Breaking the myth: do bisexuals always want open relationships

Being bisexual and looking for a date must be like standing in front of a buffet. You wish to try a little bit of everything. This brings us to the question of open relationships. Can someone who likes both men and women (and other genders) feel satisfied in a monogamous relationship that allows them to date only one of those? Do bisexuals always want open relationships?

The freedom of an open relationship

In general, an open relationship is a type of ethical non-monogamous relationship in which the couple has agreed to date other people outside of the relationship. This sort of arrangement typically has some limits, depending on what the couple is comfortable with.

There is no fixed definition of an open relationship. Different people will give your different answers when you ask them about it. Most say that this is when people in a primary relationship agree it’s okay to fuck other people but not make deeper connections with them. Usually, in an open relationship, encounters with other people are limited to sexual and don’t include romantic and emotional aspects.

That differs an open from a polyamorous relationship. Polyamory also describes a situation when a person has relationships with multiple people. The difference is, here, they make sexual, emotional, romantic, and other connections with all of them. It often happens that poly people hang out with their lovers’ other partners. That is something you won’t see in an open relationship.

What do numbers say?

I tried looking into some scientific papers and research so I could break the myth like a pro. Unfortunately, it turns out that there aren’t many researchers who wanted to get deep into this topic. However, I did find one paper about polyamory and who practices it. This study from 2018 discovered that bisexual and pansexual participants were more likely to be in polyamorous relationships. On the other hand, straight people were more likely to be in monogamous ones.

Keep in mind that polyamory is not the same as open relationships. Despite that, these results do say something about how open a person is when it comes to sex and dating. Also, this study underlines that there is some connection between being bi or pan and being open. Still, is that enough to say that absolutely all bisexuals always want open relationships? I have trouble believing in that.

What does the public say?

Even though there are bisexual and pansexual people who practice open relationships, I don’t think that that is the rule. After all, who says that, just because they like more than one gender, they have to fuck more than one gender at any time?

I have stumbled upon pretty good thoughts about this dilemma on Quora. The general opinion here was that being bi doesn’t necessarily mean you want to date multiple people. Among the top answers on Do most bisexual people engage in open relationships? was this one:

Not in my experience. In our bi/pan organization, there are a significant number of polyamorous people (including myself), and I believe a few others are in other sorts of open relationships, but we’re still a minority. Most bisexuals I know are monogamous.

Being bisexual doesn’t mean that you have to (or should, or want to) be in relationships with people of various genders at the same time – just like even if you can be attracted to both fair-haired and dark-haired people, it doesn’t mean you need to be in relationship with one of each!

(posted by Alex Coninx)

I couldn’t have said it better myself! The answers to another question –  If my wife is bisexual, how could I as a husband satisfy her other needs? – were pretty much the same:

If your wife were attracted to men with brown hair and men with blond hair, how could you, as a brown-haired man, ever satisfy her needs?

Doesn’t that sound silly? Presumably, you understand that straight women can be attracted to different sorts of men – different personalities, different features – and yet most of them are basically content with just one man.

The same goes for most bisexual people. We are attracted to men and women the same way that a straight or gay person is attracted to gingers and blonds. You don’t need a partner with every hair color in order to feel satisfied, and I don’t need a partner of every gender in order to feel satisfied.

(posted by Claire J Vannette)

Do bisexuals always want open relationships?

The bottom line is that being bisexual (or pansexual) does not mean that you need to have sex with people of a different gender at the same time to be happy. It only means that you have a wider variety of options to choose from than straight people have when it comes to dating. Yes, there are bi people who practice open relationships. There are also those who do want to date both men and women simultaneously so they can satisfy their different needs. However, that is hardly the rule. The concept of needing “one of each” can even be annoying or insulting to some people. Just because someone loves to play both with big cocks and tight pussies, doesn’t mean they have to play with both. So, it is not true that bisexuals always want open relationships.