Years ago I was friendly with a lesbian couple – well, one of the lesbians identified as bisexual (her partner knew this). One day the bisexual woman… er, changed? She seemed to have woken up one morning and decided she was no longer attracted to women (and broke her partner’s heart, sadly) and started trying to meet men.
Is this how it works? You’re romantically or sexually attracted to both genders, but maybe you prefer one over the other most of the time? Or you’re all one or the other… and then switch after a while?
It seems being involved with a bisexual person is likely to be highly unstable: your partner could just change at any time! What does it do to the children of such a couple, knowing that one parent might stop loving the other at any time?
How is this any different from every single gay & straight couple? :dubious: All children face the possibilty that one parent might stop loving the other parent at any time (except where this has already happened).
That wasn’t about being bisexual, that was about… this is not the Pit… about being unfaithful. As alphaboi867 said, they’re two completely unrelated things.
Today, a former coworker told me that bisexuality doesn’t exist because :
1)His gay friends were saying so (I’m not even surprised), and they certainly know better than me about such a topic.
2)One can’t love at the same time a man and a woman so…well, I’m not sure how the reasonning goes, but it somehow proves that there’s no such thing as bisexuality.
All bisexuality implies is that the** bisexual person finds both sexes attractive in a sexual way**.
It doesn’t make people more or less likely to be giant assholes, or more or less unfaithful, and it certainly doesn’t come with an On-Off switch that says “today I only like women” and “today I only like men.”
Now, it is possible to consider yourself bisexual but to be more strongly attracted to one gender over the other, and even that can be present to various degrees. I have no idea how common or uncommon it is for bisexuals to feel equally attracted to both genders.
I’m a strongly straight-leaning bisexual who is quite happily married to a man. An ex of mine is (according to him) a very slightly gay-leaning bisexual, and he’s with a girl now, and they’re doing fine.
I think your confusion has more to do with that one person’s life choices, and you can’t pin that on a sexual orientation, sorry.
Well, they are two completely different things, only I didn’t read ‘unfaithful’ into the OP. I read ‘broke up with’ or at least failed to sense anything other than a change of heart and the ending of a relationship.
Being an avowed hetero I con’t contribute to the OP.
ISTM there are really two different paradigms of bisexuality, in practice:
Bisexual capacity: One may be attracted to and find sexual fulfillment with either a male or a female partner (monogamy is possible). A particular partner’s gender is not necessarily determinative of anything in the relationship.
Bisexual requirement: Sex with both male and female partners is necessary for sexual fulfillment (monogamy is out). The partners’ genders are highly significant; there is a distinction in some quality of the relationship with each gender of partner.
(I’m heterosexual; this is my composite interpretation of how self-identified bisexuals of both types and genders have described their feelings and/or recounted their practices.)
I’m 100% gay and my partner is “polysexual.” He can be attracted to men, women, bisexuals, transexuals, asexuals, etc., etc., etc. He says he’d be equally attracted to me if I were a different sex.
Think of it like eye color. For most people, eye color isn’t a strong preference. All other things being equal, you wouldn’t be turned on by a green-eyed person, only because of their eye color. And you probably wouldn’t leave someone just because you met someone with a different eye color. There are so many more important things about a person than the color of their eyes. So, to my partner, there are so many more important things about a person than their sex. and he would feel the same about me if I were a brown-eyed transexual.
And after 25 years, I’m not afraid he’ll suddenly run off with someone of a different sex or eye color or any other characteristic.
I think this is a great way to describe it. I’m a lesbian-leaning bisexual happily married to a man; I prefer women in general to men in general, but I specifically prefer my husband to anyone else on earth. I often point out that there are are millions of happily-married women who wish their husbands looked like Brad Pit but love them nonetheless. I wish my husband looked like Angelina Jolie, but I don’t love him any less because he doesn’t.
25 years is a highly respectable run. Having said that, don’t go introducing him to David Bowie.
Back to the O.P. I would throw in that it isn’t infidelity that’s being asked about here. It’s the “I find both sexes to be appealing/ attractive” and then one day, " Hey I don’t dig women any more !". It’s as simple as that. To my interpretation of that part of the O.P., it isn’t an issue of infidelity at all. It’s an issue of attraction to one sex or another. ( My apologies for saying sex instead of gender. I cannot figure out how many gender identifications there are today that are recognized as distinct. I figured sex was safer. )
Bisexual here. Everything said is good; I’d add that personally, the specific balance of my homo/heterosexual sides can vary, usually over fairly long periods of time. I seem to currently be coming out of several years of being more physically attracted to girls and swinging over onto the gay side again. However, that doesn’t mean I’d dump or cheat on a partner if my mood shifted. There’s porn, there are toys, there are my two best friends–lefty and righty.
I only ‘do’ relationships, since I am not sexually attracted enough to anyone, to pursue sexual contact with them, unless I am attracted to most everything about them. I’ve found both men and women attractive, in this way. I wouldn’t hesitate to form a relationship with either on the basis of their gender. As it happened though, I’ve never had the opportunity to start a relationship with a woman I found attractive (because one or both of us wasn’t single). So I have only had three relationships/sexual partners, and all were men. I still don’t consider myself entirely heterosexual.
That’s how it works for me. I think it’s pretty simple.
Most bisexual women I know have dated/been with more men, simply because there are many, many more straight guys pursuing women than there are bi or lesbian women. Unless you really set out to look for a girlfriend and resolve not to date men for a time, you’re more likely to meet a compatible, interested male partner.
I imagine the woman you heard about third hand might tell the story a little differently. Perhaps… “I’m attracted to both genders but as my relationship with X cooled off, I realised my most successful partnerships were with men.” One wouldn’t need to cease to be sexually attracted to women to simply make a choice that they are less compatible long term.
Or maybe she just ran out of gay. Who knows? I do know that a friend of the ex that she dumped isn’t always likely to be the most accurately informed source.
