One of the anonymously submitted questions at a "Savage Love Live" Q&A session at a university last week:

You have been accused of being bi-phobic. What are your views on bisexuality?

I'm not bi-phobic, I explained, just unwilling to pretend that was is, isn't. My wildly controversial, condemned-as-bi-phobic views: Many adult gays and lesbians identified as bi for a few shining moments during our adolescences and coming out processes. (We wanted to let our friends down easy; we didn't want our families to think we'd gone over the dark side entirely.) This can lead adult gays and lesbians to doubt the professed sexual identities of bisexual teenagers. Sorry about that. And most adult bisexuals, for whatever reason, wind up in opposite-sex relationships and comfortably disappear into presumed heterosexuality—if they were ever out about being bi at all. Now I don't think it's necessarily misleading or deceitful for a technically bisexual person in a long-term opposite sex relationship to identify/round down to straight so long as the bisexual is out to his or her partner. It would be great if more bisexuals in opposite-sex relationships were out to their friends, families, and coworkers as well as their partners—hell, it would be great if more bisexuals were out to their partners—because more out bisexuals would mean less of that bisexual invisibility that bisexuals complain about. And if more bisexuals were out, more straight people would know they know a sexual minority and that would lead less anti-LGBT bigotry generally. But people get to make their own choices and most bisexuals choose not to be out. I'm willing to recognize that their reluctance to be out is a reaction to the hostility faced by bisexuals. But bisexuals should be willing to recognize that their reluctance to be out is a huge contributing factor to the hostility they face.

The very next question in the stack was this:

I identify as straight but technically I'm bi. I lean heavily toward straight, but I do have exceptions. Is it wrong for me to say I'm straight? Am I just being a pussy?

No it isn't, my bisexual-but-straight-identified gyno-phobic friend. And here's a bisexual tale of woe I ran across on the tubes today:

I once dated a woman and when we were getting very close, I decided it was time to let her know that I was bisexual. She freaked out and told me the idea of two men together made her sick. Needless to say, that was the end of that relationship. In order for me to have made it work, I would have had to lie to her. There's nothing "easy" about that.

I've got another making-it-work option for you: being completely out about your bisexuality from the start and not allowing the straight woman you're dating to make the entirely reasonable assumption that the man pursuing her is also straight.