Member-only story
This Is Us
The Joys of Queering Your Relationships
How I learned to prioritize connections that speak to my authentic self
The last time I intentionally met a man was three years ago.
When you’re a bisexual, femme, cisgender woman, the default for dating can easily become straight, cis men. They’re plentiful. They express attraction clearly and readily. They assume, based on your gender presentation, that you’re attracted to them. And despite their proclivity toward both fetishizing and minimizing, if their politics are good, they’re generally unconcerned with your bisexuality — unlike much of the so-called “woman loving woman” community, wherein “No bisexuals!” shows up frequently in dating profiles.
The behavioral scripts are more than carved — they’re ingrained. You can generally map out how the courtship, the first date, and the sex will go, with little variation. From the part where they open with “Hey beautiful” on Tinder, to the part where you fake-grab your wallet and suggest splitting the bill, to the part where penetration is the guaranteed aim of sex, you move up and up the relationship escalator. Surely, “not all men.” But most men. And our brains love patterns.
And so straight, cis men become the path of least resistance, even when they’re also the path of least fulfillment.
In my own life, I have dated mostly straight, cis men, despite my ever-present (romantic, sexual, political) desire to be in queer relationships exclusively. While most (God, not all) of these men, individually, have been wonderful, the truth is that I never entered relationships with them with intention. Swept uncontrollably upstream the River of Cisheternormativity, I would just kind of land in these commitments. Being bisexual — which I define, for myself, as being attracted to people regardless of gender — I’m not not attracted to straight, cis men, and so it wasn’t clear to me that I could actively challenge the space they took up in my life instead of going with the proverbial flow.
It wasn’t until I was forced to explore the level of choice I have in how I exist in relation to others that I realized I could actively prioritize connections that speak to my authentic self — and in that process, decenter…
