I'm a bisexual woman engaged to a man. I'm worried I missed the opportunity to explore my queerness fully.

• I'm a bisexual woman who just got engaged to a man.
• I haven't officially dated women because I was afraid to come out to my family.
• Now, I'm worried I'll never get the chance and that I'm cutting off my queerness.

When my boyfriend proposed, my younger sister was surprised; she was convinced that I hated men.

This joke started in my teenage years because I was a naive but outspoken feminist, which caused some stir in my traditional Protestant family. My beliefs never really meshed well with my religious family.

Though I was a proud bisexual woman, I kept my queerness a secret from them. It helped that my romantic history only involved men.

Now I'm engaged to a man and thrilled. But I'm worried I've put up a permanent wall between two parts of my sexuality — and I'll lose access to my queer self entirely.

Bisexual women often deal with stereotypes

Many people have certain beliefs about queer women: Bisexual women sleep with women but only date men, or they only sleep with men because they find women so intimidating, or they like women but are happily settled with their "golden retriever boyfriend."

If you go on social media, where these jokes are recycled for content and solidified in cultural canon, you'd think a bisexual woman had never successfully dated another woman before.

It leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I worried for years that I wasn't being true to my sexuality. Sometimes, I'd wonder if I was straight and somehow duping myself. With an impending marriage, the anxiety returns.

Julia Shaw says in her 2022 book "Bi: The Hidden Culture, History and Science of Bisexuality" that there's a "sense that, once people are married, the gender of their partner is indicative of their 'real' sexuality."

It's taken years to admit that my hesitation to pursue women came from the restrictive, internalized ideas of my Christian youth. I believed in the church, and only after discovering my sexual interests in my late teens did I question my faith.

I spent the better part of a decade agnostic and happily bisexual, in theory, but struggling in practice. I kept thinking I would eventually date a woman. After all, I found women attractive and daydreamed about them plenty.

But dating a woman meant coming out at home. I convinced myself that I'd come out to everyone if I fell in love with a woman. I didn't recognize how much that would subconsciously dissuade me from pursuing them. So, not coincidentally, I kept dating men.

Fetishizing versus respecting bisexuality

Many men fetishize queer women, and this provided an outlet for me in past relationships. I could flirt or be intimate with women without jeopardizing my relationship with a man because my sapphism wasn't viewed as "real" or "valuable" the way heterosexuality is.

My sexuality was finally viewed as something other than a sin: It was hot. I felt bad for furthering this horrible dynamic, but I was suffocated no matter what I chose.

When I met my current partner, I nearly avoided dating him. I'd repressed my sexuality for too long, I told him, and I wanted to explore it.

In the end, though, I wouldn't sacrifice my time with him for the theoretical pursuit of queer romance with women I didn't yet know. Discussions abounded in the first months of the relationship, and I felt a grief I'd never encountered before.

It took a while to recognize it was because he fully respected my sexuality, thus removing my toxic outlet. It felt ironic. He saw physicality or romance with women as equally valuable, so it could have no space in our monogamous relationship.

I'm now mourning missed opportunities

I mourned this loss, which may be confusing to someone heterosexual. I don't want to cheat or be non-monogamous. I'm happy with one person and feel no need to experiment with that.

My relationships with women — romantic, platonic, or familial — have simply been different from those with men. It's something integral and hard to articulate. They each bring something unique to my life.

Nothing is scarier than the unknown, except maybe missed opportunities, and I felt I'd spend the rest of my life not knowing what I missed. Ultimately, though, we lose something no matter what we choose.

After much discussion, my partner and I know maintaining my connection to queer people and events is integral. I may be in a heterosexual relationship, but I don't have to bar myself from all the beautiful cultural aspects of the LGBT+ community.

Beyond that, my partner and I acknowledged that things change. My decisions aren't all made now. Our sexuality and our needs can develop as we age, and we may have to return to and approach the issue differently throughout our marriage.

Honesty and understanding are the best features of our relationship, and they make my bisexuality feel cherished instead of stifled.