Bisexual mums??

[abulford13]

Hi all

Any bisexual mums on here? I'm a SAHM and would be nice to talk to someone who knows how I'm feeling!

Your experience is not all that different to mine lillithdor and it has been a strange experience, although I came to it via a different route it sounds like?

In my early teens and right up through the early college years I more or less was predominantly attracted to women, and all my meaningful early sexual experiences were with girls. Not to be too delicate about it, but while I sometimes kissed and fooled around with boys I had no real response to them physically which was different to the excitement and butterflies I had with girls. At the same time I never thought I was gay or straight or anything, I just didn't have words for any of it. I kind of knew that other girls didn't feel the same as me and I kept most of it to myself because there wasn't a community where I lived.. so experiences were few and far between. I had a lovely pen friend I fell deeply in love and wrote many passionate letters to over a number of years. She lived in a different country and after three years I went to visit her and had the most intense weekend but ran away scared after it (and she went back to her boyfriend), otherwise I just didn't really have any experience with anyone.

When I went to university I continued to have more experiences with men than women because I just didn't know how to go about meeting women and I was a bit naive that a relationship would just happen if it was meant to happen.. which it didn't. I had a very intense emotional highly charged relationships with a number of questioning women but it never went anywhere... and I had sexual experiences and slept with women I never connected with emotionally.. and yet still.. all of this and it never occurred to me I might not be straight. That sounds vaguely ridiculous to me now. How could I not have known?

Anyway towards the end of university I met my husband. And he was the first person male or female I had met who wanted to really know ME and wasn't just interested in a sexual encounter (but was, too). And so I fell in love with him and found myself very genuinely attracted to him. He was the first man I had ever felt that with and I have never felt it with anyone else male really, apart from one other guy I had a ONS with.

When I got pregnant, I found I was much more "in my body" and it was much harder for me to ignore how attracted I am to women. It was almost like a filter came off my mind. I read that women in pregnancy often have same sex attractions so I just enjoyed it and didn't think much of it. But then I was no longer pregnant and realised I was still very, very much attracted to women around me. And for a long while, I thought "oh well, everyone is a bit bisexual"... but the feelings and desires were much more prevalent. Then it became clear.. oh my God. I am not straight. I would actually happily be in a relationship and lived with and been with any of these women and that really isn't true for everyone.

The bit people find hard to "get" is that this didn't make me suddenly want to cheat or leave my husband or whatever. It was just a shock to me because of the power of it, and also this sense of strangeness that I had never had langauge for what were very longstanding feelings. I can remember being attracted to girls right back to childhood but because I'd never talked to anyone about it or labelled it, it never felt like part of my identity. But then I sat down and wrote lists of people I had fancied, people I had really fallen for, people I felt drawn to in my current life, people who popped up in my fantasies both sexual and romantic... and it was just overwhelmingly clear that the majority of them were female. And this caused this terrible period of questioning and, at the height of it, meeting a woman through work who I just fell head over heels for but who was unavailable.. and knowing that this was a very deeply painful sort of thing that I had to learn to live with and navigate or find a new path in life...

And then the depression kicked in.

What I find hardest about it is that I really love my husband. He is absolutely my soul mate and I love him and being with him in all aspects of our lives and have no intention of being with anyone else.. and yet my day to day reality is that I wish I could be Hermione Grainger and live two lives and it often feels very heavy to hold. My husband initially also had a freak out when I felt I had to tell him, took the kids away for a weekend for headspace and I felt like I was going to explode from the pain of it.. but has come to terms with it and is very loving and accepting. He says in hindsight I was always very open about my attraction to women and he just freaked out that by labelling it I was moving towards having a different life. He understands better now that it is very much a part of coming to terms with who I am, and as much as anything else, a process of coming to terms with the extent to which I absolutely and unknowingly lied to myself for SO LONG.

There are also specific contexts at play in my story such as the fact I was raped in college at a time I was beginning to come closer to coming out and my background of child sexual abuse, I think the whole thing got mixed up, as well as my own background where there was a lot of trauma. It becomes hard to unpick it all - but for my wellbeing I really do need to deeply appreciate my own sexuality as it is without feeling shameful about it.

The thing is, it all became expressed as a "mental health" issue but I am a very sane sort of person with no dysfunction in my life - with dh nearly 20 years, professional, many friends, a variety of hobbies etc... there's nothing there other than the fact that I desire women as a "problem" and I'm not doing anything harmful or unethical or impulsive with that. but unfortunately it is hugely difficult to find ANYONE to speak to about it... even though I had therapy for about four years I just couldn't find good ways to talk openly about it, because I'm not very comfortable with people knowing (which is of course deeply personal shame - I don't think anyone else who is LGBT should feel this deep shame, I seem to reserve it for me!).

But it is so hard to find community. I read some terrible threads on here about how bisexual women married to men need to get over themselves and realise it is all irrelevant and they're just trying to claim the "cool gay space" from being privileged, but it doesn't feel much like privilege to me. I just don't want it. I hate myself for it, if I am honest. I feel like I am cheating in my heart everytime I feel attracted to a woman which is ridiculous because I hear my straight married friends just totally happily lusting over men and know this is no different to what I am doing in my own head and yet I feel very different about it.

Sorry this has been epic but I would just love to find someone who feels the same just to talk openly about it without it being torn apart. I made the mistake of telling an old friend who is gay and male and he just cannot accept it about me, doesn't believe in "bisexuality", thinks my marriage can't possibly work now etc... and yet I really don't think I am a lesbian,I really do feel terribly connected to and attracted to my husband but I also feel this deep desire to be with a woman and to have an emotional relationship with a woman... and I can't have both.

I wish it was irrelevant to me. It just isn't. I continue in therapy but it has been very painful.

Though one thing I forgot to say is this research by Lisa Diamond and her book has been enormously helpful to me: . It made me realise that I am not alone and other women do have these fluctuating patterns of desire for women and men and experience actual real bisexual lives.

I also joined a Bi+ Network group online for Ireland. Most of those on it are fairly young but there is a cohort of bi mums who feel a lot of what I feel, especially the kind of strangeness of it and feeling you don't fit in any community when it comes to this.

I'm bi, but am in a relationship with a woman, so no longer have that wonder of what it would be like. I know a lot of women find themselves struggling with a newfound desire for the same sex, but can't act on it because they are in a monogamous relationship. This is when it can get complicated and I've been there.

I can understand many of the comments on here, but at the same time, I think people need to understand already identifying as bi and then marrying a man isn't the same as marrying a man and then discovering you're bi....or at least thinking you might be.

YY to bisexuality being stigmatized in the MH system. I've had my bisexuality questioned by several psychiatrists - one asked if I was always bisexual, or just when I was manic? Another put it down as the sole symptom for possible co-morbid BPD because he thought I was attention seeking by dating women as well as men.

I have wound up just not mentioning it to psychs.

I've also found it quite painful, in some ways, settling down with a man. I don't want to be sleeping around with lots of women, but I do feel like I've lost a part of my identity. I was quite involved with the LGBT scene at one point, and it's been painful to slowly become less welcome there are I'm often written off as 'basically straight' by old friends. People slag off LGBT people in front of me, and increasingly if I want to maintain any kind of bi identity I have to come out again and again which I hate.

I like my life. I adore DH. But bits of settling down have involved an element of loss.

This has probably become the best bisexuality thread I have seen on MN. Other threads I have felt pretty crap about really as they have descended into crap of some kind.

I read the recent posts and nodded along to so much of it - mostly the one about the discussions. I am reconciled with my sexual identity and have been as long as I have had sexual feelings so I have not really had an OMG moment or problems with feeling I am missing any type of relationship with someone I am not with, though I can see why that causes turmoil and peace in equal measure.

The main thing that causes me sadness is that I feel, and I may be wrong, that the stigma from the LGT community means there isn't a community for me. I am, if anything, MORE concerned about being 'out' with LGT people because I feel more strongly that prejudice from them is more hurtful because they don't have an excuse, maybe that is unfair.

There is literally no-one in my life I feel able to be open with, there are a select few who know but whose reactions have made me guarded about what else I share. I shared with my best friend and she tries to kiss me whenever we drink, I shared with my BF and he went through a phase of telling me his fantasies involving my friends and asking me whether I fancy every woman on the TV...

I have maybe had only one relationship where I was able to be totally open and this affects the intimacy - it was my bisexual teen boyfriend and there were lower risks because he was the same.

Any form which has the dreaded tick boxes causes dreaded anxiety because I would like to feel I can be honest. I don't feel I am achieving anything by hiding, I feel people will know I am lying etc.

Being so guarded protects me in many ways but it also does nothing to help me feel able to be more honest and being fundamentally dishonest so frequently, even if it is only over seemingly small things doesn't sit well with me:

I was aware I was bi before getting together with DH and my previous long term relationship was with a woman so I don't wonder what it would be like to be with a woman. I have had open relationships in the past but equally I am very committed to monogamy when I make the commitment (if that makes sense) so wanting to have sex with anyone, male or female, while I am with DH doesn't come into it. If DH and I were to break up, for whatever reason, I'd have more of a longing for sex with a woman as it can be different in some ways to sex with a man. DH is also bi so I've never experienced any silliness from him with respect to my bisexuality.

This is a really good thread.

I'm bi but I am actually in a poly relationship with both a man and a woman which brings with it another set of challenges.

I recently went to bicon which was amazing - such an accepting and safe space.

Like Booboos, my DH and I are both bi. Aside from a nasty reaction from female friends when I drunkenly 'came out' 20 years ago, I've not had any other problems with it.

I do like being married to a bisexual man, though. It makes for fewer misunderstandings.

I'm also bi, with a child and married to a man and can relate to so much of what is being said here. I feel very lucky that my DH is very accepting of who I am, he's honest enough to admit to having a few 'fantasies' about me with other women, but also doesn't keep going on about them. My best friend is also bi and I also have a close collegue at work who is bi and married to a man so we talk a lot about the problems we face. (We are also lucky that my work has a fantastic LGBT group!). I am also fortunate to have a lot of lesbian, gay and Trans friends (who I have met through various things) who are very accepting of me - one of them was very 'anti-bi' to begin with but is now much more accepting.
I may post more another day, but didn't want to R&R - it's 1:45am however so I need bed, but wanted to mark my place with more than a "me too!"

So good to read all of this, thank you everyone for being so candid and thoughtful in your posts. Do we have the beginnings of a community?!

Fusionconfusion, your story of the self deception part really rings true for me too. I had a crush on a female teacher at school, used to imagine it was her sometimes when I kissed my boyfriend. I had a very close friend at university who I had some feelings for but as far as I can remember nothing ever happened. Years later she told me something did happen but I just can't remember, it's like I repressed it. My husband also said he saw me kiss a girl once, again, I just don't remember. A few years ago I signed up to a dating site (secretly) as a "bicurious" woman. Didn't contact anyone (too scared). But after all of these things it never really crossed my mind that I was not really straight. Ridiculous now of course. How did I lie to myself so convincingly for so long? That in itself is one of the scariest aspects. What else might I be hiding from myself?

"But after all of these things it never really crossed my mind that I was not really straight. Ridiculous now of course. How did I lie to myself so convincingly for so long? That in itself is one of the scariest aspects. What else might I be hiding from myself?"

I certainly went through this. It feels very ungrounding when the jigsaw pieces come together.

My "aha" moment came on a five day silent mindfulness retreat. I had seen one of the leaders at a different mindfulness event and he had talked about growing up gay in Ireland and done this meditation on compassion and treating the mind kindly, like a wild horse... you get further by dropping the rope rather than yanking harshly at its bridle.

At some point over the five days he read this:
"You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things."

And I was ENRAGED. I never felt anger like it. And it was the first part:
"You do not have to be good
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves."

We had to journal as part of the retreat (I am doing a course) and I literally wrote pages and pages about how wrong this was, about how the one thing I really really needed to be was GOOD and not to let the soft animal of my body love what it loved... the following day I was doing some yoga postures and I just realised that my body felt so tight and tense and awkward and that I was literally HOLDING myself from feeling things. My pelvis and my back were in spasm the whole time and they asked us to notice habitual patterns of holding... and I suddenly knew.

I went to speak to him about it... I said I just can't check myself anymore. I just can't spend my whole life in a closet.

I knew even then that none of this would mean I needed to tell everyone and anyone (I don't think it's entirely safe to do so, I think anything that's very personal needs a bit of protection from a harsh world especially when it comes to something that is SO deeply misunderstood) but there is a HUGE difference for me between "not broadcasting it" (again, though, an interesting social prohibition) and literally feeling "if people knew this about me they would reject me totally".

The problem for me is the checking myself... the suppression. I've learned a lot in the last year about thought suppression as part of this Mindfulness course I'm doing and apparently the more you actively suppress your thoughts the more rebound effect there is... so the harder you struggle with not thinking or experiencing something, the more it will show up... and also, really, the more cognitive control you are using the more potential there is for you to be totally exhausted. It sort of lowers your stress response. This is one theory behind why SO MANY bisexual people suffer disproportionately from mental health difficulties.. that maybe the cause is the OPPOSITE to what old school non-LGBT psychiatrists think... maybe it's the bloody pressure of having to face an onslaught of really negative statements about and representations of your sexuality in the media and do so with no support or no sense others feel it too.

For bi people who have integrated their sexual orientation identity with other parts of themselves I can see why it can seem crazy when bi married women are all like "oh my God I am bi and it is nuts and I don't intend to leave my husband but i need to work this shit out". It probably feels quite redundant... but honestly, the trouble it has caused me NOT to look at this means it got to a point I knew it just had to be named and known for what it is. Then there was the inevitable "maybe I am just a closeted lesbian" and that was deeply painful...

I get it, the straight privilege thing. I am married. I did get to conceive easily and naturally without needing expensive interventions or surrogates (90k these days, I'm told). I got married in a big white dress in a Church with a load of conservative relatives.... and the thing is, right, all of those are great... and there is an ache in me that others who love same-sex people don't usually get these things as their right...

AND none of this means that it's been easy for me to walk this road either, always bloody lying to myself... that doesn't mean it's been harder or that it isn't easier to be invisible in this way than if I were in a relationship with a woman. My experience may not be as hard as other people's but as Philip Larkin once wrote - "your course is the harder, I can see. On the other hand, mine is happening to me".

I found my wedding day extraordinarily difficult and I felt terrible guilt about that for a long time, especially as I couldn't for the life of me work out why it felt like such an ill-fitting glove for me. I was marrying someone I truly loved and love still, a soul-mate... and yet something about it really didn't sit well with me and at the time I thought it was just the feminist angle. I think it was too, but I wonder how much of it was some part of me was going, hey - what about ME? I haven't gone away you know...

There's a model called the Compassionate Mind model where they have different parts of the self "speak" to one another, recognising everyone has these inner conflicts about all manner of things. For me, a lot of my experience has been fighting this deep attraction to women, really pushing it down and away. I had loads of gay friends always and the fact I never told them that I had actually BEEN with women just seems really weird to me.. why? I didn't think I was so shamed of my sexuality. But I guess maybe I was. In some ways I still am... and that doesn't sit well with my overall values as a person, which is that I believe we all love the same and people should feel free to express themselves sexually in whatever way feels best to them as long as it isn't harming another person.

Hi, me too! I find the constant assumption that I am straight and the very "naice" Cath Kidston tone of our PTA make me feel fake. It is like I am "passing" but why would it be appropriate to add that I am bi unless it comes up naturally in conversation? It is a bit weird.

Fusion - your posts are so eloquent and so heartbreaking.

Something that has been on my mind is the defensiveness. Bisexuality is so stigmatised, I remember reading some research where people were asked to rate groups of people with identified characteristics, bisexual people were rated lower than heroin addicts and I think most people understand the prejudices against that group of people!

It is understandable that bisexual people therefore choose to express their sexuality in ways that are thought to be socially acceptable - for women this is often sexualising themselves through the lens of heterosexual male fantasy. For a lot of people it is denying themselves, sometimes even to themselves in various ways.

It is unsurprising therefore that bisexual people suffer more mental health issues.

I could never be grateful for the honesty of someone fetishising my sexuality - that feels threatening to me. I feel so sensitive about it. There seems no right answer at all because the meaning of bisexuality is more defined by heterosexism than by bisexual people themselves and that requires brave people to stick their heads up above the parapet, but that requires a sacrifice for me (and my DC) that seems too much.

I left MN for a long while after a thread about a bisexual boyfriend... MN has not covered itself in glory re bisexuality in my past experience.

Good thread. Thanks all for being brave and sharing your thoughts. Fusion, a lot of what you say rings true to me... Especially "I really do feel terribly connected to and attracted to my husband but I also feel this deep desire to be with a woman and to have an emotional relationship with a woman... and I can't have both."

I am struggling massively with it all... Therapy has helped but it's the day to day omissions that I have to make to everyday conversations, the never-ending feelings of guilt and the longing I feel for the life I feel I'm missing that are hard.

My life to the outside world is perfect. I love my husband and children so much that I would never do anything to hurt them, but alongside it all I feel a huge and overwhelming burden in the shape of my sexuality.

I think that longing is more accurately framed, not as a longing to be with another woman as such, but as a sadness related to the suppression of yourself for so long.

Being with a woman would be a way to throw over the suppression of yourself in some ways but it would cause you loss if you have a happy relationship now.

I don't know, because I have reconciled my sexuality with myself long ago but I think you have choices going forward, to see your current happy relationship as a case of bad timing and leave to be able to work on reconciling yourself with yourself - maybe not even by having a same sex relationship, or to try to work on what I see as the root cause - reconciling yourself with yourself.

I can only speak for myself really but I think the fixation on being with someone else is never an answer to some problem inside yourself. Sometimes being with another person is not possible or advisable when you have an issue inside yourself though.

Perhaps the answer is to leave your current relationship, not because you have in your mind that you will be with someone else or that you will just become you but because it is incredibly difficult to integrate something so fundamental to your own identity when you have a highly committed relationship with someone else

You've found out something about yourself but how do you understand fully what it means?

Ocelot41 I have asked myself that question too.. I was Chairperson of my PTA last year which came about by a strange circumstance of being roped into it as the previous committee had stood down and I was asked to as a favour to someone I was good friends with, but I felt it so much there... and I reflected deeply on why that's so, but I think that PTA type stuff feels like the ultimate in straight culture... it's like the drag of being straight, a very extreme representation of a particular role that's as constructed by the media as the idea of the fun loving sexually adventurous promiscuous bi girl.

I think there are many heterosexual women who feel the same about it, it is the butt of many jokes, but I just had this really wry sense of humour about the fact that while we were arguing about what colour cellophane to put on the reindeer food I was locked in this massive internal conflict, longing to sleep with a woman and feeling desperately guilty and ashamed of myself for feeling it and what it would do to my family. It was just sort of absurd.. and absurd to know the extent to which I really would lose all acceptance from that group if they had one tiny iota of what was going on in my head at that time. And yes, if I had been wanting to sleep with a man they would have been none too accepting about it either.. but having seen how this was responded to when it came up from time to time, there's no doubting that the response to a woman cheating with a woman and a woman cheating with a man is not at all the same. No matter how much people say "oh it's all the same". It isn't. There's a hushed, eyes down, "dirty" quality to the way people talk about same-sex attractions (and here in Ireland, among women much more so than men).

And then outside of that I think of all the times I could have said it, that it would have been MORE than appropriate to say it, and didn't...

So being in Ireland we went through marriage equality referendum just over a year ago. There were so many times I could have said "I support this because it could have been me"... without even saying I am bisexual in any strong way. There were times I talked about it with gay friends and lesbian friends and I kept myself outside of the circle of that in that way because I was afraid they would think I was trying to "claim the cool gay space", while I was actually in therapy and crying all the time about my sexuality.. you know, that cool space..

And after all, if you zoom out from it, what's appropriate is a moment by moment changing context. Everyone I know doesn't know I'm in a choir, but if a conversation about choirs comes up I'm not suddenly flushing red and looking at my feet and excusing myself from the conversation. And if someone says they can't understand why people would want to be in a choir and they think it's a fuddy duddy old person hobby I would speak up about what it means to me in a non-shamed way and without feeling my whole self was being torn apart, because I would find a way to voice my opinion and my experience.

Few people now think when someone says they are gay that they are telling you about their sex lives, they see it as someone saying something about themselves that's important to them. That is absolutely not true for bisexuality (and I'm not even sure it's true for women regardless of orientation: there's still a general stigma around female sexuality).

And yes Ojos, that's it for me too. I feel it as a burden and I wish I didn't. I think if people strip away all the heterosexism we've been faced with it's obvious that sexuality is an important part of life and it doesn't make sense that internal feelings and conflicts about sexual and romantic experiences are such a prevalent topic of so much of what we choose to turn towards for leisure - drama, fiction, music, poetry etc - so much a part of being human, but it's only acceptable to have a monosexual response to it.

Offred - I think I remember that thread. Lots of horrible posts by people saying they couldn't be with a bisexual man, and one woman going on about how she liked macho men, like bisexual meant 'Noel Coward without the testosterone'?

MN isn't good with bisexuality at all.

Also, can I second the person who said BiCon was great. It is, and v family friendly.

I'm 'bi' but I'm married now.

Tabsicle - it was the rejection that there was any prejudice on the basis of 'I am and should be perfectly able to choose my own partner for whatever reason I wish' that got to me about that thread the most. I found it quite profoundly upsetting the idea that people would no longer see a partner they had previously loved as an acceptable partner simply because they discovered they had had prior relationships/experiences with same sex partners or identified as bisexual and for no other reason and that this was not because of their prejudiced views re bisexuality. It was just harmless and the shouting down that it was ludicrous to suggest people think negatively about bisexuality.

I left MN for about a year I found it so upsetting.

I don't think people realise how profoundly disturbing it is to be rejected based on something beyond your control, something fundamental to who you are. I mean sure you could deny who you are, but if this thread is anything it shows the damage of doing that really.

Struggling with not being able to be accepted for who you are is profoundly upsetting.

And it is different for men. Women are allowed to be bi if it is for heterosexual men's titiliation, though they are considered as a whole person only good for one thing. Bisexual men are never acceptable to anyone in anyway.

I think that's the thing I would like most. For it to not feel like a big thing or if it is known for it not to be my sole defining characteristic.

Absolutely. It was the message I got from my gay male friend who has known dh and I since our early twenties. Twenty years, three kids and a lifetime of weathering all manner of storms like unemployment and illness and bereavement, and his perspective was I needed to understand that dh would be perfectly justified to leave me because of my sexual orientation as though I had chosen it. Even though I was sexually active with dh and had no intention of acting on any desires towards anyone else. No one would tell someone married for ten years, gay or straight, that if they had a sexual thought about another adult that was a game changer. We can't control our thoughts or desires.

It is basically saying... Yeah but your sexuality is a problem, just as it is for what it is. It is not okay. You are fundamentally not okay.