In her recent video on pop culture biphobia that everyone should watch, Ophie Dokie (an excellent lesbian Youtuber) said: “I don’t experience my sexuality in such a way that ‘fluid’ is a word I would ever reach for. My sexuality is very solid—a foundation for what I want in my life and the decisions that I make inside of it.” And even though I am not a lesbian, that resonated with me very deeply.
I broke up with my abusive high school boyfriend, drained and exhausted from giving that relationship everything, when I was twenty. I eventually started falling for my current girlfriend and finally decided I was done being in denial about being bisexual. In true serial monogamist fashion I plunged into a queer relationship. (I also fully waterboarded my girlfriend, who is also bisexual with a preference for women but had succumbed to believing she would never be able to date a woman seriously.) Neither of our families will ever understand and it is also physically dangerous in our hometown to be queer; there are no properly “out” queer people in our country at all, with zero legal protections or recognition. The long-term plan for us is to migrate to an LGBTQ+ friendly country as skilled labour, which is a time-consuming work-in-progress.
And so it was hard. It was hard for us to make it long-term with no representation of proper vision of what a future can look like, but even still we just … were not built to be casual with each other. In five years of dating, we’ve been mostly long distance and we’ve never seen a reason to break up.
My partner agrees that I was the foundation and optimistic backbone of this relationship, and I still am, despite her being the one with a lean towards loving women. We initially struggled a lot with internalised homophobia, lesbophobia and biphobia, as well as unlearning comphet. There would be days where we felt like imposter straight women fully making up our very legitimate and mutual attraction and romantic love. (Those days have since passed—if you’re a baby gay reading this, they do pass!) My girlfriend was the one who grew up secretly consuming these things, but I threw myself into sapphic media—books, film, articles, essays, vlogs. When it hurt, when I felt like I was losing hope, I doubled down. I didn’t have access to therapy, and I often had to be the therapist in our relationship. But even that couldn’t stop me from embracing what I desperately needed to do to embrace who I truly am, and the authentic life and queer joy I deserve to experience.
Sometimes I worry that I’ve ruined her life, that I’ve been a bad influence on a woman who had made her peace with playing it safe rather than risking her relationships, her culture, and her safety. My girlfriend has informed me that is a valid but incredibly silly concern, as she has consciously chosen to do this with me just as much as I have chosen her. (If you can’t tell, we have an assertive femme x babygirl masc relationship.)
Sometimes I think of what it will mean for me if we end up breaking up. (Not that I feel that scenario looming in any way, it’s just one morbid hypothetical I entertain among with many others.) I kind of … don’t know who I’ll be anymore? I am still bisexual and I feel strongly in that identity. But it hasn’t stopped me from making WLW (specifically, a shared love with my girlfriend) “a foundation for what I want in my life and the decisions that I make inside of it”. But if I happen to date a man somewhere along the line, all the extreme mental preparation I’ve done in regards to someday coming out will have been … unnecessary. Discardable. I expressed this fear to my girlfriend, and she said, very simply, “You wouldn’t feel lost. You’d be with someone you love. And you would still love your sapphic book collection. It will always feel natural and right, and you.”
And this is why I’m in love with her.
