How To REALLY Know If You're Bisexual (Or Just Curious...)

Are you coming out as a lesbian? How long have you been out?

Are you all the way out? Does your family know? Do your coworkers know? Do your friends know? Who knows and who doesn’t know? How committed are you to the lifestyle? Loving women and living as a woman lover?

There are lots of unspoken rules in the land of lesbians. And depending on your knowledge of the unspoken and unwritten rules, you’ll succeed or fail in some significant ways.

Are you femme? Are you butch? Are you something in between? Have you ever been with a man? Were you married? Do you have kids? Did you like sex with a man? Do you miss it? Do you like penetration? Do you hate the idea of penetration? How many partners have you had? And on it goes.

These are just a few of the questions that come up between women in the process of exploring relationship. It all depends on your past and what’s happened. It depends on the woman on the other side of the table and what her past is about.

Our experiences shape our present and determine our futures. Do guys ask these questions? Damn if I know. I’m not a guy and I haven’t been hanging out that close to gay men to find out.

As a woman who came out later in life, I’ve met lesbians that don’t want to date me because there is an ex-husband and children. I’ve also met women that wanted to date me, and in spite of my being honest and upfront about my past, they had issues with the ex-husband and my children as time went on.

Sometimes it feels like there is no winning in some conversations. I continue to meet many women that have come out later in life. It’s a phenomenon that we will always see. Perhaps it will happen less when sperm donation becomes an easier and less expensive option for younger women. But it’s also going to take a lot more work being done on equal rights for both men and women to decide they don’t need to “pretend to be straight” to have a family and kids.

But what I really want to say here today is that coming out later in life is not simple. It’s not easy either. It’s definitely not what most women expect when they decide to come out. I’ve had more than a few conversations with women who had an idea in their head about what it would be like to finally come out. To leave their husbands and their marriage and risk all to be with a woman.

I admit that the movie I was running in my head when I came out was not at all what happened in real life. My movie included me and a woman I viewed as beautiful being together. We had a sweet house and animals and maybe a child or two (one was mine and the other her’s) who got along so well.

We had beautiful music playing all the time, we always wanted to do the same things at the same time, we moved and breathed at the same pace and believed all the same things about life. She was soft. Soft lips with no pointy prickly beard bristles and we would melt into each other’s soft bodies to make love that would last for hours. We’d be so happy and content. We’d enjoy and share all that life has to offer. Even enjoying all the same foods and sharing dinners together every evening.

Let me tell you that this didn’t happen. No, it didn’t happen for me. It’s not my story of coming out. In my story, yes, I fell in love and then my heart was broken. Now that’s not unusual, is it?

My first love didn’t want me after all. It didn’t take long, just three short months and that first love had fallen apart. She had warned me that there was a process to coming out and she’d been there and done it. She also at one point talked about wanting to share this season of my life with me, but that didn’t happen. We parted ways and I was off to figure it out on my own.

What a mess I felt I’d created. I was overwhelmed with the magnitude of changes after being married for 21 years. No one had really helped me understand the “rules” of the lesbian community, and when I ran into them face first, it was one more thing that broke my heart.

I just didn’t understand why women didn’t want to get to know me or be friends. So, I moved into a neighborhood that was very gay friendly with plenty of queers living there.

Actually it was the same neighborhood my ex-girlfriend was living in. She’d wanted me to live close, but at the point of my moving just three blocks from her, she broke up with me. So I was living in this really queer friendly part of town, but still I wasn’t able to easily meet women for friendship and just to hang out. It was before the days of Meetup.com and when dating sites were just coming online. It was a lonely place to be at that time.

I’m sure one issue was that I looked too straight. I looked like someone who’d been married and was heterosexual. Well, that makes sense, right? I’d only been out for a year and I was still finding my way out of the old world, slowly walking into a world with its own set of rules and expectations.

My experience of the lesbian world in those first few years showed me that it's as full of rules as the heterosexual world. It’s just that the rules are different and sometimes particularly surprising for a newbie. One of those unspoken rules is that many women who came out at a young age and are now older often don't want to date late-comers to lesbian life. 

Like many "late to the game" lesbians, I was hurt by this “rule” when I first learned about it. As my lesbian life experience has grown, I now get it.  It makes complete sense to me that life-long lesbians just want to protect their hearts from women who may just be curious versus serious.

There’s a lot of video and TV time being given to the idea of two women being together. In the land of queer where the lesbians live, it's not a game show or a reality show — it’s real life with real hearts and real emotions.

For those of you that have realized late in life that you must own your self and that your truth is living as lesbian, I salute you. You will and have taken many brave steps to get to where you are.

This in no way diminishes the courage of the women that have always lived their lives out in the open. The truth is that the courage of lesbians that have always taken a stance for lesbian freedom are my heros. Those are the women that helped me finally realize that I must live my truth. Thank you again for you courage, for your lives lived in the open, and your voices.

I'm asking nicely to all lesbians: please have some mercy for the late comers to lesbian life as we stumble and perhaps bumble about trying to figure out what to do, with who and when.

You are probably tired of women like me, but we’re not going away. Actually, you can probably expect more and more of us to be showing up. And in that deluge of "late to life" lesbians, we will be able to solve the problem of there not being enough lesbians to date. How’s that for a turn-around?