Heterosexuals do not understand bisexuality

Funny and interesting:

It was not jealousy I felt, not in the least. It was exclusion. Invisibility. Irrelevance. What did she mean? What had Stephanie said? What the hell was this? To make matters worse, when we got home that night Stephanie passed out in the elevator and, annoyed, I carried her into my apartment and put her to bed on the coffee table. I figured in the morning she’d forget the whole thing, and, should she need a female fix in the future, she would not bring me along, which is all I really wanted.

I was wrong. In the weeks following that night there was a shift in what I’m reluctant to call “our relationship,” given that what I’m describing here barely lasted two months. Anyway, apparently that evening was something of a test, and I’d been okayed, initiated into Phase Two of something I had no interest in. Suddenly I found myself regularly feeling invisible — at Henrietta’s, at Ruby Fruit’s, at Meow Mix. I barbequed at lesbian barbeques. I cheered at a lesbian bike race. Instead of holing up with Stephanie on Sunday mornings, I became a regular at lesbian softball games, the guy who’d pick up an extra six-pack, which wasn’t quite as sexy.

As it turned out, Stephanie was into men, and into women, but not into men and women. There were no threesomes. There were no orgies, and had the offer come, I would have declined it. Stephanie, so little and lithe, always found the least conventionally feminine women the most irresistible. This was not how it was supposed to be.

Maybe there is some reality to the idea that dating a bisexual person means living a kind of raw, sexually amorphous existence—or, at the very least, getting to sit on the corner of the bed from time to time while your girlfriend kisses a girl who you secretly want to be kissing. Maybe you’ve been there, maybe your friend has told you stories. Call me, tell me I have it all wrong. Or maybe it’s that Stephanie was heroically passive-aggressive, and started treating me like a lesbian because she wanted to end things without having to end them (though, given that her brand of craziness came with a propensity for a blunt sort of anger I haven’t seen since, I doubt this).

All I know is that Stephanie and I eventually broke up, during a polite conversation that involved the throwing of a wine glass against a section of wall only a few feet from my face. We no longer talked when we ran into each other on the block. I found myself suddenly interested, at least for a bit, in the least bisexual women imaginable: a Midwestern law student, a Republican from Alabama.