Bisexual people’s strengths: Top three qualities

Let’s celebrate the strong suits of the bisexual community by taking a look at three specific qualities many bisexual people share. Highlighting bisexual people’s strengths is part of the work we can all do to help reduce the stigma that bisexual people face.

Looking at the research about mental health outcomes for bisexual people is a bleak exercise. Our rates are higher for many mental and physical health problems. It is a useful thing that we have these studies, and this research is important work.

If you, like me, need a break after reading some of the more crushing studies about the frequency of mental illness in the bisexual community, then read on here, and marinate in some genuine pride for this community. Now sure, the reality is that bisexuality is a vast tapestry with as many different experiences as there are people in the community. That said, permit me a moment to make some generalizations about my experience of bisexuality, and what I see as some common threads frequently woven into the fabric of many people’s bi experience.

Bisexual people have the strength of self awareness.

There’s a term in queer literature I’ll be borrowing today. It describes the pressure from society to date a member of the “opposite” sex. It’s based on the incorrect idea that there are only two sexes, and that your job as a member of society is to date and eventually marry someone who comes from the one sex that you are not. This idea does damage in multiple directions. It can crush a young queer person under its weight.

The term for this is “compulsory heterosexuality,” or “comphet”. Compulsory: as in you may face isolation or punishment from your family, your friend group, and your community at large if you do not obey. It felt compulsory for me growing up, and without knowing the words “comphet” to reference what I was feeling I was unaware that it existed as a concept. Much less that it could be impacting my day-to-day high school existence.

As people attracted to multiple genders, in order to be honest with ourselves about the full range of who we are attracted to, we have to position ourselves in opposition to comphet. First, by accepting that there are way more than two genders, and second, that although we are attracted to a different gender than our own, we do not necessarily have to date or be in a relationship with someone who has a different gender.

That kind of revelation may not come easily. It requires a certain amount of self-awareness and personal integrity. It turns out you have to know yourself pretty well in order to move past comphet. I’ve found this quality of self-awareness in many of the bisexual people I meet. That kind of self knowledge can make a difference in how you arrive at big decisions, like who you chose to live with or where you choose to spend your time. The benefits of knowing yourself are many, and that makes self-knowledge a real strength of the bisexual community.

Bisexual people have the strength of dialectical thinking.

I have to break out another vocabulary word for explaining this second strength. For those of you who have some experience with dialectical behavior therapy or DBT, I’m hoping you know this term well. Marsha Linehan, the founder of DBT, uses the term “dialectics” from philosophy. One of its meanings is holding multiple things true at the same time, even if those things seem to conflict.

Take the weather: I’m writing this on a gray Chicago afternoon, and it is either raining out my window or it isn’t. A statement like “it’s raining” is either true, or it’s false. Right? Except of course if we were to zoom out from the map of my neighborhood in Chicago, and look at the whole of Illinois, of North America, of the Earth. There we would see that it is raining and not raining at the same time, everywhere, all at once. Let’s get into the option of drizzling! With just a light fog and the first two drops of a coming shower: raining, or not raining? It can be both. It’s the same with sexual attraction.

You may have heard of the idea that there’s the straight world and the queer. Being bisexual can feel like you’re straddling the two, or at least it’s felt that way to me. When dating across multiple genders, you start to get better at seeing things from multiple perspectives. You start to see convergence and overlap, whether other people who are attracted to only one gender, may not. From there, it’s easier to hold onto different things being true in a more conceptual sense.

Take therapy- either your therapist believes you are trying your absolute hardest, or they are going to want you to try harder. You can’t have both. Well, dialectics tells us that you can have both, and in fact, you do! As a I therapist, I often tell my clients I see how hard they are trying and I know for a certainty that they are trying their very best. And I’m going to ask them to work harder, try again, and do better. It’s a “both this, AND that” philosophy, and being bisexual can make it come naturally. Read more about four skills from DBT that are especially helpful for bisexual people to get an idea of how this looks.

Bisexual people have the strength of openness to experience.

This last strength has been lobbed at members of the bisexual community as an insult for generations. I’m going to ask for your patience for a moment here. There’s the idea that bisexual people do not belong in either the straight or the queer community. Many of us have been told that we are “actually straight” or “actually gay,” and only experimenting for a time before we ultimately “pick a side.” That’s a separate binary the dialectical thinkers may already know to question. The expectation is that we will deny our full sexual identity and cut off a part of ourselves. In reality, we have our openness to being attracted to and/or forming relationships with our same gender and with people of other genders. We have our curiosity to explore between and within and around this system of supposedly only two camps. I want to emphasize that curiosity and openness to experience are in fact strengths, ones we can embody the more we acknowledge the joys of bisexual life.

Exploring More

As a bisexual psychologist myself, I am committed to exploring the strengths and working on the challenges that bi people face with my clients. If that’s something you want to explore more too, schedule a consult call with me to learn more about what that work looks like. I’ve written lots about how LGBTQ+ affirming therapy makes a big difference, and that could be a good place to explore more as well. I wish you the best as you discover the many strengths of our community!