You were bi before and will probably be bi after. You weren’t a heterosexual person while you were with this guy your relationship might have been heterosexual, but that doesn’t mean you were. You’ve been playing the same game all along. You didn’t take the Bisexuality cartridge out of the Queer Nintendo and replace it with Heterosexuality: The Game. You ought to have more faith in the person you want to be with.Īnd now, we can at last get to the crux of things: Is your bisexuality indeed a video game you’ve neglected? Has your memory card been wiped clean, your checkpoints lost, your bisexual grappling hook taken out of your inventory and put back in the treasure chest? But the solution isn’t to preempt their judgment by downplaying that part of ourselves. The idea of being rejected by someone we would otherwise vibe with were it not for this one thing about us is scary. You’re not even giving someone the chance to love you for all of you because you’ve already tossed a pretty significant part of yourself overboard. But any partner who would ask you to sacrifice who you are in order to stay with them is no partner you should have. I am completely sympathetic to the fact that bi people often have to navigate stigmas that both straight and gay people hold. Second, it sounds as though you yourself have some internalized tropes about bisexuality to work through. Just as it would be unacceptable for him to tell you to “tone down” your bisexuality, it ought to be unacceptable for you to do it to yourself.
You are demonstrating (to yourself) a willingness to sacrifice things about you to make another person more comfortable and more likely to stay with you.
I could dress this up a lot of different ways, but I think I’ll just say: Stop that. Before your partner even brought it up, you decided to downplay your bisexuality to assuage a fear he hadn’t even vocalized. Let’s throw some confetti and jump into it.įor starters, now is a good opportunity for you to change how you enter romantic relationships. I don’t mean your feelings aren’t valid! But it does mean I get to be your Big Gay Mythbuster™ here.
I think your approach to this is all wrong. The only way I can describe it is like starting a video game that you’ve played before only to find half the characters silhouetted and not unlocked because your level is too low. Now I feel relegated to beginner status because one (1) heterosexual man doesn’t love me anymore. Prior to this relationship, I was a chaotic bisexual. I feel like I’ve got an enormous void I’m not sure what to do with. The worst part? It wasn’t even my (ex-)partner causing it! I was just so scared of losing him that I killed off one of my favorite parts of myself. I spent a lot of energy on this to combat the unyielding myth that bi means cheating and infidelity. Yes, I was just dumped by a boyfriend I felt very serious about, and now I can’t help but feel like I sacrificed a lot of my bisexual identity in order to “prove” my feelings for him were genuine. “So I’ve just been dumped” must be the start of 80 percent of the emails you get, but I do love jumping on a trend.