I feel really lucky that I have had the chance to discover who I am again at this point in my life, when I am more open-minded, stronger, braver and more curious than I was when I was making these choices the first time around. The fascination from others in my choice of partner comes down to sex, and anyone who thinks that heterosexual sex is inherently more valid or satisfying than homosexual sex is wrong (or doing it with the wrong person). I hate that we never stop talking about our feelings.) It doesn’t feel right in a way that dating men felt wrong, it doesn’t feel wrong in a way that dating men felt right. There are less challenges in some areas, there are more in others. This is my first official relationship with a woman and yes, it’s different from my relationships with men. We didn’t fall in love overnight, we fell in love over weeks and months of dating, of meeting after work in wine bars, long lie-ins with coffee, evenings snatched between my busy childcare schedule, talking about politics and philosophy and parenthood and sexuality and almost everything else for hours and hours on end. Standard modern day dating protocol re-established. She gave me her number, I texted her a kiss emoji. Nobody swiped right, it was simply eyes drunkenly meeting across a sticky dance floor, a couple of sweaty dances and several hours of kissing. It was an old fashioned meeting, worthy of the great love stories of old. We met in London’s only lesbian bar, in Soho, last summer. I was blocked by several women after revealing that I identified as bisexual and since I was also holding a ‘single mum’ trump card that I rarely got around to showing, I was seriously thinking about applying for Channel 4’s The Undateables.īut then I met my girlfriend. I empathise with people looking for love and not wanting to be somebody’s sexual experiment, but it’s been a sharp learning curve that biphobia and bi erasure exist not only in the straight, but gay communities, too. Many dating profiles have statements such as ‘no bis’ (my favourite was a woman who had simply ‘no mums, no bis’) or comments alluding to the fact that they’re not open to first-timers. To anyone reading this who has lived their life up to a point as ‘straight’ (whether in the closet, or simply not feeling like they have ever been restricted by one), I’m not going to pretend that your first steps onto the queer dating scene will be painless. Nobody asked if ‘maybe I just hadn’t met the right woman yet?’. Nobody asked for a list of people I had dated before ‘going straight’. When I decided to get married to a man, nobody ever questioned whether I was sure that I was straight.
Questions I’m sick of answering include, but are not limited to: ‘do you prefer men or women?’, ‘but men and women completely different?’, ‘how many women have you been with?’ and ‘do you still fancy men?’įrom the inane to the invasive, people sell their questions as curiosity, but they are microaggressions. But it seems that people are fascinated by the idea of ‘going gay’ later in life. For people who know me well, the surprise is that I have gotten into any relationship at all, not that my chosen partner is a woman. And, this is not the first time I have felt compelled to explain my sexual preferences since I got a girlfriend, and it will not be the last. While I love the ‘late life lesbian’ trope, I am actually bisexual. But, from the various responses to my relationship that I’ve received over the last year, it is clear that to some, it is. Admittedly, being a divorced single mum in a queer relationship wasn’t exactly how I pictured my life as I approached my 36th birthday, but there is nothing about how my life is shaping up that feels particularly shocking to me. We got married in our late twenties, had a baby and then got divorced. New West End Company BRANDPOST | PAID CONTENT.Tej Kohli & Ruit Foundation BRANDPOST | PAID CONTENT.