Biromantic vs Bisexual: What Each Word Means

Who are you attracted to sounds like one question. It is two, and for most people the same answer covers both, so the seam never shows. Varun is one of the people it shows for: he has dated men and women, and only the women have ever made him want to build a life with anyone. Biromantic and bisexual are not two versions of one word, and knowing which you mean can settle an old argument with yourself.

Wanting someone, wanting to be theirs

Lisa Diamond's 2003 paper in Psychological Review made the case that falling in love and wanting someone physically run on different biological equipment, so either can turn up without the other. Pulling them apart is usually called the split attraction model, described further in aromanticism; it says they can come apart, not that everyone's do.

There are numbers on that. Lund, Thomas, Sias and Bradley surveyed 414 American adults and found about 10.6 per cent reported sexual and romantic attractions that did not match, the commonest being sexual attraction to more than one gender with romantic attraction to only one.

What each word means

Bisexual means sexual attraction to more than one gender. Biromantic means romantic attraction to more than one gender. That is the whole distinction, and it is simpler than the debate around it suggests.

Both words describe attraction, not behaviour. Neither requires a track record, a fifty fifty balance, or a partner of any particular gender. A bisexual woman married to a man for twenty years is still bisexual, and someone who has never acted on any of it is still whatever they are.

The word bi has long meant attraction to people of one's own gender and to other genders, which is why plenty of bisexual people count non binary partners under it.

The four combinations

Put the two axes together and four broad shapes appear.

Biromantic bisexual. Both kinds of attraction include more than one gender. The most common shape by far, and almost everyone who fits it just says bisexual and gets on with life.

Heteroromantic bisexual. Sexual attraction to more than one gender, romantic attraction to one. Varun sits here. It was the most common mismatch in the Lund study, and nothing about it is a contradiction.

Biromantic heterosexual, or biromantic gay. The mirror image: love arrives across more than one gender while sexual attraction stays with one. People here often spend years assuming they must be miscounting something.

Biromantic asexual. Romantic attraction to more than one gender, with little or no sexual attraction to anyone. A single word simply fails here: bisexual would be wrong and straight would be wrong. For that axis, read asexuality and graysexuality.

Writing them out is the trick. Each shape fits in one line, which is what someone who half fits the single word has been going without.

Who needs the distinction

Here is the honest part. Most bisexual people do not need any of this. Their two axes point the same way, bisexual describes all of it, and a second word would only add admin.

The split terms earn their place for a smaller group: people whose two axes genuinely diverge, people on the asexual spectrum who still fall in love, people who kept trying labels that half fitted. For them the second word is the first accurate sentence they have had.

This kind of splitting has precedent. Savin-Williams and Vrangalova, reviewing the evidence on people who describe themselves as mostly heterosexual, argued that this is a distinct orientation group in its own right rather than a stop on the way to another label.

Bisexual and pansexual belong here too. As people generally use them, bisexual means attraction to more than one gender and pansexual means attraction regardless of gender. The definitions overlap heavily, and which one someone picks usually reflects what language was around when they found it.

The myths worth dismantling

That it is a phase. Lisa Diamond followed a group of non-heterosexual women for ten years and reported in Developmental Psychology in 2008 that the bisexual women's attractions to both sexes held steady across the decade. Those who changed labels moved between bisexual and unlabelled rather than settling on lesbian or straight, which led her to call bisexuality a distinctive orientation, not an experimental or transitional stage.

That it is a stepping stone. The phase myth in a smarter jacket: a rest stop before gay for bi men, before straight for bi women. It cannot be both, which is a useful hint that it is neither.

That it is greed. Attraction to more than one gender says nothing about how many people someone wants at once, or whether they want monogamy. A bisexual person can be exclusively committed for life.

That it is confusion. Bisexual people are often the least confused person in the conversation, and the accusation usually comes from someone who has not asked a question. And in India, where bisexuality is still waved off as confusion or a phase, a further distinction like biromantic can sound like confusion multiplied. It is the opposite: precision, turning up where one word was never quite enough.

Erasure, and what it costs

Bi erasure is the habit of reading a bisexual person as something else. In straight settings, a bisexual woman with a husband becomes straight. In queer settings, a bisexual man with a boyfriend becomes gay, and his earlier relationships get treated as rehearsal. The current partner overwrites the person.

The cost is not only social. Being read wrong teaches people to ration what they say, to friends, to doctors, to anyone new, and that rationing gets lonely.

It happens on both sides of the line, which is what makes it wearing. Dodge and colleagues surveyed a nationally representative sample of adults in the United States and found responses about bisexual men and women clustering around neither agree nor disagree, which the authors read as substantial ambivalence rather than warmth, while acceptance of gay and lesbian people had shifted markedly.

There is a mental health finding worth stating carefully. Ross and colleagues pooled 52 studies in a meta-analysis published in The Journal of Sex Research and found a consistent pattern of the lowest rates of depression and anxiety among heterosexual people, with bisexual people showing rates higher than or equivalent to those of lesbian and gay people. The authors proposed three contributors: discrimination, invisibility and erasure, and the lack of bisexual affirmative support. Conditions, in other words, rather than the orientation, and conditions can change. For care that assumes you exist, see queer sexual health.

Try this

Write down the sentence you cannot say at a family dinner, then cut it in half. The long version: I am attracted to more than one gender, and the person I want to build a life with happens to be a woman. The short version is the one you can deliver between two courses. "I date women and men, and none of it is unsettled."

Then say the short one to yourself until it bores you. Most of the difficulty is not the room; it is hearing your own voice make the sentence.