I’m in a Happy Relationship With a Man. Would I Be Happier With a Woman?

In a society that puts profit before people, it’s hard not to feel broken-hearted. Landlords split friends, nuclear families isolate parents, bosses burn out workers. But fear not – Red Flags is here to tend to your troubled hearts. 

In Novara Media’s anti-capitalist anti-advice column, resident therapist Sophie K Rosa marries their ongoing training in psychoanalysis with ideas from their book, Radical Intimacy, to respond to your questions. Unlike other agony aunts, Sophie doesn’t claim to have all the answers, but they could help you unlock new ways of thinking. 

To submit a dilemma to Sophie, please fill out this form.

Dear Sophie,

I’m bisexual and in a fulfilling relationship with a man, but I often feel like my queerness is dismissed or erased by society, friends and family. I sometimes wonder if being in a relationship with a woman – I’ve only ever dated or slept with women before – would make me feel more seen and accepted. Not because I’m unhappy where I am, but because it might validate my identity in ways others currently overlook. I often fantasise about being with a woman long-term, imagining it as more liberating, more free from the male gaze, more gentle, and like a quiet rebellion against the patriarchy. There’s a part of me that feels sad not to be with a woman right now, even as I love my male partner deeply. What do I do with that sadness and longing? Does this just mean I am gay? Is it worth disrupting a happy relationship to feel more affirmed in my queerness and pursue the freedom I associate with being with a woman?

Seeking Bisexual Affirmation

Dear Seeking Bisexual Affirmation,

It strikes me that there are many questions here: about sexual identity, yes, but also about gender, biphobia, doubt and love. There is, among it all, the yearning for recognition, and the dream of liberation through love. 

You are wondering about affirmation: if the queer affirmation you might feel being partnered with a woman is worth disrupting your existing relationship with a man. There is no definitive answer to this, but I notice that in your letter, as well as wondering about affirmation, you are providing a version of it, on multiple occasions, for yourself: you affirm that you are queer, and fulfilled, deeply in love and happy in your relationship. 

I note this not to advocate for your remaining partnered, but to invite reflection on self-affirmation per se. I don’t think self-affirmation means being self-reliant or indeed certain about anything – ourselves, our sexuality, our life choices – but perhaps it does entail noticing what feels true enough right now. I say ‘enough’ because hardly anything, even the truest things, will feel true all of the time – amid fluctuating emotions, selves, relationships, contexts. When do you feel most ‘yourself’?

I wonder if it feels like your desires are pulling you in different directions: towards your male partner on the one hand, and towards an alternate life partnered with a woman on the other. Seemingly mutually exclusive or conflicting desires – especially when they concern such fundamental aspects of our lives – can be painful and preoccupying. For bisexual people, contending with stigma that can malign attraction to multiple genders as ‘confused’, ‘greedy’ or ‘untrustworthy’, these feelings can be especially troubling. In a monosexually normative society, it can sometimes feel more conflicting than expansive to experience bisexual desire. Many bisexual activists have attempted to reclaim biphobic stereotypes rather than attempt to disprove them.

Wanting potentially opposing things – or as you put it, having different ‘parts’ of oneself, wanting different things – is a common experience. We are, all of us, complex and conflicted beings. People feel fragmented in different ways (people also disavow or repress parts of themselves that don’t fit their ego-ideal). I am saying this in case it is a comfort: even though some people don’t feel torn due to bisexual desire, everyone feels torn due to something. Often silently so – not least in the realm of romantic relationships, where certainty and ‘all-in’-ness holds such sway.

You ask what you can do with the sadness and longing. Well, you could heed it by ending your fulfilling relationship and pursuing partnership with a woman. Maybe, in doing so, you would indeed experience some or all of your fantasy of liberation, freedom from the male gaze, gentleness and feminist resistance; it can be true that relationships between women, under patriarchy, entail a certain magic. But then again, you might not experience any of this.

Or, you might – but then be faced with all manner of other relational challenges. As much as we might wish otherwise, relationships between women (or without men) do not guarantee all things good. Women, too, are complex and conflicted beings. And our relationships do not exist in a vacuum, but in further relation to others and to the world. Would you be leaving your real male partner for a real woman, or a fantasy? Not to say the latter would be ‘wrong’ by any means, just worth being aware of. 

As for whether the sadness and longing ‘just means you are gay’ – like you, I can’t say. Maybe you will change the way you identify, maybe you won’t, maybe you will and then change again. What I can say is that ‘truth’ in sexuality is wily and arguably, in some ways, futile. Whilst sexual identities and categories serve important purposes, each human’s sexuality is, in the end, unique – and, for many people, changes in varied directions over the course of a lifetime. Bisexual people have invented the term ‘bi-cycling’ to describe changing preferences in gendered attraction. Perhaps you will decide you would prefer to exclusively be with women; perhaps you generally prefer women, but want to be with your male partner specifically; perhaps your attractions will shift over time. 

If you stay with your partner, what to do with the sadness and longing? To begin with, I think acknowledging the existence of such feelings is important, as you have done. Making choices in life – even ones that bring us much pleasure and joy – often entails grief for the path untrodden. And then there’s the cultural demand to ‘pick a side’, which can be distressing, even maddening, for bisexual people. Do you have bisexual friends or peers you can talk to? Perhaps engaging with bisexual theory and media might support you to feel more connected to the wholeness of your queer self. 

In this relationship, you ask, how can you experience recognition as a queer person? First, I’d ask you, what would it mean to be recognised by others as queer? The answer might differ depending on which others we’re referring to. Is being recognised as queer about people understanding your sexual and romantic attractions? Or is it about your ‘orientation’ – towards queer life – being grasped by others in a broader sense? Is it about being able to live out particular kinds of relationships with others, platonic or otherwise, perhaps non-monogamously? Is it about your experience of or relationship to gender? There are a lot of ways to be queer – and for many people, sexuality identity is less a destination than a journey. 

As a queer person in a straight-passing relationship, you hold a certain privilege, some may be quick to point out. And it’s true – though in terms of your own psychic life and your place among queer communities, you might not feel it. Are you involved with broader queer struggles? Can you harness your queer emotion in the fight for trans liberation? This too, is a question of gender: an urgent, material one, often with the highest of stakes. 

Bisexual people have long been on the frontlines of queer activism. Lani Kaʻahumanu co-founded the US’s first feminist bisexual political action group in 1983, and was vocal in her solidarity with trans people. In her 1993 speech at the March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation, she said: “Both the bisexual and transgender movements expose and politicise the middle ground. Each show there is no separation, that each and every one of us is part of a fluid social, sexual and gender dynamic. Each signals a change, a fundamental change in the way our society is organised.” The scholar and writer Jacob Engelberg has called for “a radical leftist bi-trans alliance […] to disrupt the normalising binaries that undergird systems of social oppression, all the while centring the social realities engendered and maintained by these same systems.” 

No matter how your romantic life evolves, I wonder if you might come to experience the fluidity in your sexual orientation – as in, your orientation to the world – as something affirming in and of itself. Perhaps, even, as a part of you to be glad about, and to harness politically.