Here’s a strange thing to think about: over the entire run of writing this newsletter (so, since the end of September 2022), I have been single. And not even just that period: my last serious relationship ended in March 2019, which means the entire time that I have been doing my journey of intellectual exploration of bisexuality, it has been as a single person.
I mean, yes, I’ve casually dated and done some things with some people that I’m not interested in writing about here*. But the dominant theme of the past four and a half years of my life has been me, being on my own with me. Me, just myself, thinking about my own personal relationship to bisexuality.
And I say that it is strange, not because being single is strange, but because being a single bisexual flies in the face of so much of how we talk about bisexuality. So many conversations about bisexuality are focused on whom one has dated and how that person’s gender does or does not get you access to various privileges; on a bean counting of all your sexual and romantic experiences in an effort to prove you are “really” bi. Indeed, many people still argue that until you’ve had sex — or possibly even had extended relationships — with people of multiple genders you cannot know if you are a Legitimate Bisexual™️ or just a pretender. The entirety of “bi validity” is, well, embedded in not being single.
And yet. Here I am, a single bisexual. Does being single make me feel less bisexual? I mean, not really: I’m still attracted to a range of people of a range of genders. My fantasies are still involve a diverse mix of scenarios and genders that vary depending on my mood, depending on the day. And I still deal with the exhaustion of living in a world that is not built for bisexuals: a world where people routinely make snide comments about people like me as though I’m not within earshot, a world where I constantly feel the weight of having to come out or at least offer clarification lest people assume that I am someone who I am not.
More to the point: I still feel like a person with a bisexual perspective. That’s maybe the hardest bit to describe, but I will attempt to all the same. There are ways that people talk about the world — assumptions they make, behaviors they do or do not endorse — that feel very straight or gay. The straights see the world through this lens, the gays see the world through that lens, and as a bisexual, none of it has ever felt particularly correct to me. Regardless of my relationship status, I cannot unlearn this sense of outsiderdom — this sense that most of the world is operating from a blinkered perspective, and that I’ve been given the gift of being able to see a full spectrum of color rather than a simple black and white binary.
In all honesty, I think I almost had to be single for an extended period — to take a step back from, uh, “actively being bisexual” — in order to understand any of this. I had to get rid of the very things that I was told defined my identity in order to see what, exactly, was left without it. Turns out, there’s a lot! Turns out, bisexuality is not simply a laundry list of who you have or haven’t fucked. Turns out, it really is a way of being a person.
* The plebes do not deserve the details of my personal life
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