33 Comments Add your own

• 1. Corina  |  July 25th, 2011 at 12:02 am

  Totally agree that orientation is something we’re born with, but I think there is a not completely insignificant portion of the population who are born with a more flexible sexuality than we as a society are comfortable with. People are kind of pushed to pick a team and stick with it, even if their natural inclination is more fluid than that. There seems to be a general scoffing at the legitimacy of bisexuality, like it’s just a way for people to fence straddle, or pretend they’re not really gay, when they actually are. I obviously don’t know your friends, but this sort of mid-life gender preference switching doesn’t seem that terribly odd to me, even if it is heartbreaking and confusing and awful to the parties actually involved. But it doesn’t necessarily mean that they were lying about their sexuality to themselves or their partner for the duration of the relationship.

• 2. Marie Green  |  July 25th, 2011 at 12:08 am

  Yes, this moral compass description of Adam? This is David, too, to a T. He had the SAME REACTION to… what’s that movie… the one where we learned that fishing trips were not really about fishing AT ALL… um… Brokeback Mountain!! Yes, that one. He was so revolted that they were CHEATING ON THEIR WIVES, year after year at THAT, that he couldn’t see beyond it.

  (Incidentally, I was a little off-put by the cheating lesbian, mainly that she cheated WITH A MAN, reaffirming, in my opinion, every misinformed-about-gay-person out there that OF COURSE all she wanted all those years was a little dick. Gah. Why couldn’t she have at least cheated with a WOMAN??)

  Anyway, yes, I totally hear you on this post. I feel so content right now (mostly) with life, with where we live etc… and I hope I don’t wake up in 10 or 20 years not recognize myself.

• 3. jonniker  |  July 25th, 2011 at 12:08 am

  No, Corina, I get that, actually. I think it’s just that as a friend and outsider, when you don’t HEAR that flexibility is a possibility from that person, it SEEMS to come out of left field, and again, you find yourself panicking that one day you’ll wake up in the same situation, which is irrational. It’s just that, as you said, you (or I), as the viewer/outsider, we’re not privy to the inner dialogue that led to this particular decision/change. I think it’s why I equated it to divorce. I mean, NONE of us knows what happens between two people — or really, in the mind of one person, when it comes to their relationship — so it’s as nerve-racking as a “simple” divorce (HAAAA), but with the added surprise of a complete and total shift in something that appeared, at least to that point, entirely fundamental to who that person was.

  In cases like this, I like to lovingly refer to Ani DiFranco’s “In or Out.” Should have made that the title, in fact, because I kind of love how she addresses the issue there.

  (I’m thinking of the case of my friend who recently got married to a man when, for the TEN PLUS years I’d known her, she was the person who self-identified with being a lesbian so far beyond sexual preference, it was almost amazing. It was a DEEPLY ROOTED cultural belief for her and then one day, it was all kind of left behind, while everyone who knows her is just sort of watching with surprise and a little awe. But, you know, still love.)

  (Well, except for her ex-wife. I’m seeing a lot of hostility there, UNDERSTANDABLY SO.)

• 4. Corina  |  July 25th, 2011 at 12:34 am

  Jonniker, I get that actually in theory, but I guess my personal capacity for shock has been short circuited. Militant lesbian to het soccer mom? Seen it. Het soccer mom to militant lesbian? Seen that too. Gay friend picking up heretofore straight male neighbor? Yup. My motto is now: “Confusion is the natural order. Everyone (except me and MAYBE one or two other people I know really really really well but even them I’m not so sure about) is completely inexplicable and their behavior cannot be accurately predicted.” It’s kind of a long and awkward motto I admit. I don’t think I’ll ever get around to embroidering it on a sampler.

• 5. Alyce  |  July 25th, 2011 at 12:49 am

  I’m sure I’m not going to adequately explain where I come down on this/fall on the spectrum, but I think some people are born with one attraction and some people aren’t.

  Before I met my husband (online nearly 15 yrs ago, in a chat room and then thru email and phone conversations-we wooed with words) I had exclusively dated women. And I think if I hadn’t fallen in love with him that I may be in a relationship with someone of either gender. Sex is very important to me, but the anatomical parts are not. It’s just not how I’m wired.

  And I only say this to validate the choices or vocalizations of some of your friends. Maybe that was true for them, too.

  I identify as a queer woman, if asked. But rarely correct someone.

• 6. jonniker  |  July 25th, 2011 at 7:42 am

  Alyce: Not that it’s a lick of my business, but did you always KNOW that was a possibility? That’s what I mean, I guess — not that such things HAPPEN (because I believe they do and SUPPORT that they do) — but that to outsiders, they seem like they happen out of NOWHERE, leading to the blind paranoia that it could happen to them, and one day they won’t know what hit them.

  Like I said, same with divorce/other major life changes that seem like a vast departure from how the person presented themselves in public. Not that those changes are bad or impossible or even unexpected, if one is viewing things more broadly, as Corina does, but I think it’s still unnerving for observers, only because it reinforces the fact that you can never really know everything about a person.

  What I DO find interesting about the notion of sexual preference as a fluid entity is that for some, the idea that they just don’t possess the parts to please their former spouse may be vaguely comforting. As in, the departing partner HAD to leave in order to satisfy who they were. If that person is, indeed, one who sees sexual preference as something elastic, rather than static, then there is a LOT MORE moral ambiguity into the dissolution of the previous relationship IF it was solely precipitated by the discovery of an attraction to a third party from the previously unexplored sex.

  INTERESTING.

• 7. Swistle  |  July 25th, 2011 at 9:13 am

  Yes, YES. I mean, sometimes it’s someone who always knew they could live several different ways: they were born Catholic but were always intrigued by other religions, or they always dated men but knew they were also drawn to women sometimes; or they always wanted to be a lawyer but they also actively pursued art with classes and as a hobby. So if those people change religion, start dating someone of the sex they don’t usually date, or ditch a career to see if they can make a living as an artist, it’s not so shocking. It’s SURPRISING as any sudden-change-of-direction is, but you can look at it and say, “Well, he always did love art” or “Well, she was Catholic but a lot of that was because she was born into a Catholic family” or “Well, she hadn’t met the right woman yet.”

  Whereas if it’s a Catholic who was always appalled at all other “false religions,” or a woman who said she couldn’t even understand the attraction of other women, or a lawyer who never picked up a brush or went to a museum, it’s “OMG WHAT HAPPENED??? Could it happen to ME too?? What do they mean, ‘They just woke up one day and KNEW’??” And then the auto-correct of “Well, what we saw/heard of them isn’t necessarily what WAS.”

• 8. Lawyerish  |  July 25th, 2011 at 9:52 am

  As further evidence that our husbands are cut from the same cloth, Joe cannot STAND “Indecent Proposal” (and not just because it’s an awful movie). It offends his moral/ethical sensibilities deeply.

• 9. jive turkey  |  July 25th, 2011 at 10:12 am

  This is an infinitely interesting topic to me — mostly because I never really spent much time thinking about this type of thing (the fluidity/flexibility of sexuality and how it’s viewed in our culture) until recently. This is a bit off topic (in that it deals more with couples happily eschewing monogamy instead of people up and joining the other team), but there was an interesting NYT article published recently in which Dan Savage was interviewed about “the virtues of infidelity”: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/03/magazine/infidelity-will-keep-us-together.html?pagewanted=all

  (Your husband will not be a fan of that article.)

• 10. H  |  July 25th, 2011 at 11:06 am

  I love your this post because it is thought provoking and your readers/commenters add interesting perspectives.

  I completely agree with you on all points. Most of my personal experience with sudden change has been related to divorce. In those cases, I’ve been shocked but quickly attribute my surprise to the fact that no one really knows what is going on inside a marriage except the two people in the marriage. I have two close friends who were thrown for a loop when their husbands announced one day that they were unhappy and left. But, it seems in both cases, the wives have been able to look back, after some time has passed, and identify a few signs that foreshadowed the divorce.

  I’m going through several transitions in my life right now (normal stuff, kids growing up and moving away, etc.) and sometimes I do wonder if one day I’m going to wake up and discover I’m not really who I thought I’ve been the past two decades. However, my resistance to change makes it highly unlikely I’d do anything about it anyway!

• 11. Cherie Beyond  |  July 25th, 2011 at 11:38 am

  I think the discussion above is fascinating, especially Alyce’s experience, which just clarified so much for me. I’ve always bought fully into the sexuality spectrum idea, and the concept that we are all somewhere along that spectrum (and I think our placement on the spectrum can and may shift through years and circumstances), but I somehow missed that important piece that she just filled in. It’s the person, not the gender. The PERSON. So unless you are on the far, far, far ends of that spectrum, your feelings for a person may trump your lifelong self-placement on said spectrum.

  This is so obvious and I feel very dumb right now for never thinking of it that way before.

  Anyway, in regards to cheating: I don’t mind a certain level of moral ambiguity in most areas, but cheating is one I’m pretty black and white about. If I learn that someone has cheated on a spouse, that’s kind of it for me. I don’t stop associating with them or anything, but they have been fundamentally changed in my eyes. It becomes a pretty defining facet of their personality for me, fair or not.

• 12. Farrell  |  July 25th, 2011 at 1:07 pm

  Cherie – on how you view cheating: I think that’s totally fair.
  Jonniker – I like your husband. He is a good man. Also, I agree with him. Honestly, I wish more people in society held to such a strict moral compass.

  This whole discussion is fascinating to me. I also agree with Corina on the fluidity issue. I feel society ALWAYS wants to place people into “boxes”/label them: Democratic or Republican? Liberal or Conservative? Gay or straight? Catholic or Jewish? when of course in reality there are SO MANY MORE than just two choices.

• 13. Anne  |  July 25th, 2011 at 1:33 pm

  My sexuality has always been rather fluid (from high school until marriage I literally alternated male/female long term relationships), so the change doesn’t seem too shocking to me. But at least for me, nothing about flipping from “closer to straight” to “closer to gay” is abrubt or shocking in my own head for me. So if it does happen to you, I suspect you’ll see it coming and not just wake up one morning and run off with a cheating lesbian.

  (Aside: my sexuality is so fluid I can tell when I’m ovulating by the increase in the number of men on the street I notice and think some variation of “yum”.)

  For me, it isn’t really abrupt, and it isn’t like a light-switch. Even if I’m all about my boy-crushes and drooling over hot guys jogging along the lake shore, that doesn’t mean I’m any less attracted to/in love with my wife at that time, you know? There is room for all of that in me at the same time. Just like being married doesn’t mean you stop finding other guys attractive, being married to a woman for me doesn’t mean I stop being attracted to other women and/or men. But it also doesn’t COMPELL me to become a cheating lesbian or leave my wife for a hot dude.
  So this is all a really wordy way of saying you’re probably safe from unexpectedly waking up a cheating lesbian.

• 14. Anne  |  July 25th, 2011 at 1:36 pm

  Also – in college I used to give talks (in classes upon the request of the professors) about sexual orientation and how it is not an either/or (not a light switch) but is a spectrum (like a dimmer switch) and people can move around on that spectrum and land in different places on different days and I seriously typed and deleted the world’s longest comment basically re-hashing those speaches I used to give. You’re welcome for deleting (most of it).

• 15. SwingCheese  |  July 25th, 2011 at 1:39 pm

  I have to say that I’m in the “the thrown for a loop” category when I hear about people I know getting divorced. And, like one of the other commenters, my default thought is that s/he MUST have known that something was wrong. And I think that, on some level, both parties know that something is off. I mean, people get married for all kinds of reasons (whether they are conscious reasons or not, whether they would EVER admit them, under pain or torture even, or not), and sex/sexual attraction isn’t always the driving factor behind a marriage. And these reasons wax and wane in importance over time. Since sexuality is fluid, but it isn’t always a determining factor in choice of partner, I guess it shouldn’t be all that shocking that people divorce and move into other orientations. But it does still surprise me, every time, because I become very accustomed to thinking of someone in one way, and then I have to revise my version of them.

• 16. jonniker  |  July 25th, 2011 at 1:41 pm

  Is it inappropriate to say that you are all making me want to make out with you so that I can BECOME a cheating lesbian? I love these comments, I love how thoughtful you all are, and I love the discussion in general.

  I think what’s interesting is that most of you who HAVE identified with being fluid DID see it coming and/or were like that for a long time. I think where things become more shocking and hard to grasp is when you’re looking, again, at the outside at someone who you didn’t KNOW to be that way and then, BADOW! wait, what?

  My sexuality hasn’t ever been fluid, so for me, it’s a concept that’s rather foreign to me personally. That’s not to say that I’ve never found women attractive and/or been attracted to them, but never with a capital ‘A’ Attracted, I suppose. So, coming from that PERSONAL absolute, and viewing it through my own experiential lens, it explains some of my surprise and wonder at waking up and seeing something that WOULD BE, for me, rather abrupt.

• 17. Caitlin  |  July 25th, 2011 at 1:43 pm

  I have a lot to say on all of this and I also find it fascinating but I am feeling crappy (sinus infection! migrated into my ears!) and so I will just say:

  When Brandi Carlile played the Avalon on May 5th, 2007 (don’t ask me how I remember the date, but they recorded some awesome songs from that show including her covers of Creep & Folsom Prison Blues, both of which you should download immediately), I waited outside for her afterward with my friend and we met her (We also sort of accidentally cut the line and I still feel guilty about it (they moved the line and we ended up first, instead of in the middle and I just…went with it.))

  I got completely cross-eyed, starstruck, babbling. She was super sweet and signed my ticket stub anyway. After, my friend was like “I did NOT KNOW it was possible for you to be speechless.”

  Somewhere out there is a picture of us with her.

  Only she does not look like a Teddy Graham Murderer. She looks like an angel. And I look like a freak of nature, as it was the Year of Terrible Hair for me.

  That is all.

• 18. Kirsty  |  July 25th, 2011 at 2:17 pm

  I can totally identify with the “equating to divorce” part – everyone (including me!) thought my marriage to D was solid (OK, we weren’t actually married, but as good as). We’d been together for 14 years, we both either worked from home (me) or basically never worked (him) so spent HUGE amounts of time in each other’s company… And then, one day, out of the blue, he accused me of trying to kill him, of on line gambling, of sleeping with strangers picked up on the internet, of trying to kill our elder daughter… And he left. And life has sucked ever since (not that I want him back – I’m so full of anger and – dare I say it? – hate right now that THAT is out of the question). I’ve been alone ever since (15 months) and now don’t feel like I can ever trust anyone again. I don’t know what snapped in his brain, but something did, big time. I still wake up sometimes and think it was all a dream…or a nightmare, more like… but no.

• 19. Kristina  |  July 25th, 2011 at 2:31 pm

  I love this post and I can totally relate to your position. It’s unsettling to think that everything we know about ourselves could change.

  This is kind of unrelated, but my little brother was killed in a car accident about 5 years ago. My life was simple until then. I knew what I wanted, who I was, what I liked. And after he died, I couldn’t reconcile my life after the accident with my life before it. So there was (and still is, sometimes, if I’m being honest) this big disconnect between what I used to know to be true about myself and what I’m facing now. It fundamentally changed me and many of the things that were important to me before or were a part of who I was before are no longer important to me or a part of me now.

  I guess my point is that, while I also agree that sexuality is something we are born with, maybe life events, whether traumatic or just the normal growing and changing we do as human beings, shed light on suppressed or misunderstood feelings or beliefs about themselves. Perhaps they are just coming to the realization that the life they’ve been living isn’t exactly true to the person they are in their heart of hearts.

  I don’t know if any of that is at all clear, sorry if it wasn’t!

• 20. jonniker  |  July 25th, 2011 at 2:37 pm

  Kristina, your example makes sense. And really, they ALL make sense, even if they don’t make sense to US, the outsiders. But I think I’m saying more or less when there ISN’T a traumatic event to “explain” it. (In fact, I am often skeptical of major life decisions made after traumatic events, because I think we are a slightly fuzzy version of ourselves after that happens.)

  What’s interesting is that I’ve had conversations like this with friends of different sexualities, and very few of them have really identified with being fluid and/or on a sliding scale. So this conversation is super enlightening for me.

• 21. Jess  |  July 25th, 2011 at 3:20 pm

  I guess even though I myself am sometimes thrown for a loop when someone else makes a life-changing decision that feels to me like it came out of nowhere, my default assumption is that to the people involved, it didn’t come out of nowhere.

  Awhile back a couple in my social circle, the kind that had always seemed like the perfect lifelong match, got divorced, and everyone was stunned and more than a few friends did express sentiments along the lines of, “If it happened to them, could it happen to me?” Because it seemed so sudden, so out of left field, and we thought we knew the people in question very well, so it seemed like it must have been just as sudden for them. But it turned out that it wasn’t. At all. After the divorce happened we learned that they had had issues for years, MAJOR issues, issues that they were both QUITE aware of, issues that had been ongoing even BEFORE they got married, and only expanded after they got married.

  Which isn’t to say that every couple who gets divorced had doubts before they even got married. But it is to say that I don’t think these things do suddenly come upon you one day out of nowhere. Even in the cases where people SAY things like “I just fell out of love with my husband,” it pretty much always turns out that there were major issues before, and often not being able to deal with those issues anymore precipitates the sudden “falling out of love.” Or at the very least I think there must have been some stifled, but still very real, feelings of dissatisfaction involved.

  Does that make sense? What I’m trying to say is, I really don’t think that this stuff comes out of nowhere for the people involved. Shocking as it is for the rest of us. So if you’re totally happy in your marriage and your spouse feels the same way, I don’t think you have to worry that you guys will be the next ones to announce your divorce to a shocked group of friends.

• 22. Deb Rox  |  July 25th, 2011 at 3:42 pm

  Denial is an amazingly strong force. Amazing. People who I’ve know who had an abrupt change that surprised even them, when they look back, don’t always see signs or a gradual change but instead see murky depression. Depression was their way of pushing down ideas or thoughts or wishes or ways of seeing or whatever before they even came close to consciousness–a true de-pressing of what wanted to bubble up. Then for whatever reason a crack of some sort lets a light shine through or a shell peels away or they are finally mature or supported enough to recognize what the depression is and they are able to see where they want to go next. That can happen gradually or suddenly or imperfectly.

• 23. H  |  July 25th, 2011 at 3:55 pm

  Yes, to Jess and Deb Rox. I’d like to add that my friends who can now look back and identify moments or issues that led to their divorce, some of the “signs” look like “signs” today and might not have appeared to be so at the time. In other words, there were issues, yes, but to my friends (the wives), the issues did not seem (overall, during the course of their marriages) to be leading to divorce. Now that their husbands have ended the marriages and each have given reasons for the endings, the wives can look back and find a comment, an issue or a moment that seemed innocuous then but is not so innocuous now.

  And truly, I am not implying that this is the case for everyone and that we all should worry about things that seem unimportant now. This was just the case for my friends, and I suspect it happens to others too. It is just how it works sometimes.

• 24. Max  |  July 25th, 2011 at 5:15 pm

  Wow, love this post! And your commenters are incredibly spot-on & insightful, I’m impressed.

  Fluidity is pretty much the key point here. Especially when speaking about female sexuality, (purely statistically speaking) women are much more fluid in their attractions than men. Another commenter discussed cultural pressure to definitive labels, which is absolutely true and often adversely affects people… I have always found the Kinsey scale to be incredibly useful when discussing sexuality: it goes from 1 to 6, 1 meaning exclusive heterosexual attraction, 6 meaning exclusive homosexual attraction. In thousands of extensive interviews, Kinsey found that the vast majority of people fall in between, but culturally the pressure remains to “pick a side” or somehow your orientation doesn’t count. Even in the LGBTQ community, identifying as bi or genderqueer tends to position you as lesser.

  That said, most of the time people are pretty aware of their attractions and where they fall on the scale. (Whether they’re honest with themselves about it can be a different matter entirely, though!)

  Even so, you still may never know what might catch you off guard… I’ve always been exclusively attracted to women, never had any male crushes or boyfriends when younger, until one day when I developed an obsessive attraction to a male coworker. And I mean, seriously, massive. I could barely function in the same room with him at times and it lasted for MONTHS. (My girlfriend thought it was HILARIOUS and gave me no end of harrassment for my one and only hetero crush.)

  Now I’m facing a different identity challenge… I came to terms with my dyke-ness, learned to love it and not be ashamed… And as I’m learning more and more about myself, I’m having to try to accept myself all over again in a male identity. (Oddly, that’s not difficult, but suddenly finding myself seen as “straight” is killing me.)

  Long story short, though, I’d say things here are right on the money. …At least until life throws a curve ball.

• 25. LizScott  |  July 25th, 2011 at 10:31 pm

  Man, I’ve been waiting ALL DAY to comment on this.

  So, my husband and his first wife got divorced just before their 10 year anniversary. I’m told people were shocked, absolutely FLOORED. His mother reminds me frequently how surprising it was (…great).

  But to hear them tell it – and I do mean them, as the four of us (me/him, her/new husband) have actually sat down and talked about marriage and how to make love last and the life one purposefully chooses. I’m told they had multiple “do we stay or do we go” conversations littered throughout the 10 years of marriage, and the final straw was so long in coming that it was almost anticlimactic. (I mean, they didn’t even lawyers when the got divorced. They legalzoom.com the whole damn thing.)

  (If we want to dive briefly into my own issues: It’s *slightly* a mind fuck to be the second wife in this situation. On the one hand: I know that should we ever get divorced, it will be relatively amicable and respectful, because I’ve watched this man go through this, and I know how his character will react. [weird to be comforted marrying someone because you respected the way they got divorced, but hey man, reality is messy]. But it’s also weird to have happy moments and think “Didn’t they too have happy moments? Are we any better than they were back then? And we talk about it, a lot, and about what didn’t work and why and what we want from this round in marriage. I tell ya, people on their second marriage? Biggest optimists I’ve ever met)

  So my take away there is exactly your point: You just never know what relationships look like from the inside. Mutual friends of my husband and his ex have said that they were completely blown away by their divorce, but not that everyone is on the flip side of it, they are amazed at how happy the both are; it’s like they couldn’t see the problems because they had gotten used to the norm, and couldn’t conceive of either one of them being different than they were, but once presented with the “new them”, it made perfect sense.

  I’m actually at the point with divorce that when I hear about it, I am sad for the couple, but also find myself cautiously hopeful and almost happy for them. It takes a lot to call an audible and start over, even when it is for the best (CLEARLY I am a second wife. CLEARLY.)

  ANYWAY, BACK TO THE SEX: I’ve never had a long term relationship with a woman, but it wouldn’t shock me if I had or if I do in the future. Or, rather, if I do in the future, it would shock me exactly as much as it would shock me if I had a relationship with ANYONE else, given that whole marriage thing I have going on. My dimmer switch, if you will, slides towards the lesbian end while staying closer to the hetero side, and I’ve always kind of know that about myself. When I am attracted to women, its in the same appreciative way that I am of men that is more of “Hmmm, nice. Anyway, about my husband …” And that’s just kind of the thing with marriage – I chose him, I am perfectly happy with my decision, and regardless of attraction I wouldn’t act on it. It was entirely likely at one point in time I could have chosen a female, but the person I fell in love with was male, so: there I go.

  I would think that most people would be shocked if I got divorced, and would be shocked if I was in an open lesbian relationship – I’ve never been in an “out” lesbian relationship, so sure, that would throw people off. But I bet the people closest to me wouldn’t be thaaaaaat shocked about it.

• 26. Lara  |  July 26th, 2011 at 12:26 am

  This is a great conversation. I’m not sure I can add much to it, in writing, but I could talk for days about this kind of thing.

  Firstly, I am divorced. I can hardly believe it myself. No one, NO ONE, ever thinks it will happen to them. I actually said, before I got married that *I* was going to make sure it was right because *I* wasn’t the type to ever be OK with divorce and OMG I want to shoot my past self for being such a twit.

  Not only did I get divorced, I left my husband after one year. 15 months. Without boring anyone with the details, life can change rapidly. RAPIDLY.

  And still, when I hear of marriages falling apart after 6 months, a year, two years, I think “How does that happ…oh wait, right.”

  As for sexuality: I’m one of these people who believes in a spectrum of sexuality. I personally have only ever been with men and don’t see myself having a relationship with a woman, but I kind of think too much emphasis is put on the sexual part of sexuality (I know, I know).

  Because I think sometimes: how different would it actually BE? I mean, physically? Not that much, right? It’s not so much about the sex as about the connection to another person, or so I think.

  That is to say, while I don’t consider myself sexually attracted to women, I don’t think it’s something so foreign I couldn’t EVER see it happening. And yet I realize that there are many people who could never, ever, ever see this happening, which is why I believe in a spectrum.

  I like the example of a line with heterosexual on one end and homosexual on the other. People fall somewhere in between – hard core left or right, or somewhere in the middle. I’m pretty close to the far heterosexual side – not close enough to the middle to even slightly consider myself bisexual but not jammed up as hard to the edge as some people probably are.

  It’s all fascinating to me. People are so interesting.

• 27. T  |  July 26th, 2011 at 1:37 am

  I think that the big question here–whether or not the person/couple involved feels shock–has a lot to do with their capacity for denial.

  For me, it comes down to what you’re ready to deal with at any given time. One of my dear friends from school wondered idly sometimes about whether he was adopted, made references to the possibility, joked about it. And then one day he went home and finally had a conversation with his parents (yes, he was adopted!) and he was in SHOCK for months afterward. Holding something in your head as a possibility is quite different from knowing it is a fact.

  Similarly, I was always fairly comfortable with the idea that I was attracted to both men and women, didn’t really feel the need to identify myself one way or another, got into my thirties, had some kids, and then met a PERSON, as Cherie says, that just went and scrambled my brain. And that has opened up a whole can of worms. It is unnerving, for my conception of myself as well as for what the hell I would ever say to my spouse. And yes, I might have seen it coming five years out, but that doesn’t make it less frightening or ludicrous.

  And it is so comforting to find a score of people out here on the internet having a thoughtful conversation without resorting to cuss words or cliches. I just wish I was related to some of you.

• 28. Jen the Trephinist  |  July 26th, 2011 at 2:33 am

  Sexual flexibility is one of those things you don’t know about until you start talking about it with people. I had an extremely eye-opening perspective shift when I started paying attention. The gay, it is everywhere, and even the gay people aren’t SO gay sometimes. Sexuality may be inborn, but it’s definitely a spectrum, and a startling number of people were born smack in the middle, or closer to it than they want to admit.

  It’s just not something people are eager to talk about if they sense that someone is going to be shocked by it, but I’d say my “truly 100% straight” or “truly 100% gay” friends are in the serious minority. I wouldn’t have said that about the exact same group of people ten years ago.

• 29. Fiona Picklebottom  |  July 26th, 2011 at 8:37 am

  Interesting post and interesting comments. I’ve been hearing a lot about middle-aged women in particular who always considered themselves straight “suddenly” being attracted to women. My theory is that hormones dictate a lot about attraction and sexuality and since hormone levels fluctuate and change depending on a person’s life stage, it is conceivable that a person’s sexuality would fluctuate and change as well. So while my first reaction upon hearing of 180 degree changes in sexuality was along the lines of “how can that be?”, after further consideration, particularly in terms of hormones, I’m surprised it doesn’t happen more often (and I bet it does, but people are too scared to admit it).

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