So there is this Instagram glitch where sometimes, when someone texts you a link to a reel, clicking the link does not bring you to the reel they were linking to, but instead just randomly pulls up a totally different reel — and I mean completely randomly, like, every time you click the link, it generates a wholly different reel, each unrelated to the reel you are trying to access. (The solution, in case you are wondering, is to fully shut the Instagram app and try again.)
Anyway. I mention this both to give you some helpful tech advice and also to explain exactly how it happened that I wound up on an Instagram reel of two painfully annoying TikTokers named Jacob and Samantha explaining how, even though he’s gay and she’s straight, they’re getting married and they plan to be monogamous.
Everything about the reel — and especially the affect of the two subjects — seemed so forced and off that I assumed this must be a bit. You know, a gag making fun of those Mormon couples where everyone knows it’s a gay man and a woman who’s hoping he isn’t. I started clicking around and watching their other reels to try to confirm my suspicion; the video where they talk about the first time they had sex and can’t stop name dropping Dylan Mulvaney made me think that for sure for sure this must be a joke.
But then I clicked over to the dude’s Instagram and saw that he’d been lovingly documenting his relationship with this woman for several years now, in a way that seemed very sincere, and once I found this Insider article, I came to the conclusion that, no, these folks are deadly serious.
And while it is not really any of my business, the place I currently land re: these people is that they are not so much “doing a bit” as they are two supremely annoying theater kids who just realized they’re happiest together — the archetypal sassy gay boy and his straight girl best friend from the high school movie, only instead of him thinking he’s straight and only realizing he’s gay when they kiss, these two bone and are getting married. IDK, it just makes sense to me, and the more you watch of their videos, the more you realize they are just this fucking annoying, the more it will probably click for you too.
But.
If you look at the comments on these people’s posts, you will probably not be surprised to see a drumbeat of, “Dude, you’re just bisexual” comments. They’re so common that the two have directly addressed the assertion in a video that… well let me just say this was one of the ones that pushed me more into the “this has got to be a bit” column*.
Jacob’s logic, as I understand it, is that he is gay and not bi because it is men, not women, who get him physically aroused; because while he loves Samantha and enjoys having sex with her, he doesn’t look at her boobs and think, “Aw yeah, boobs, hot.” At least I think that’s what he’s talking about? It hovers back and forth between “I’m gay because I’m mostly into men but love this one woman enough to sleep with and have sex with her” (which to me sounds like bisexuality, more on that in a second) and “I’m gay because I’m only physically attracted to men, but I have not met anyone I like as much as this woman so whatever, I’m spending my life with her and if she needs sex from me sometimes, fine**” (which sounds to me more like he’s gay).
And let’s be clear here: he’s allowed to call himself gay, the same way that it’s nobody’s business if bi lesbians want to identify as lesbians. But I do think that — if we again, accept that these people are for real and not doing an extremely involved bit, if we give them the benefit of the doubt that Jacob’s not going to realize he made a horrible mistake in a few years and that this really is like those Mormon couples I thought these guys were parodying — it is fascinating that a man who loves a woman so much that he is marrying her, who is attracted to her enough that he wants to sleep with her, is so averse to calling himself bisexual (or even rejecting labels entirely) that he keeps subtly insulting the woman he loves in ways I have outlined in the footnotes.
And mostly, this is just a reminder to me that the fixation on labels itself is kind of the problem here. What does it matter if Jacob is mostly attracted to men but wants to have his weird annoying theater kid marriage with his weird annoying theater kid best friend, you know? If we, as a society, could just accept that their love is real and pure, then they wouldn’t have to keep explaining themselves to us in increasingly unhinged videos that really, truly, make this seem like a bit.
But then on the other hand, if people just accepted them as they are, they wouldn’t be able to use their relationship to get attention on the internet. So, you know, maybe that’s part of it too.
* The way Samantha just kind of gamely smiles when Jacob is all, “I’m gay because I’m not physically attracted to women, I’m not physically attracted to Samantha, we just have a soul connection” made me want to scream “girl, you deserve more than this!”
But it is her life and not mine.
** For all their talk of it being a “mixed orientation marriage,” I feel like it is never acknowledged that there’s a fundamental imbalance in the mix? A bisexual/monosexual relationship is also mixed orientation, but in that case the parties are still both attracted to one another despite having different sexual orientations; whereas with this one it feels like she’s physically attracted to him and he sees her as a warm body and again, like, girl, I think you deserve more than this.
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