Married Bisexuals
Q: I have a friend who says she's bisexual, but she just got engaged to the guy she's been dating for a couple years now. Does that mean she's decided she's straight?
A: Congrats to your friend on her engagement! It’s great to hear happy news, especially during these strange times that we’re all living in. As for your question, it’s a fairly common one, so I’m glad you asked!
When we facilitate LGBTQ Cultural Competency trainings, one of the things we emphasize is the difference between behavior and identity. Sexual orientation is a form of identity. It’s something that’s integral to our sense of self, and our behavior doesn’t dictate our identity. We intuitively know that straight people are still straight, even if they’ve never dated anyone before. The same is true of lesbian, gay, and bisexual people. Their identity is valid, regardless of their dating history.
Let’s look at this through the lens of ice cream (this may seem like an odd analogy, but stick with me for a second!).
Imagine for a moment that being straight is like being vanilla ice cream and being gay is like being chocolate ice cream. Some folks mistakenly assume that bisexual people would be a chocolate-vanilla twist in this analogy. As a result, they may think that if a bisexual person is dating someone vanilla, they might as well call it all vanilla (aka straight) because there’s barely any chocolate (aka “the gay part of bisexual”) left.
In reality, bisexual people are more like strawberry ice cream. They’re not half-straight and half-gay; they’re fully bisexual. Whether you mix strawberry ice cream with chocolate or vanilla, it’s still delicious and still distinctly strawberry. In other words, whether a bisexual person is dating someone of their same gender (or someone of a different gender) they’re still bisexual. They’re also still bisexual when they’re single.
Now granted, this analogy doesn’t account for folks who identify outside the gender binary, but I hope it’s a helpful place to start understanding bisexuality. As for your friend (and congrats again on her engagement!), you can safely assume that she’s still bisexual unless she tells you otherwise.