The Complications Of Bisexual Dating

Dating provides the sorts of anecdotes that make your grandmother laugh whilst she breathes a sigh of relief that she’s out of the game. My dating life is ridden with humiliation, depravity and hilarity — with the added pizzaz that I fancy men and women. Double the choice! I hear you cry. Double the fun! Hello straight boys and gals, I’ve got a story for you — bisexuals haven’t got it easy when it comes to this romance malarky.

Where my gays at?!

Unless London is your city, the UK gay scene consists of straight men and women doing an ironic disco dance in your quarters and then getting offended if you give them the smoky eye. I’m all for inclusion and harmonious partying, but sometimes a straight crowd’s just gotta give.

‘I’m so ironic and brilliant for coming to a gay night and dancing with all of these gays,’ they say. ‘I love dancing and laughing and being part of the scene and me dancing and laughing at what you do just shows how marvellous and cool I am about it.’ When a clan of girls tried to stick a bindi to my head and moaned at me because I wouldn’t get off with their friend while their boyfriend watched, I wondered if I had involuntarily signed up to a pornhub community showreel.

‘You can’t possibly be gay!’ one guy remarked, as he hit on me in a club called Curious when I had my arm around my girlfriend. Do you know what kind of guy says that to me? That’s the kind of guy that still wanks into his socks because he’s too lazy to find a tissue.

Dating apps only exist to plot your social demise

Tinder, Happn and Bumble are the triumvirate of straight dating, but they weren’t thinking about my clan when they carved out those prototypes. On Tinder, I try to grit my teeth when I’m just not in the mood for any male swiping — because I don’t get a choice. ‘Fancy seeing you here, Bernard, 24,’ I hiss to myself. ‘Have you been thrown into the mix because only six gay women are using Tinder in my area? I do love it when my dating apps try to become a sexier version of neighbourhood watch’. Cue LGBT women forming a new band of Muskateers — FindHrr, Scissr and HER — and you’ve just about got one functioning dating app. Amongst the wreckage of bugs, perverts and low-res photos, the effort to find a decent person to date becomes a disciplined lesson in micromanagement. Although it’s worrying how much info Facebook needs to know about my love life, at least using it to validate my existence prevents the likes of Daniel, 15, making his way into my e-yard to try and see what I look like with my kit off.

Note to self: Disable app push notifications so that your office do not have you down as a desperate dater. A message from ‘pussykillah69’ will derail most business meetings — no matter how quickly you start singing Happy Birthday to Jerrod from HR.

Your ex might date the same person as you

Apparently only 0.5% of women in Britain identify as bisexual, which makes my romantic streams look more like forlorn canals that house disused shopping trolleys. That’s why it didn’t surprise me when my ex-boyfriend told me that we were dating the same person.

Couples share similar interests, yadda yadda yadda, but that didn’t heal my ego bruise. I knew I had lost a battle in saving face. I had to tackle the blistering memories of falling in love with my ex whilst sating a crushing sense of awareness that his new squeeze was a regulation hottie. As the song goes, breaking up is really hard to do, and being able to make pathetic comments about two people that I’ve fancied can make all of the difference.

Coming out, again and again

Every gay knows that coming out can be Biblical, and for more and more people, they’re met with an ‘I know’ before they have to begin their exodus. I wish I could just date whoever I wanted and gender wouldn’t come into it. I am bisexual, and my identification is part of my identity. And of course, as a chronically shit liar, I feel that I owe it to my date to come out. Every. single. time. Women for the most part, run in the same queer streams as I do. Men, for the most part, don’t have a clue what to do.

‘What percentage do you like women and you like men?’ said one. ‘That kind of freaks me out, and I know it shouldn’t,’ said another. ‘That’s really hot,’ said my last date. Another burst into hysterical laughter for ten minutes. Amongst the statisticians and freak-out merchants and the guy who made me feel like I was harbouring a sexual fetish, one bloke managed to get it so beautifully, wonderfully right. ‘Oh it’s cool, I knew already,’ he said. ‘I am just flattered that out of everyone out there, you picked me.’

And that, my friends, is what's known as a 'keeper'. And a 'relief'.

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Follow Jasmine on Twitter: @the_chez

Picture: Lukasz Wierzbowski

This article originally appeared on The Debrief.