Bisexual Erasure in Relationships and Why It Happens
By Mark Ryan, BACP Accredited Psychotherapist and NCPS Accredited Relationship Therapist
Most people picture bisexual erasure as an argument. Someone says, “bisexuality isn't real”, or “you'll figure out which one you really are eventually”, and the bisexual person pushes back. That does happen. But most of the erasure I see in my room doesn't look like an argument at all. It looks like absence. A partner who never asks. A conversation that never quite has room for it. A part of someone that everyone around them has agreed, without saying so, not to mention. Erasure by silence does more damage over a longer period than erasure by outright denial, precisely because there's nothing dramatic enough to point to and call unfair.
That's part of why it's so hard to raise. A single hurtful comment gives you something to name and object to. An absence doesn't. Most of the couples I see aren't dealing with a partner who has said anything untrue or unkind. They're dealing with a shape their relationship has settled into that leaves part of one person outside it without anyone deciding that on purpose, and neither of them quite knows how to describe that as a problem, because on paper, nothing is wrong.
What erasure really is
The clearest research on this describes it as identity denial, the experience of having your own account of your sexuality overruled by other people's assumptions about what you are underneath it. Bisexual and pansexual people report this from multiple directions at once. Researchers found it produces a specific kind of distress that neither straight nor gay or lesbian people typically have to manage, the sense of not being straight enough for one world and not queer enough for the other (Thöni, Eisner and Hässler, 2022). That's a useful frame because it moves the conversation away from single dramatic incidents and towards something more accurate. Erasure is usually cumulative, and it comes as much from what never gets said as from what does.
This matters in my room specifically, because it comes from every direction people are told to expect support from. A partner who doubts the attraction is real. A family who never brings it up once someone settles into a relationship. Friends within the LGBTQ+ community itself who assume, without saying so, that someone will eventually pick a side. None of these people usually think of themselves as erasing anything. Most would be surprised to hear the word applied to them at all.
How it shows up differently for men
Bisexual men in relationships with women describe a specific, recurring pressure, to downplay the part of themselves that isn't oriented towards their partner, sometimes explicitly asked for, more often simply understood without being said. Underneath that pressure often sits a specific belief the partner is carrying, that he isn't bisexual at all, that this is a staging post on the way to coming out as gay. It's worth being direct about where that belief comes from, because it isn't random. For decades, some researchers seriously doubted that male bisexuality existed as a stable orientation rather than a social cover for being gay.
That doubt has been directly tested and it didn't hold up. A large combined study measured genital and subjective arousal in nearly 600 men. It found that men who identified as bisexual showed arousal patterns reliably different from both straight and gay men, real arousal to both sexes, not a hidden preference wearing a bisexual label (Jabbour et al., 2020). The stereotype driving a lot of quiet pressure on bisexual men in relationships with women has been tested directly against the body's own response, and it lost. That doesn't mean every partner's doubt is malicious. It usually isn't. But it does mean the doubt isn't grounded in anything the evidence supports.
How it shows up differently for women
Bisexual women rarely get told they don't exist in the same blunt way. What they describe instead is something closer to being taken less seriously, their attraction to women read as something staged for an audience rather than felt for its own sake. Researchers call this performative bisexuality. Bisexual women who've studied their own experience of it describe feeling the double bind directly, aware that public same-sex affection gets consumed through a male gaze, resentful of having a real part of themselves flattened into content for someone else's viewing (Wood and Matsick, 2024).
What's underneath that pattern isn't about bisexuality at all. It's a wider habit of treating women's sexuality as something that exists in relation to men rather than as something that belongs to the woman herself. A bisexual woman's attraction to other women gets read as less serious, less real, more available for other people's interpretation, in a way that has more to do with how women's desire generally gets treated than with anything specific to bisexuality. The erasure and the diminishment are hard to fully separate.
Same-sex or different-sex, the relationship itself keeps getting asked to explain the person
Which partner someone is currently with tends to become, in other people's eyes, a verdict on who they are. A bisexual woman with a male partner reads to the outside world as straight. The same woman with a female partner reads as a lesbian who was experimenting before. A bisexual man with a male partner reads as gay, finally being honest. The same man with a female partner reads as straight, or as a gay man who hasn't fully come out yet. In every version, the attraction to the gender not currently represented in the relationship disappears from view. Not through any one person's decision, just through how relationships get read from the outside.
Couples rarely notice this happening because nobody said anything false. The relationship is monogamous and committed, exactly as it appears. What's missing isn't honesty. It's room for a part of one partner's identity that isn't currently visible in the relationship's shape, and that room has to be made deliberately, because it won't happen by accident.
The attraction to the gender not currently represented in the relationship disappears from view
Erasure from inside the community too
It would be simpler if this only came from outside the LGBTQ+ community, but it doesn't, and pretending otherwise doesn't serve anyone. Some of the sharpest dismissal I hear described comes from within gay and lesbian spaces. A bisexual person's relationship with a different-sex partner gets read as evidence they were never fully part of the community to begin with, or as a retreat into straight-passing comfort rather than a genuine account of who they're attracted to. The specific accusation shifts depending on who's making it. From straight people, it's often that bisexuality doesn't fully exist. From within queer spaces, it's sometimes that it exists but that this particular person is using it opportunistically, keeping one foot in straight privilege while claiming queer credibility.
Both versions land on the same person from opposite directions, and both produce the same practical result, a reluctance to bring the subject up anywhere, with anyone. Clients describe learning to read a room before deciding whether mentioning an ex of a different gender is worth the conversation it might start. That's not paranoia. It's an accurate read of how often the mention gets met with a raised eyebrow, in gay bars as readily as in family living rooms.
What making space looks like in practice
This is the distinction I'd want a couple to sit with more than any definition of erasure. Not making space isn't the same as being unsupportive, and most partners I see aren't hostile to their partner's bisexuality at all. They simply haven't built anywhere for it to live inside the relationship's ordinary conversation, so it sits unmentioned, technically accepted and practically invisible.
In practice, making space is smaller and more ordinary than people expect. It can mean not flinching when a partner finds someone of another gender attractive out loud, the same way any partner might mention finding someone attractive without it becoming a crisis. It can mean not needing every mention of an ex or a past relationship to be reframed around the gender of the person involved. It can mean simply asking, every so often, rather than assuming the subject has already been fully covered. None of this requires the relationship to change shape. It requires treating the whole person as present in it, not just the parts the relationship's current form makes visible.
If you're the one who needs the space made
Naming this to a partner is harder than it sounds, mostly because there's rarely a single incident to point to. Nobody said anything untrue. Nothing was denied outright. What's missing is an absence, which is a much harder thing to raise than a specific grievance, and a lot of bisexual people I see decide it isn't worth the awkwardness of explaining a problem that has no clean edges.
It helps to be specific rather than to raise the subject as a general complaint. Naming one concrete thing helps, a moment where mentioning an ex felt like it needed managing, a pattern of the subject never quite coming up. That gives a partner something to respond to, rather than an abstract accusation of erasure that can feel unfair to receive when nothing was consciously withheld. Most partners aren't erasing anything on purpose. Most are simply following the shape the relationship has settled into without realising a part of you has been left outside it.
How therapy can help
Couples rarely arrive telling me erasure is the problem, because it doesn't usually feel like a problem from either side. It feels like nothing in particular, a subject that never quite comes up. Part of the work is simply making that absence visible enough to talk about, without turning it into an accusation against a partner who likely never intended it. From there, it's less about resolving a single conversation and more about building an ongoing habit, room for the whole of someone's identity to stay present in a relationship, not just the part the relationship's current shape happens to reflect back.
Where the erasure has been coming from more than one direction at once, a partner, a family, a friendship group, the work sometimes needs to happen in layers rather than all at once. I'd rather help someone get the relationship itself right first, since that's usually the relationship carrying the most day-to-day weight, before turning to the harder conversations with family or community that may take considerably longer to shift, if they shift at all. Not every source of erasure is equally changeable, and it's worth being honest about that rather than promising a tidy resolution on every front.
Where someone is still working out their own relationship to the label rather than dealing with how others receive it, I've written a separate piece on that part of the process, which covers the wider territory of questioning attraction and identity while already partnered.
If this is showing up in your relationship, I offer a free 30-minute consultation, in person in London or by video.
About the Author
Mark Ryan is a BACP Accredited Psychotherapist and NCPS Accredited Relationship Therapist working in person across central London, from rooms in Pimlico, Kensington, and Angel. He works with couples, individuals, and polycules on relationship issues including jealousy, affairs and betrayals, sex problems, and considered separation. His practice is integrative, sex-positive, and affirming of all relationship structures and identities.
References
Jabbour, J., Holmes, L., Sylva, D., et al. (2020). Robust evidence for bisexual orientation among men. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117(31), 18369–18377. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2003631117
Wood, J. M., & Matsick, J. L. (2024). Bisexual women's meaning making of same-sex performativity, orientation towards a heteropatriarchal context. Sex Roles. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-024-01487-w
Thöni, C., Eisner, L., & Hässler, T. (2022). Not straight enough, nor queer enough, identity denial, stigmatization, and negative affect among bisexual and pansexual people. Psychology of Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity. https://doi.org/10.1037/sgd0000606
