Who we are and what we choose

Poly Means Many: There are many aspects of polyamory. Each month six bloggers - ALBJ, An Open Book, Delightfully Queer, More Than Nuclear, Rarely Wears Lipstick, and The Boy With The Inked Skin - will write about their views on one of them. This month, our topic is "orientation or choice?"

Cynthia Nixon, in an interview with the New York Times earlier this year, controversially said that being gay was, for her, "a choice".

After being accused of doing "real damage to [the] fight for civil rights", and basically being told that she is wrong in all over the place, Nixon clarified her statement. She isn't gay, she is bisexual, and she didn't choose to be gay, she chose to be in a gay relationship.

Which, I think, gets to the crux of the difference between an orientation and a choice: we can't choose what we want, but we can choose whether or not we act on it. I didn't choose to want children, but I did choose to become a parent. We don't choose to be gay, bisexual or straight, but we do choose our relationships.

I'm bisexual and I am polyamorous. At one point in my life, I exclusively dated other women, and that was, like for Cynthia Nixon, my choice. I didn't choose to be bisexual, but I do choose whether or not to pursue someone I'm attracted to. If I wanted, I could completely ignore my attraction to women, and focus entirely on heterosexual men (which is something I expect a lot of bisexual women have done) but I would still be bi. I suppose I could also have chosen not to have children, if my primary partner was resolutely child-free, for example, but that wouldn't have stopped me from desperately wanting to become a parent.

And similarly, I've chosen to be in both monogamous and non-monogamous relationships, but I didn't choose to find monogamy restrictive and pointless. I can do it, but the monogamous aspect of the relationship will always feel unsatisfying and unnecessary to me, even if everything else is great. No matter what I choose to do, it won't change who I am.

But fundamentally, it doesn't matter whether the way I am is a result of genetics, upbringing or my environment. I can't change it, and more pertinently, I don't want to change. We want what we want. What you do with that is up to you.