my-husband

In private, my husband, Paul*, has started referring to his sexual orientation as “Results-Oriented.” As in, he doesn’t care what gender his sexual partners are if they can get the job done, so to speak. He’s being glib when he says that — no, he wouldn’t go to bed with just anyone — but there’s also some truth behind it. For a person who isn’t ready to socially, culturally, or politically identify as bisexual, Results-Oriented is his way of saying that he’s not quite as straight as most straight-identified men.

Paul started calling himself Results-Oriented around the time we had our first foursome with a straight-presenting, queer-identified couple. For the most part, we engaged in heterosexual and lesbian activities, but at one point, I let it slip that watching two men together has always been one of my top turn-ons. Our male partner looked up with excitement and climbed on top of Paul. Once he obtained consent, he gave Paul…

That was the first – but not the only – time Paul has engaged in sexual activity with a man. At this point in our increasingly polyamorous relationship, he’s just as likely to play with an interested male partner as he is with an interested female partner. Yet, whenever we discuss his evolving understanding of his sexuality, he stops short of calling himself “bisexual.” (To be clear, I’m using “bisexual” as an imperfect catchall here; he doesn’t call himself “pansexual,” “omnisexual,” “queer,” or “heteroflexible,” either.) In part, that’s because he is primarily hetero-romantic, in the sense that he has never been interested in having an emotionally intimate and romantic relationship with a man. I often wonder, though, if part of his hesitation in claiming the sexual descriptor that I’ve used to describe myself for the last five years has to do with the reality that coming out as a bisexual man is much, much harder than coming out as a bisexual woman.

[Read more over at theFrisky]

Ladies, could you date or marry a bisexual man? Have you ever dated a man you believed to be straight and later told you he was bisexual? Is it more acceptable to be a bisexual woman than it is to be a bisexual man?