Oh wow. This whole thread has left me staring at a wall for a while.
I’m not really sure how best to summarise my thoughts in a way that would be useful to anyone, but I’ve found the wider discussion around bisexuality a bit difficult to read. A few demographic bits about me in case it’s relevant: I’m bisexual, in a monogamous relationship of nearly 20 years, and have known I’m bisexual since age 12. I’m also a completely normal and fairly boring person. I like reading and going for walks.
A heads up that none of what I’m going to say here is addressed to OP personally or is intended to be specific to her situation, more a comment on some of the other ideas I’ve seen being discussed more generally.
As a bisexual, I’ve always found it odd when people have assumed I could never be satisfied with one partner and therefore that I’m bound to cheat sooner or later. I’ve never heard anyone applying the same logic to anything else, for example saying that people who are attracted to both blondes and brunettes could never be faithful to a blonde partner, because there’d always be a brunette out there somewhere and the brunette-attracted part of that person would always be left unsatisfied, and vice versa, or that people who are open to interracial partnerships could never be faithful to just one person etc.
I’ve encountered offshoots of the idea above that have become quite extreme. For example my mother, who is very supportive of gay and lesbian rights, told me when I was a teen that bisexuals are dirty and promiscuous and carry diseases and I should never sleep with one. And this was AFTER I’d already come out to her as bisexual myself.
I’ve seen people in this thread debating whether ‘biphobia’ is really a thing, and for me these are examples of the way that it can occasionally look, and it can be expressed by straight people and gay/lesbian people alike. It can look like: bisexuals are untrustworthy and duplicitous. Bisexuals have overactive libidos and throw themselves at anything that moves. Bisexuals are bound to cheat. Bisexuals will give you STDs. And if you’re a male bisexual, you’re not really bisexual, you’re actually gay, and if you’re a female bisexual, you’re not really bisexual, you’re actually straight and are just saying it for attention and to sound more interesting than you really are. Sorry for expressing these ideas so crudely, but this is the kind of thing that people have said to me or about other people I care about.
People are of course completely within their right not to date or marry people they aren’t comfortable with, or to leave people if they are no longer comfortable with them, and the police aren’t going to come knocking on anyone’s door to force them into relationships. However, if people do hold assumptions and biases against bisexual people, it can be worth examining and challenging those assumptions, it can damage or preclude relationships that could otherwise be very meaningful and positive, and it also does have the power to really hurt others. Being told you must be disgusting and promiscuous and people should never consider dating or marrying you is not a good feeling, whatever the cause of those ideas is.
I can’t speak to the situation with OP’s partner in the slightest, not knowing him personally or anything, but for anybody who’s genuinely curious in a general sense about why any bisexual people would ever need to come out to anybody at all unless they’re planning to cheat or just using it as a narcissistic method of gaining attention for themselves, here are a few possible reasons:
- Admitting to being bisexual feels like a possible way of normalising bisexuality for people who are struggling to understand it or who have only been introduced to bisexual people through hurtful stereotypes – if people get to know bisexuals on a personal level and see that we’re just normal people, it might help break through some of those biases and incorrect assumptions;
- It might help encourage and support other people who feel like it’s a shameful secret they have to hide;
- For our own personal sakes, it really shouldn’t have to be a shameful secret that we have to hide if we don’t want to.
With sympathy to OP, as I do understand that getting big and unexpected news can be very difficult to come to terms with and that you’ll have questions about what this might mean for your relationship going forward. Here’s hoping that things settle down for you and that you’re eventually able to move forward in the way that feels right for you, however that ends up looking.