had internalized biphobia in the first place, that I despite being out of the closet for more than two decades, I’d spent the vast majority of my life hating myself and my bisexuality. It was the key moment that made me intellectually interested in biphobia, because, well, if it had derailed my own understanding of myself so aggressively, then what was it doing to other people?

In the three years since that revelation I’ve overcome my knee jerk assumption that any writing about bisexuality must necessarily be corny and cringe and engaged with some truly beautiful and inspiring thoughts and theory about bi existence and bi oppression. I’ve written book proposals about biphobia (alas, they didn’t sell) and I’ve sent countless about bisexuality out to you, my loyal readers.

And yet.

The one thing I expected to happen in these past three years, the thing that seemed so obvious an outcome of that crying jag, that Twitter thread, never happened.

See, three years ago, it seemed so obvious to me that it was my internalized biphobia alone that had prevented me from landing a loving girlfriend. If I just accepted that I wanted to date women, I reasoned — well, accepted it and more aggressively started approaching and hitting on them — then surely I would find myself a sapphic romance sooner or later. I stopped pursuing men. I asked women out on dates. I told women that I was romantically interested in them.

I did not find a girlfriend.

Some of this is undoubtedly due to the increased standards that I have adopted with age. In my late thirties — now forty — I could not muster up enthusiasm for being in a relationship just to be in a relationship, especially not while in the midst of a deadly pandemic that threatened the lives and well being of people that I dearly loved. If I was going to get a girlfriend, she needed to be really special. She needed to be someone I really wanted to be with.

Over the course of a few years, I’ve felt that way about maybe a dozen women. Maybe less. None of them reciprocated my affections; all expressing that they were flattered but preferred to remain friends.

Which is fine: I’m too old to want to date someone who isn’t enthusiastic about the idea of dating me.

But it’s put me in an odd position all the same. Because in spite of my awareness that I’m more attracted to women than men, in spite of giving up on romantically pursuing men, the only person I’ve felt any mutual attraction to (and mutual is the key word here) over the past three years is a straight male friend who I’ve known for the better part of a decade.

And look: I’m grieving my father, and I’m still very fragile, and because of that I’m not planning on getting into a relationship any time soon. But it is nevertheless such a strange position to find myself in: to have unpacked my compulsory heterosexuality, to have dealt with my internalized biphobia, to have embraced my intense sapphism, to have put on my big girl pants and put my heart on the line with numerous women, only to find that the person closest to what I think I want — someone I feel an intense physical attraction to, someone I adore who adores me, someone who respects me and cares for me and has supported me in times of crisis — is the very type of person I’d sworn off dating in the first place.

It’s confusing, to say the least. And I’m not even saying that I’m going to end up with this person, that I won’t eventually find a woman who sweeps me off my feet. But I am saying I have given up on trying to predict my own future.

I am saying that all I know anymore is — to quote Nat King Cole, and not Ewan McGregor as you may be tempted to think — the greatest thing you’ll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return.