Ongoing reminder that I am trying to transition off of Substack. I’m currently in the process of building up the whole archive on my own little website — remember personal websites? — but for now, if you feel icky about supporting Substack, all posts that appear here also appear on my Patreon. They are available for free, but I wouldn’t be mad if you gave me $1 (or more!) a month. $5+ patrons get early access to essays, as well as other benefits.
When I have a critical mass of people on Patreon I will likely wind down operations here, FYI.
There is, I think, a fear that exists in many monosexual-bisexual relationships. Or if not a fear, then the acknowledgment of a block, an impenetrable wall that exists between the two parties.
To be bisexual is, on a fundamental level, to have a part of yourself that is fundamentally unknowable to a monosexual — even a monosexual who is your intimate compatriot, your closest companion. Whether are you are partnered with a gay man, a lesbian, a straight man, a straight woman, there will always be a side of you that they can never see, that they can never experience. Even a threesome will not actually remedy this: the observer effect ensures that the you who exists while your partner watches you fuck someone is not the you who exists when you are fucking another person on your own.
I think the knowledge, or the fear, of this unknowable aspect of the self is the source of so much tension in mixed mono-bi relationships. Not even think: I know it is. How else to explain the lesbians convinced their bi girlfriends are tainted by past dalliances with men, the straight women convinced their boyfriends will go gay, the straight men who obsessively control their bi girlfriend's female friendships, the gay men who refuse to believe that male bisexuality is real. All of these are, at the end of the day, mechanisms for coping with the discomfort of your own limitations, a defense thrown up in the face of a blinding light that you cannot comprehend, a light emanating from the person you profess to know the best.
I've been aware of this block for years. I used to let it stop me, let it shape my interactions with people. If monosexuals could not know me, best to avoid them completely — why get in bed (literally and figuratively) with someone who will inevitably run up against a wall?
But lately, I have been thinking about things differently. The wisdom of age has made it more clear to me that this block we sense — it's not a unique thing, not something specific to bisexuals and monosexuals who attempt a partnership. To the contrary: it is a block that exists in all relationships.
It is simply that bisexuality renders it visible.
And I do not simply mean that it's a block that exists in all romantic or sexual relationships, although yes, of course. It's a block that exists with everyone we interact with. On a very fundamental level, we are all unknowable to anyone outside ourselves*. No matter how close we become with someone, there is always a part of the self that exists outside of external perception. To be "known" by someone is simply to be the subject of an elaborate fan fiction they are constantly writing and rewriting in their heads; to be known well is simply to have that fan fiction be good. The person who is observing your patterns, developing a sense of how you tick, is only doing that: they are fundamentally incapable of breaching an impenetrable outer layer, of literally seeing into your mind and understanding the full, real you as you understand yourself.
It is possible that this sounds bleak. I do not think it is. There is something gratifying in accepting one's limitations; in recognizing the boundaries of what we can and cannot know about another person, of how we can and cannot be known.
More than that: there is something gratifying in knowing that bisexuality is no greater a barrier to knowability than any other human attribute. It is simply one that society has decided to fixate on — and that, more than anything else, is the actual problem.
* And sometimes unknowable to ourselves as well, for good measure
Really good