Friends, you know me: I hate most sexuality explainers. Are you bisexual or pansexual? Are you pansexual or abrosexual? Are you omnisexual or polysexual? Truly, I could not care less, and mostly see these explainers as a way to sow division within the broader umbrella community of people who are attracted to multiple genders.
However. I just came across an explainer from PinkNews that actually seemed useful? I mean not the explainer itself, the explainer itself was the same old garbage that PinkNews tosses out onto the internet in search of clicks to feed the clicks beast. But the subject of the explainer, well, for once I didn’t hate it.
Because rather than splitting hairs over what it means to be attracted to more than one gender versus being attracted to people independent of gender, or whatever other personal but not political difference is used to divide the community, this one was about the differnece between being biromantic and bisexual. And that… that is actually a difference I consider worth exploring? Not because I think these groups aren’t fundamentally united under the same umbrella, but because teasing out the difference between romantic and sexual attraction (among other attractions) can help us better understand the grand spectrum of how people date and fuck.
I first started thinking about this after reading Ace, a brilliant overview of asexuality by Angela Chen. (It’s a very good book that you should read if you haven’t already — I both blurbed it and got interviewed for it!) In the book, Chen tries to tease out the various ways of being attracted to other people — an important task for people who know they don’t experience sexual attraction, but feel like they maybe feel attracted to people in other ways.
Chen lays out four types of attraction: there’s sexual attraction, or the urge to bone down with someone, which is often what we assume people are talking about when they say they’re “attracted” to another person. There’s aesthetic attraction, which is when you find someone enjoyable to look at. There’s sensual attraction, or a desire to be physically intimate with someone in ways that aren’t quite sexual (think cuddling). And then there’s romantic attraction, which is honestly the one I find the most confusing*, but seems to mostly boil down to wanting to date and be in relationships with people.
For Chen and other aces, these distinctions are crucial because one can certainly experience some or all of them even if you don’t experience sexual attraction. To be asexual is not to be aromantic, and even aromantic aces can still experience aesthetic and sensual attraction — or none of the above.
And for bisexuals —
Well, even saying “bisexual” here is wrong, or at least inaccurate, because what I really mean when I say that is everyone under the “bi+ umbrella,” which to mean includes people who aren’t strictly “bisexual” as such. If you’re a biromantic monosexual or ace, someone who feels the desire to form romantic relationships with people of a variety of genders even if your sexual attraction is limited to one or zero genders, I consider you just as much a “bisexual,” or at least bi person, as an aromantic or monoromantic or biromantic bisexual — i.e. someone with expansive sexual attractions, regardless of how many genders they feel interested in dating or doing romance with.
But that’s kind of my point, here. “Bisexual” gets used as shorthand here because it’s assumed that, again, sexual attraction is the end all, be all of attraction; the attraction from which everything else ultimately flows. And I think it is only when we allow ourselves to accept that we can be multivariate, that our various attractions need not line up, that we can better understand both ourselves and our community.
Because while no one has done any research on it as far as I know, I personally suspect that, for instance, bisexuals are more common than biromantics. All those supposedly closeted people who pursue queer sex even as they publicly profess to be straight, all those gays and lesbians whose deepest shame is the rare, gasp!, straight crush they happen to have? I sometimes think we might open up some kind of release valve if we acknowledged that at least some of them might be monoromantic bisexuals; that they might see themselves as straight or gay or lesbian because that’s an accurate descriptor of who they want to date, even as their sexual desires are more expansive. If we allowed ourselves to understand that a person who wants to have sex with a broader array of genders than they want to date isn’t automatically some bad closeted person ashamed of their desires, but potentially a person with discordant sexual and romantic desires. It happens! It’s okay! It is valid!
(I feel like I should note here that over the past few years I’ve variously wondered if I’m biromantic, heteroromantic, homoromantic, or aromantic, which is part of why, as I noted above, I find the very concept of “romantic attraction” to be confusing. I feel very intense love for people of a variety of genders and want to do nice and maybe romantic things with them but I also tend to fare poorly in a traditionally structured “relationship” and currently don’t feel like I have the capacity for one. I don’t know if that means I experience romantic attraction or not! It is all very confusing to me!)
And so unlike the tiresome pan vs bi debate, biromantic vs bisexual feels, not like it divides us, but like it unites us. Your sexual and romantic attractions don’t have to line up, but if any of the above are bi, then you are part of the bi community. It’s a beautiful thing to recognize, I think: we are united, not in our similarity, but in our embracing of our diversity.
* Yes, I am a 41-year-old woman who has been in many relationships and still is not totally clear on what it means to have romantic feelings for someone
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