Hotel Bliss Guest Blog

I was the last to know I was bi!

I was twenty when I finally decided that there was no getting around it. I was unashamedly, irrefutably bisexual. The funny thing was, I had been saying I was bi since I was fifteen. Now, before you accuse me of being the type of girl that would make out with another girl at parties just to get attention, let me explain that I was hopelessly clueless about who I was even when I was staring straight at myself. Until I was twenty, I called myself theoretically bi. I knew I thought girls were stunning, but I had never felt a deep emotional attachment to one.

That changed when I met Jaime. Jaime was a bi girl who was an acquaintance of mine. I was dating a man at the time and they had fooled around. Overcome with guilt, she insisted to him that she had to tell me. Up until that conversation, I really didn’t know her that well. We started talking and I immediately became interested in this delightful and complex girl. After one conversation, it didn’t matter that she had fooled around with my boyfriend. In fact, I was happy because I never would have discovered how wonderful she was otherwise.

Jaime was just as surprised as I was at my reaction. I fell head over heels for her in a surprisingly short period of time. My man became convinced that I liked girls more than I liked boys. I was fighting spontaneous romantic urges I had never felt before in my life. I called her my inamorata.

Now here’s what I valued most about this precious bit of time where I had my inamorata’s affection. I began to look at women differently. I had always had a somewhat uneasy relationship with other women. I found them intimidating, inscrutable, or too catty for my liking. Now, everywhere I turned I found something wonderful in the women around me. Their beauty, their intellects, their hopes and their creativity. They all reminded me of her. I also had far more self confidence because I loved her and I was a woman just like her, so I began to love myself. I looked different when I saw myself in the mirror. This is what my love for Jaime did to me.

After she left and the glittery distraction of infatuation began to fade, I started thinking back on my life. I realized that I had not been theoretically bi for years, I had just been plain old bi in reality.

When I was a kid, I had been interested in other girls my age. In junior high and high school, I had checked out female celebrities and flirted with my best girl friends. At the age of fifteen, I had come close to losing my virginity to another girl before I had been scared that someone might find us out. At sixteen, an ugly rumor circulated that I had tried to have sex with a girl I had harmlessly flirted with.

And yet I still dared to say that I was only theoretically bi. I was half in the closet all those years. I fully admitted I was bi, but still had my own doubts. Maybe I would have sex with a girl, but I didn’t think I could love one. To commit to another girl emotionally would condemn me to a life of bisexuality. There are a lot of places I could go with this discussion, but I am going to talk specifically about self identification.

You can be bisexual and still not incorporate it into how you see yourself.

There are women out there who are interested in other women and want to be loved by someone like them but do not identify as bi. There are women out there who identify as bi and yet still insulate themselves in doubt to help preserve a semblance that they might be normal. Some bi girls may desperately want to believe that other girls are a passing fancy, just so they do not have to face the pressure. It is difficult to be gay. It is getting easier, but what some people don’t realize that it is hard to be bisexual too. It comes with its own variety of intolerance, misunderstanding, and objectification.

I cannot stress the benefits of authentic self-identification. The world may be raging around you but you will be the calm center. Be authentic and live with integrity. There is nothing worse than having to hide the love you have to give and who your heart gives it to.