I LOVE MY GIRLFRIEND MORE THAN ANYTHING… BUT I STILL VERY MUCH LOVE COCK

By Mikey Carr

Being bisexual has come a long way since I first told my friends I enjoyed the company of both sexes.

Where once I was perpetually greeted with disbelief, told I was going through a phase and that I would soon choose which set of genetalia I preferred, these days most people are more fascinated than disgusted, especially seeing as though for the last year I have been in a committed yet open relationship with an amazing woman.

However, contrary to what many, straight and queer alike had  told me, there was no great awaking into heterosexuality upon falling in love with her.

And, despite the fact that I love my girlfriend more than anything in this world, I still very much love cock.

Now some people find this hard to handle, the very idea of polyamory scaring them enough without adding the whole same same element into the mix, but by and large these days most people seem curious, if not a little jealous of my lifestyle. Yet for every understanding person I meet, there are those who just can’t understand how I can not only sleep with other people while still remaining faithful to my girlfriend, but also sleep with other men. To these people I always give the same answer – to me, sex and love are very different things.

Sex is about attraction. Love is about respect.

Let me unpack this for a moment. If love and sex are inextricably linked, as many would have us believe, is feeling a passing attraction for another a sign you no longer love your partner? Furthermore, does having really great sex with someone you otherwise abhor mean you harbour some subconscious feelings of love? Of course not.

Not to say there aren’t cases where relationships have fallen apart because of a passing attraction, but the real issue in these situations is often not so much that someone feels attracted to someone else but rather that they then don’t respect their partner enough to be honest with them.

By not speaking to their partner and either pursuing a fling without their knowledge or nurturing an infatuation that slowly draws their sexual attention away from them will inevitably destroy even the strongest relationships because without respect, there can be no trust.

If you can’t rely on on your partner to respect you enough to talk to you about their feelings and emotions, attraction among them, how can you hope to share your life with them.

In my relationship for instance, what led to our current situation was a transgression on my part where I drunkenly made out with an ex fling at a party. Rather than hide the facts from my partner and just pass it off as a meaningless mistake only to allow the urge to cheat to grow within, I told her straight up what happened and how I felt about the situation. I told her I loved her, but that being a bit of a slut in my heyday, I missed the feeling of being naughty, of cheap tawdry hookups in public bathrooms and shallow meaningless sex with people with whom I shared little but a sexual attraction.

Most of all though I told her how being bisexual, I also missed my adventures with the hairier sex.

Now it bears to mention I had been in this situation before, and it had never ended well. I nevertheless felt I owed it to all the partners from whom my eye had wandered to be honest about it with them, often before the act ever occurred. I never expected them to understand, but I told them because I respected them all too much to lie, and myself too much to live a lie. My being bisexual had also often scared off a number of parters who were of the “going through a phase” persuasion , and so when telling my current partner about all this I was expecting anything from a silence to a slap. What I wasn’t expecting was acceptance.

Not only did she recognise that the way I feel about sex means that my feelings for her were not at all affected by my desire to sleep with other people, she understood that I was speaking to her about it out of respect, out of love.

More than that, she realised that not only did I respect her enough not to want to lie to her, but also that I respected her enough to make her own decision as to whether she wanted to be with someone like me, rather than try and hide my  ‘perversions’ from her in order to avoid ending the relationship.

That was the best decision I have ever made, as I am now not only in love, but I am sharing my life with someone who shares the same values as me, and all because I was honest about how I felt. For us, respecting each other’s desires, even if they are to sleep with other people, strengthened our relationship. Mind you, as she would tell me once I started writing this article, my bisexuality played a large role in her acceptance of my alternative philosophy of love.

“I don’t know why it’s different because you are bisexual, but it is” she told me, before going on. “If you were just some straight guy, asking me if you could go around sleeping with other girls I don’t think I would be into that, but being interested in men is part of who you are and part of what makes you happy, and I want you to be happy. I had known you were interested in men before we even officially met and it wasn’t an issue for me, I just thought you were an awesome, interesting person.”

This was a game changing moment for me as for the first time in my life society’s fascination with my sexuality was working in my favour instead of against me.

And that is the real beauty of the contemporary discussion around sexuality – namely the more we talk about it, the more comfortable we become with it. While I still get the same occasional gasps of surprise, denial or voyeurism when discussing it, I no longer feel frustrated or alienated by the interest as I recognise it for what, by and large, it is.

Mere curiosity and sometimes envy.

And while there is the odd person who still labels me as nothing more than a closet queer, there are plenty of people who thought like that, but whose minds I changed through patient discussion and by my example.

In the end attraction is undeniable and seeing is believing, and the more visible alternative lifestyles like mine become the more accepting of them society will be. My relationship is really just like any other. We go out to dinner, we watch movies and go out together. By most measures we are actually painfully boring, often preferring stay home than face the busy weekend hustle and bustle. I buy her flowers and surprise her at work, she brings me candy and treats home when she knows’ I’ve had a long day writing from home. We love and care for each other and do everything we can to show it and the fact I occasionally sleep with men is only a small part of our relationship really, but speaking if speaking about help others see people like me as normal like everybody else, I guess having to suffer through the same dinner party conversations over and over again is a small price to pay. At least I can just hand this article around to save time.

For me, regardless of the fact that I have found a loving, caring and beautiful partner to share my life with, that doesn’t change who I am and nor should it. Just because I am in love with a woman, doesn’t mean I can’t still be attracted to men, and vice versa. But this is the mainstream narrative pushed on us bisexuals – that we are sexual miscreants only indulging in both sexes out of greed in the hope or ‘doubling our chances for a date on Saturday night’ as Woody Allen famously put it.

This is something we bisexuals have copped a lot of criticism for over the years, that we are just trying to have our cake and eat it too, although in our case the cake if made up of cock and pussy. Most people, straight or queer, all tend to share the same belief when it comes to bisexuals – that we are sexually selfish, and only interested in increasing our chances for sex.

For me personally nothing could be further than the truth, as with an abundance of choice also come great indecision. And while variety is for me very much the spice of my sex life, bisexuality for me has always been a means of ensuring quality not quantity. This has never been truer than it is now, where sleeping with other partners keeps me not only interested in sex with my partner but excited and full of ideas inspired or amplified by others.

The way I see things is that sex and love are like chips and sauce. You can have both on their own, but it’s much better getting a bit messy and dipping away to your hearts content. But, just as with chips and sauce, so too with sex and love can mixing the same two ingredients together become a bit stale and boring. Consider having to choose one condiment to use on your chips for the rest of your life? Sure, a bunch of you are probably die hard tomato sauce fans, and the idea of putting anything else on your chips just sounds disgusting (mayo, are you kidding?), but for a lot of us variety is the best way of keeping our favourites fresh.