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I Don’t Understand Straight People, Even Though I’m Married to One
I’m confident in my sexuality, but my husband’s makes no sense to me
“Sometimes I feel like I’ll never be enough for you,” my husband says, “because I’m just a man.”
“You know I’m happy with monogamy,” I tell him. “You’re enough. You’re the person I chose.”
“But how can I be enough?” We’re spooning under the covers.
“With me, you can’t do everything.”
“Who needs to do everything?”
“I want to do everything.”
“Well, not everything,” I say, pulling his hand to my lips and nibbling his fingers.
“I want to do everything with you.”
I’m pansexual: I’m sexually attracted to people of all sexes and genders. Sometimes I use the word bisexual instead because “pan” makes me cringe with visions of a cartoon Peter Pan. But bisexual implies — duh — a binary. And my sexuality does not feel binary at all.
It’s not that I’m attracted to men and I’m attracted to women. It’s that I’m attracted to people.
When I say I’m pan, I’m not saying I’m attracted to all people. In fact, I’m not attracted to most people. But when I am attracted to someone, that someone can be of any sex and any gender.
My worldview is colored by my sexuality. “I only date women,” sounds to me like “I only date redheads.” Like, really, you can’t even imagine being attracted to a brunette?
My first impulse is to assume society tricked all the 100% heterosexual and 100% homosexual people into thinking they had to live in the binary.
As Elle Beau recently wrote about herself and her husband:
“We considered ourselves straight at that point, largely because we’d never had very much opportunity to be anything else and we knew we weren’t gay — and for most of our lives, those seemed like the only choices.”
We don’t choose who we fall for. Sometimes you just feel chemistry with someone — when I met my husband, the chemistry was immediate and intoxicating — and you can’t choose who that person is or what’s under their clothes. Attraction isn’t a…
