If you’ve been reading my writing on bisexuality for a while now, you’re undoubtedly aware that the current leg of my bisexual journey kicked off at the end of June 2020, when I found myself crying in my kitchen, overwhelmed by the revelation that maybe I actually liked women more than I had ever let myself know. Although I’d been out as bisexual since the spring of 1997, when I was just fourteen, my dating history had long favored men, and it was easy to assume that that gender balance was a result of my personal preferences. But as I found myself getting worked up over the hurt at felt at perpetually feeling like an outsider in queer spaces, it occurred to me that I probably wouldn’t feel this strongly about that if I weren’t, you know, extremely queer. I probably wouldn’t feel so wounded by the rejection of other women if I didn’t really want to date women.
After that episode, I began to rethink my identity, to reevaluate my whole life. It suddenly seemed obvious that I’d always been more interested in women — certainly, I’d had a passion for various girlfriends that wasn’t really replicated in my relationships with men. I started to see myself as not simply a bisexual, but a sapphic bisexual, a homoromantic bisexual, a woman who was sexually attracted to a variety of genders but only interested in forming romantic relationships other women.
There was a real comfort to adopting that label, to seeing the course of my life, my dating history, through this new lens. Suddenly, my long track record of failures with men made more sense: how could they have succeeded when I lacked that romantic attachment to men? How could I really expect men to love me when I was incapable of loving them back? Suddenly, my anxiety around women made more sense: of course it felt scarier to approach women when they were the ones I was actually interested in. Of course rejection from women felt more terrifying, more intense.
Best of all, seeing myself in this new light gave me more confidence to interrogate the ways that biphobia had long held me back, to reevaluate it, not as some nothing burger that was cringey to even bring up, but as a real and harmful structural oppression that was having an impact on my community. For years, I’d held my tongue about biphobia, terrified that I’d be chastised for being a straight girl who just wanted attention, who was trying to steal resources from actually deserving queers. But now that I knew I didn’t want to date men, well, that argument no longer held any water. No one could accuse me of being a “fake queer” if I was only interested in dating women.
But.
Even as I launched myself on this new adventure, even as I committed to exclusively dating women, there was a tiny voice in my head asking myself if maybe, just maybe, I was wrong. Not wrong about who I was right then — it was clear that dating women was what I wanted in that moment, that romantically, men held little interest for me — but wrong about this idea that it was who I always had been. Was I sure that I’d only truly loved women for the entirety of my life? Or was it possible that the gendered nature of my attractions had an ebb and flow, with some genders feeling more appealing in one moment and others revealing their charms in others? Had I really been in denial about my all consuming romantic attraction to women for my entire life? Or had I simply changed over time — and if I had, was it possible that I might change again?
I don’t know that I have an answer to that question, and to be honest, it kind of scares me. There’s a comfort in the idea of the one true self, in believing that you are Born This Way™️ and simply spend the rest of your life figuring out what way, exactly, that is. It is comforting to believe that there’s a predictability to you, even if the actual pattern is complex, and that once you figure out the bounds of your identity, everything else will suddenly make sense.
But I simply don’t know that it’s true for me. I mean, yes, I still feel strongly drawn to women, and mostly interested in romantically pursuing them (to the extent that I’m interested in romantically pursuing anyone at all — after two failed cohabitating relationships, the bloom is off the rose on a lot of the elements of committed relationships). But what if I one day meet a man who I find myself wanting to romantically commit to? How does that change my understanding of myself? What happens then?
As a bisexual, I’m supposed to be fine with that — relishing in one’s unpredictability is kind of the point, you know? And yet I have to admit that there’s a part of me that’s a little scared of that thought: that even as a bisexual, I would love to be able to lay out the boundaries of my existence and attractions, to never have to worry about surprising myself.
And yet to do that — to commit to some form of predictability, to assume that who I am today must necessarily be who I am tomorrow — would functionally require me to shut down opportunities for joy, for connection, simply because they did not align with my previously held ideas of who I am and what I want. And that, to my mind, is a far worse crime than remaining unfixed in space, untethered to my past. I would rather never know who I am going to be tomorrow than give up the opportunity for a passionate, fulfilling romance. Frankly, it’s a tradeoff I consider worth it.
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Looking back on my dating life from my current celibate perch, I realize, to my chagrin, how much I fucked myself over by assuming that I had to have a “type” and that i should use that as some kind of guide to who I dated. Turns out that if I just let myself be attracted to who I’m attracted to, the results are wildly unpredictable (and it doesn’t actually happen that often.)
I love this so much and I'm going to not write a whole screed here but just nod extremely enthusiastically and share this.