Here is a sad little secret: I have a habit of imagining myself as the protagonist in a film — and, when it comes to my dating life, specifically as the protagonist of a rom com. Indeed, I once even wrote a screenplay based on the early days of one of my relationships. Though in my defense, when you kick off a relationship by secretly suing your new paramour’s employer*, the rom com script kind of writes itself.
Anyway. I was engaged in one of these little thought exercises yesterday, imagining what it would be like if a certain rom commy premise I had stumbled into actually were a rom com, and realized to my horror that the obvious screenplay resolution in this instance would be one where I ended up seriously partnered with one of the film’s male characters.
“But I don’t want to end up with a man!” I thought in horror, imagining how the ending of said film would be received by queer audiences. They’d boo, I felt certain, and declare the film one more bit of heteronormative propaganda, yet another story declaring hetero love superior to the queer kind. Hell, people said stuff like that about Chasing Amy and that’s a movie where the girl ends up with a girl because the boy is such a toxic trashfire.
My life is, of course, not a rom com — honestly, if it were, I’d have found a loving girlfriend shortly after my early pandemic “Wait am I homoromantic???” meltdown and probably be married by now. Lesbian married, in a suitably sapphic way that would thrill all the queer audience members who paid good money to see my story on the big screen (or at least took an evening to watch it at home, streaming on Peacock a few months after its underwhelming theatrical debut).
My life is not a rom com, and there is no guarantee that it will end in the way a rom com would. Among other things, if I don’t want to end up with a man I… have the free will that allows me to choose otherwise. There is no cosmic scriptwriter thwarting me and leading me to fall in love in the most ironic way possible; if I do end up with a man it’ll be because that’s the choice, that’s the person, who feels correct to me, and not because, you know, it’s the perfect story beat.
And yet I cannot shake the feeling that there is some audience out there monitoring my romantic exploits, assessing them, judging me for them. Some of this is doubtless because, well, it’s a little true: as a semi-public figure I’ve inspired my fair share of parasocial relationships, and there are strangers (perhaps even you) who are invested in the arc of my dating life. I have to assume that there were queers who were thrilled when I decided to stop dating men, and — even though I never actually swore men off so much as decided that I wasn’t interested in actively pursuing them and wanted to devote my energies to the pursuit of women — would feel betrayed if I didn't wind up with a beautiful wife.
But even if I weren’t a public figure: to be bisexual is so often to be up against this imaginary audience, to be tabulating your romances and worrying about how an outside viewer might keep score. So often we tell ourselves that this tabulation is an important criteria to confirm that we even “count” as bisexual — and yet the very existence of this invisible audience is, itself, a manifestation of biphobia. Are straight people, or gays and lesbians, worrying that they might disappoint audiences because of who they’ve wound up happily ever after with? I have to assume they are not (or certainly, not to the same degree or in the same way — though maybe all of us have some version of this phenomenon, who knows).
I’m just tired of living my life for an imaginary audience, you know? It’s defined so much of how I’ve conducted my dating life, and usually to unfortunate ends. It’s kept me unable to ask what I want, because I am so fixated on finding the ending that will be a crowd pleaser. And I think I am just done with that these days.
Anyway. My life is not a rom com. There is no guarantee that I will “end up” with a man, or a woman, or honestly anyone at all. I don’t know what the future holds, or what the coming story beats are going to look like, and I’m trying to be okay with that.
I just wish other people could be okay with that as well.
* Yes this actually happened to me.
as always, you have articulated this feeling so well
Oh man, I cannot escape the romcom storylines in my head.