What if everything you know about bisexual relationships is wrong?

A brief reflection on the married bis.

The other day I had a stray thought about married bisexuals. Specifically, I started to wonder if bisexuals actually are more likely to get married than the rest of our queer peers — you know, now that marriage equality is the law of the land and all. Is this idea of the privileged, married bisexual a holdover from an era that doesn’t exist anymore, or is it a solid fact that we should just accept?

I did not find the answer to that question — the best I could find was some pre-Obergefell data that had bisexuals way more likely to get married that gays and lesbians, but it was pre-Obergefell (and also didn’t include straight rates of marriage, which would have been interesting to have as a comparison point). But what I did find was this study on bisexuals and the “marital advantage” in health (which, yes, I linked to yesterday as well).

To sum up the study: it’s a generally accepted rule that getting married improves people’s health, with married men in particular reaping the biggest gains. But the idea of the marital advantage is rooted in studies of straight people, specifically; so this paper looks at what it means for bisexuals to be married, vis a vis their health. And as it turns out it’s… not great!

Married bisexuals, however, exhibited poorer health than unmarried bisexuals when socioeconomic status and health behaviors were adjusted for. Moreover, bisexuals in same-gender unions were healthier than bisexuals in different-gender unions primarily because of their socioeconomic advantages and healthier behaviors. Together, our findings suggest that bisexuals, particularly those in different-gender unions, face unique challenges in their relationships that may reduce the health advantage associated with marriage.

Now we should, of course, remember that this is just one paper and others might find differently, but to me… it kinda shoots a missile into the bedrock of this idea that bisexuals have access to “straight privilege,” that we’re just one hetero looking marriage away from basically being straight. Not only does marriage, as an institution, harm bisexuals where it helps the straights; but straight marriage in particular is toxic to our health.

I don’t want to get into the nitty gritty of why this might be the case (though if you’re interested in that discussion, please read the linked paper cause they run through many possible explanations). But I do want to use this as a jumping off point for a related conversation that I have been thinking about ever since I started thinking seriously about bisexuality and biphobia, and it’s this: the fundamental problem with this idea that bisexuals are able to recede into heterosexuality, to functionally become straight, is that our straight partners do not treat us the way they treat straight people.

They just don’t! It’s almost laughable to me that this would in any way be up for debate. Straight men don’t hound straight women for threesomes, they don’t assume that straight women will want to go to the strip club or do bro things with them, they don’t assume that straight women will be down to look at sexts from other women without those women’s express consent. And straight women don’t have the same degree of suspicion about straight men’s masculinity, the same paranoia that they’re not actually into women that they assess bi men with. It’s just… it’s just absolutely not the same.

And I wish that we could get it through our heads — collectively, as a society — that this is how it is, because it would really crack open a lot of discussions about bi people, about bisexuality, about biphobia, if we stopped viewing our sexualities as some kind of on/off switch that swaps us between gay and straight*. It would be great if we could recognize that bisexuals have a unique experience of relationships, one that is inherently inseparable from our bisexuality. It would be great, you know?

But in the meantime… maybe don’t get married. I mean, you know, unless you want to. It’ll probably be fine.

* Which is not to say that we’re not different depending on the gender of our partners — I am! — but that’s not the same as being “gay” or “straight” depending on one’s partner.

Love The B+ Squad? Get bonus reading recommendation over at my Patreon!