Some time ago, I was dating a girl who I thought was perfect for me. We had been friends for most of our lives, and I found myself incredibly attracted to her.

I knew all about her troubled past, but I was willing to look past it because I also knew about her family and the ways they had pushed her towards some unsavory behavior.

That is… Until I found out that she was cheating on me with a large number of people. I had given her a chance, and she had turned out to be everything I didn’t want in a partner.

I went into a bit of confusion, and reeling from this experience left me questioning everything about myself. Obviously, I didn’t even know what I wanted. I thought she was perfect for me, after all, and I couldn’t have been more wrong.

I ended up going “back into the closet” and dating men for awhile. I made quite a few poor decisions during this time (about a year), but my choice to question my sexuality was never one of them.

I had come out of the closet at a fairly young age, after a fair amount of confusion; I felt that it was possible that I had taken things that happened to me and allowed them to shape who I became, in a way that wasn’t necessarily accurate.

However, after this dating of men, it became incredibly apparent to me that I was not, in fact, attracted to men after all. Although my preference of women over men may have happened right around the same time as some bad things happened to me, the two weren’t as interconnected as I had thought as a teenager.

Now, in the lesbian community, there’s a bit of stigma surrounding women who have had sex with men, but choose to identify as lesbians.

Many see us as “bisexual” despite the fact that a label is something you set for yourself – and often, if a woman feels that you have been dishonest about your sexuality, she may dismiss you entirely – and I ran into this a fair amount in my subsequent dating life.

A fair amount of this is based on biphobia, which is its own problem, but other women’s rejection of my self-imposed label felt like a slap in the face.

For women who have never had sex with a man, it can be difficult for them to wrap their head around the idea of a woman who has. I’ve never been a good liar, so I don’t even try – I have always been upfront with the women I’ve pursued when it comes to my past.

When it comes to dating men, I’ve never been particularly proud of my choices, but the fact remains that if I hadn’t examined these feelings, the questioning would always be there.

This is often what leads women to consider relationships with other women in the first place – their uncertainty surrounding their heterosexuality. Why, then, was it so different for me to transition to “bi-curiosity” in the other direction?

For anyone who has any inkling of curiosity when it comes to dating the gender that they don’t typically date, I urge you to explore it – safely. You may face some contention when it comes to your future partners, but hopefully this will soon be an obsolete thing.

After all, I’ve always been a firm believer in “don’t knock it until you try it” – why is our sexuality treated differently than that?

In my personal experience, my experimentation only confirmed what I had previously thought: I am definitely very, very gay. That doesn’t mean that there’s anything wrong with you if you find out one day that you’re not.

Sexuality is often said to be fluid and can change over the course of your life. What works one day may not necessarily be true the next. It doesn’t mean you were wrong or that your sexuality was just a phase, it means that you’re human and you have changed.