I am pansexual, but I’m giving up on pursuing women; here’s why:

I have always known I could find myself attracted to any gender. My first crush was an actress in one of my favorite movies. I must have been about six. A year or two later I had my first real life crush, a boy named Nathan in my third grade class. My next crush was Evan, in fifth grade — Evan came out as gay in high school; kind of funny that the one boy I liked in my class was the gay one, the sweet one, the gentle one, the most “feminine” boy in my class*.

Now, by this age I had been inundated — indoctrinated — with the hetero culture which surrounded me. I had seen every Disney princess movie, I knew that Barbie was supposed to be with Ken, there was no queer representation in any of the kid’s shows I watched (at least not overtly enough for me to notice), my little sister had already had a schoolyard “boyfriend”, all of the girls in my classes were into boys — especially Chelsea; I’ll never forget the day in second grade during show-and-tell when she pounced on Ryan and tried to make out with him… I wonder what ever happened to her…

So, I knew I was supposed to like boys. To be clear, I thought I was supposed to only like white boys — I grew up in a small, very white, upper middle class neighborhood, and although my parents are far from racist I had somehow internalized enough of the racism seen in the media and society at large to believe that they would not be okay with me dating a person of color (despite the fact my sister’s “boyfriend” had been black (to be clear, I am putting “boyfriend” in quotation marks because it’s not a real relationship if you’re in kindergarten)), but I digress. I was taught to like boys. My parents never plainly stated that they would not accept a queer child, or my dating a person of color, and as it later turned out they absolutely would accept both with open arms. And yet I had internalized enough comp-het nonsense that by the time I realized I could be openly queer, it was sort of too late. I’m sure many of you reading already understand what I mean, but let me try to explain, albeit in a roundabout manner… bear with me.

Throughout the nineties and early 2000’s I was a little undiagnosed autistic girl, struggling to understand why I didnt fit in. Learning to fit in, or so I thought at least, meant trying to conform, but this didn’t even dawn on me until middle school. I had very few real friends in elementary school. Despite having what one might consider friends, I was often excluded at recess (if you’d like to hear more about my childhood and adolescent trauma, I wrote another piece on that). In the third through fifth grades, I was part of a “Talented and Gifted” program, a public school program designed to offer an accellerated curriculum to the kids who “weren’t being challenged enough” (if you are a millennial you likely understand the plight of the “special unique snowflake” child who can do “anything [they] put [their] mind to” (and now struggles to find work in their field or achieve milestones such as home ownership), but again, I digress).

In the TAG program, most of my classmates weren’t fashionable or even aware of what it meant to aspire to fashionability, as was the case for me. We were nerds and we were proud. My go-to outfit formula was jeans and a baggy tee. Throw a baggy hoodie on top if there’s a chill in the air. I felt no desire to be outwardly girly and simply did not realize it would ever be expected of me. There were only three students (girls) out of the thirty-something kids in my class, who seemed concerned with coolness or fashion. Two of them were sort of mean to me, but looking back I can’t help but feel bad for them — so young and already feeling the pressures to perform femininity. Then, by the time I made it to middle school the few friends I thought I had went on to private schools, seldom heard from again. I was starting fresh, but not in a fun way.

The middle school was so big and bright and full of cliques and jocks and skater boys and beautiful mean girls. This, I was not accustomed to. There was a homogeny which I was not accustomed to either. The majority of the students seemed to have a shared understanding of how to dress, of what was “in”. I, meanwhile, was showing up to school in my cozy black Winnie-the-Pooh overalls and my black and pink glitter graphic kitty cat shirt — an item I had been so proud to select during back to school shopping with my mom, which I now was ridiculed for. Perhaps it was growing up in an isolated neighborhood where I rarely interacted with my peers, perhaps it was having been surrounded by nerds in elementary school, perhaps it was having somewhat older parents than my peers, parents who were not concerned with modern fashions, perhaps it was the autism and I just didn’t get it. Regardless, I was immediately deemed uncool, while most of the girls in my school were performing femininity, performing womanhood — some of them were already having (hetero) sex, a concept I had only learned about the year before.

Let’s talk about that for a moment. In fifth grade, when my mom gave me “the talk”, she framed sex in a very traditional and hetero manner. There was no mention of queerness whatsoever. It was “when a man and a woman are in love and want to have a baby, they do this thing… the penis goes here…”. You know that old routine… ugh. Anyway…

So, seemingly all the girls at school sought the attention and approval of the boys, specifically the cool boys. Now, what I felt at the time was probably a combination of having inernalized, up to that point, my fair share of hetero rhetoric, and also the pressure I was feeling from my peers to conform (and conforming meant liking boys). The f-slur was thrown around as an insult a lot in those days. I had always known I liked girls, but it was so obviously unacceptable and possibly dangerous to be out. I had already begun learning to suppress that part of me, whether consciously or unconsciously. So, I decided which boys were cute, which were crush-worthy.

Anyway, this is sort of becoming a tangent; let’s skip ahead a few years.

(If you want to hear more about middle school, read that other piece I mentioned)

So, by the time I got to high school (both of these schools were overwhelmingly white and straight, by the way), I had begun to ascertain what was expected of me, culturally, or whatever. Dress this way, act “feminine”, wear makeup, style your hair, succeed at education without acting like it matters to you too much (cause nerds are lame, blah blah blah), perform sexiness and desirability, like boys, etc. In middle school there were, to my knowledge, no openly gay students, but in high school there were a handful (in a sea of nearly two thousand straight kids). Still, I did not feel safe coming out, or at least not in any way which would allow me to actually behave or present myself in any visibly queer manner. At some point, I had realized that boys thought it was hot when girls were bi, but only if they treated their bi-ness as a performance to excite the boys. In my grade, a class of four hundred, there were only two openly lesbian students — three if you count the one who, after high school, came out as trans; he is straight, as far as I now know. I always liked him. He was nice to me…

Anyway…

I go into more detail in that other piece, but basically sometime during sophomore year I started actually receiving attention from boys, though it was not the particular boys whose attention I sought, nor was it the type of attention I desired (it was sexual rather than romantic). Never, ever, not once did a girl flirt with me any time before I graduated. I may be autistic, but I am not the kind of autistic who cannot tell when someone is flirting (though this is a real and valid thing that people all across the neuro-spectrum experience). Around the time I started receiving attention from boys I had also sort of started identifying as bi, but not in any tangible or visibly queer sense, definitely more in the “I like girls so if you like me you might get to see me kiss a girl” bullshit perform-it-for-the-male-gaze kind of way. Anyhow, I ended up dating a few different boys throughout my junior and senior years. Technically only one of them was really my boyfriend and the others were what would by today’s standards be deemed “situationships”, but we didn’t have that term back then.

So, jumping forward again. A year or so after high school I had my first real sexual encounter with a woman. I say “real” cause kissing platonic girl friends in high school didn’t really count. There were two hookah lounges in town where the young adults hung out back then. One evening I was out with some people at one of these hookah joints, and there was a girl there whom I didn’t really know, but she was friends with my friends. She was bi, I think (I never kept up with her after this night, so I’m not sure how she identifies now), and she flirted with me and at some point that night we ended up in her parents’ basement, drunk and making out. She went down on me, and when I asked if I could return the favor she said no, and the reason she gave was that I wouldnt know what I was doing down there. For the record, I did not cum; I probably would’ve done just as well as she had. This was the first time I had experienced biphobia at the hands of a woman in this sort of context, a woman I was actually into. I deeply internalized that rhetoric. I don’t think we ever spoke again.

Over the years that followed, in movies and television, and on various burgeoning social media platforms, I continued to be exposed to this sort of biphobic rhetoric from the mouths (or keyboards) of women. I simultaneously was not presented with many opportunities to engage with women on a romantic or sexual level, besides further experiences of performative bisexuality and a brief unreciprocated crush on a girl friend. Much of this was internalized, and I had several back-to-back monogamous relationships with cis men, which spanned my entire early twenties. By the time I was twenty-five and single again, I had decided to actually try to pursue women. I changed the settings on my dating apps to show me all genders. I matched with some women, but ultimately found myself yet again in a relationship with a cis man. This time though, it was a polyamorous relationship, and I continued trying to pursue women throughout its duration. But there was a phenomenon I had noticed which kept occurring when I would match with women on these apps. They don’t make an effort. Of all the women I matched with over the years, only one resulted in an actual date. There was no second date. And by the time this first date had occurred, it was years after I had initially begun pursuing women, and I was in a different polyamorous relationship with a different cis man. I have come to the conclusion that there is something happening in the queer community where many women simultaneously wish to be pursued and not do the pursuing. This unfortunately leaves us in a catch-22, a stalemate where we don’t date because neither wants to be the chaser, both want to be the chased. Now, I personally am fine with doing the pursuing, but you’ve got to be able to at least hold up your end of the conversation, which the vast majority of these women did not seem willing to do. There had been one other woman somewhere along the line, whom I did not meet online and had a friendship with. We were into each other. But she was a monogamous lesbian and spouted that same tired biphobic rhetoric: “you don’t know what you’re doing”, “I don’t want to be an experiment”. I internalized this, of course, deepening my own sense of self-doubt. The biphobia among lesbians seems to be running rampant, at least from where I am sitting. It seems to me, also, that the biphobia is somewhat less present among polyamorous queer women than the monogamous, but that’s simply based on my own experiences and observations and is perhaps not universally apparent.

So, five years after initially deciding to pursue women, I was a thirty-year-old bi/pan woman who had still only slept with men (a familiar scenario to many of you, I’m sure). Then, finally, I had the pleasure of meeting a lesbian woman without prejudice against my having been with men. She is sweet, kind, empathetic, emotionally intelligent, and a joy to be around. We hung out for several months, with our mutual crushes lingering, until deciding to pursue a relationship. I had told her of my hang-ups and she was extremely patient, understanding, and accommodating. We dated for just over a year, but in the nearly fourteen months we were (technically) in a relationship I had a very difficult time feeling confident enough to initiate physical intimacy (a problem I certainly do not have with men). There was a bit of a mutual hesitation, because she didn’t want me to feel pressured, which I appreciated, but ultimately this culminated in what can only be described as basically a mostly platonic relationship, but with a romantic label. To clarify, our relationship was polyamorous, and around halfway through she found an additional partner, so she was not sex-deprived for the entirety of our relationship, at least. I just couldn’t muster the courage. I had been told too many times that I’d be bad at it, and despite her patience and insistence that it was okay that there were a learning curve, I just couldn’t bring myself to take the risk of allowing myself to feel like I was failing at something. Something I had wanted a chance to become good at for so long. Now I am thirty-two and I’m giving up.

The thing is, if I couldnt manage to pull it off with my ex, with her incredible patience and encouragement, I simply do not know if I ever will. I have been coming to terms with the idea that perhaps I was pigeonholed into heterosexuality too early, and too much damage has been done. I fear the psychological damage has grown too cumulative, compounded too far, and if I haven’t faced it yet, I likely never will. For a long time I thought if I never gave it a shot I’d spend my whole life feeling like I’d ignored and neglected a part of myself. Now I believe I have had ample opportunity and couldn’t pull the trigger — I couldn’t even put my finger on it. So, I am resolved to heterosexuality. I am happily in a monogamous relationship with a wonderful man, and I yearn for nothing else. I have accepted my fate as one of the straights. Deep in my soul, I will always be queer, but I have decided that i’ve settled in (in the coziest sense of the word) to my pseudo-hetero identity and I am okay with that. As a matter of fact, I am comfortable and content and fulfilled, in all my glorious “straightness”.

*Evan was technically in my sister’s class, not mine, but the TAG program was pretty tight-knit

It’s sausage time for me, I guess! (Kowalski factory, Hamtramck, MI. Photo by me. Shot on iPhone.)