How to Do It is Slate’s sex advice column. Have a question? Send it to Stoya and Rich here. It’s anonymous!
Dear How to Do It,
My husband (trans man) and I (bisexual cis woman) have been married for eight years and have been in an open, polyamorous marriage for about four months after a lot of talking and therapy. He has another committed partner. Shifting to this new relationship after so many years has been a process, and all three of us have had our insecurities brought to the forefront. But we’ve been working very hard on communicating, and things felt good to me. We knew there’d be more unforeseen challenges, but we believed we could face them together. After years of crisis after crisis, it felt like we were finally able to work toward the future we wanted.
Then, a week ago, my husband told me he thinks he might be more gay than bisexual. Needless to say, it’s been an emotional rollercoaster of a week as he tries to figure out his own identity and we both try to figure out what this means for our relationship. We both love and care for each other deeply, but it has been very destabilizing to realize that he might not love me in the same way that I love him.
Talking with friends and therapists is helping, but I’ve been struggling to find community or common experiences. Most of what I’ve been able to find about mixed-orientation marriage is focused on couples where one spouse is gay, and the other is straight—it just feels disconnected from my experience as a queer person. A lot of resources talk about opening up a relationship after a partner comes out, but that’s a very different dynamic from already being in a poly relationship that suddenly feels imbalanced. I was fine with him being attracted to and having sex with other people, but I wasn’t prepared for him to possibly not be attracted to me.
So my question is two-fold: Firstly, are there communities or stories out there for queer relationships that change or end when one person’s sexuality changes? I know there must be, but wading through pages of homophobia or martyrdom from straight people to try to find them is too exhausting. Secondly, how can I work toward accepting that my husband’s sexuality is not a referendum on me? I know that if my husband is gay, that is just who he is and not a sign that there’s something inferior about me, but knowing that isn’t the same as feeling it. Whether my husband and I end up as friends, platonic partners, or even decide we do want to maintain the relationship we’ve had, I know that I want him in my life to some extent (and he has said the same to me). How can I cherish what we have together without constantly getting pulled back to the feelings of what I’ve lost or what he can’t give me? How can I continue to celebrate the love he’s found with his other partner without comparing myself unfavorably? How do we get to the point where we can feel comfortable around each other again, even if it doesn’t look the same way that it once did?
—Bye Bi
Dear Bye Bi,
This phrase in your letter, “after years of crisis after crisis,” gives me some pause. There’s certainly been no shortage of national crises over the past decade, which could have significantly impacted you all. The discussions and therapy you describe leading up to your opening your relationship four months ago sound like they could also have taken years, and therefore may be what you’re referring to. In case there’s other stuff behind that phrase, though, take a look at whether any of that might be part of what’s interfering with your ability to feel comfortable with your husband, and roll with the changes that life can bring. Sometimes we can get so focused on the rare details of our situations that we don’t notice how deeply factors that are common to the point of being banal impact us.
Realistically, you’re unlikely to find much in the way of long-form essays, whole books, or busy communities dedicated to people in queer marriages where, after opening up, their partner questions whether they’re more bisexual or homosexual. I find this situation incredibly irritating, and you clearly do as well. The internet used to easily connect us to a massive library of deep thought from people who’ve had incredibly uncommon lives. Now it’s riddled with AI slop, low-effort posts meant to serve as marketing, and calibrated toward decreasing attention spans. Neither of us can do more than we already are to change the forces at play. What you can do is continue to filter what you’re consuming and change your search parameters.
I fully support your decision to avoid the experiences and commentary of heteronormative people who are struggling to process a shift in their lives that forces them to confront, well, the broad spectrum of reality. Their difficulty is valid, entirely irrelevant to you, and you’re the priority right now. There’s a blog here from a bisexual master’s in counseling student, and a short post from lesbian-focused website Autostraddle about mixed orientation relationships, which are absolutely not a direct match for your situation but are at least coming from a queer perspective. There’s a small comment in Kate Bornstein’s My New Gender Workbook where they describe being in a lesbian relationship with someone who then came out as a trans man, living as a heterosexual couple for some time, and then parting ways when he “found his gay male side.” The paragraph wraps up with Bornstein writing, “What a wacky world, huh?” I imagine that Bornstein’s lifetime study of gender and well-documented appreciation of the ways our selves and identities shift in tiny and massive ways throughout our lifetimes contributed to their ability to summarize that multi-year relationship in this way. Read some Bornstein.
Seek out people who live in the complexities, and who think about the ways that our sets of identities, the concentric layers of the world around us, and the interactions between who we are and how we are perceived are in constant motion. Search for people who share the experience of having taken uncommon paths and have chosen to be true to themselves over the simplicity of living by societal expectations, with very little in the way of roadmaps or guidebooks. Find support for cobbling your way forward together. It is not easy. I know it is not easy, and I think it’s worth doing anyway.
Your husband let you know that he’s questioning his sexual orientation. Being open in practice and this questioning that he’s doing are both very new. At the same time, the language you use to talk about opening up and your attitude toward it paints a picture of having come to terms with the relationship structure rather than being interested in it yourself or deriving any pleasure or joy from it. That’s probably contributing to your feelings. Give your husband some time to work through his changes and arrive at something more concrete, and focus on yourself. Try to think through what you want before considering what you’re able to have.
Lastly, whether we’re talking about erectile dysfunction in a Leave it to Beaver-style marriage or a scenario like yours, feeling as though a partner’s attraction is a statement of our inherent value is often a sign that we need to work on our own self-image and self-worth. While sexual appeal and desirability absolutely are factors in how well women are treated in the world (in a way that’s far more complex than hot equals all the privileges and no downsides), countering those very reality-based messages with compassion for ourselves, giving ourselves grace, and spending time with people and in environments where we are appreciated for concrete aspects of ourselves that go beyond sexpot, caretaker, or support person is usually a big part of closing that gap between knowing you aren’t inferior and feeling as though you are.
—Jessica
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