“I’ve never seen myself being with a woman seriously. I don’t know if that’s me, marrying a female. My vision is with a man,” says Love Is Blind's Brittany Dodson, explaining her sexuality to her love interest, Devin.
The world meets Brittany in the latest season of the hit reality show, but after hearing those words come out of her mouth, I feel like I’ve known her my whole life. Why do I feel such kinship with this American stranger on my laptop screen? Because her experiences reflect my own.
I hold no judgement for Brittany’s way of thinking — we’re all entitled to explore, access, and explain our sexual orientation in whatever way makes sense for us. However, her approach of dismissing the seriousness of relationships with women and believing wholeheartedly that she will end up with a man is a universal experience of bisexual and pansexual women and femmes. It’s a little something called compulsory heterosexuality.
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Coined by Adrienne Rich, compulsory heterosexuality challenges the assumption that all women are innately attracted to men and posits that heterosexuality is an institution imposed on women to render them subordinate. The terminology is inspired by the societal norms that pressure women into heterosexual relationships by subtly encouraging them to submit to heterosexuality by treating their LGBTQ+ identities as an oddity, not a core part of their being. Through the heteronormativity that dominates our culture, we socialise everyone into seeing straightness as the default state, so even if you are attracted to women, you should marry a man.
Just like Brittany, the influence of this often unspoken phenomenon led me to avoid serious relationships with women for most of my life. In fact, Brittany doesn’t even use the word relationship when describing her past connections; she repeats the word “experiences” as an almost involuntary programming that inherently devalues the strength of those relationships.
Brittany tells Devin about one “experience” where she was with a woman who saw them marrying in the future, but she couldn’t envisage the same fairytale because they were two women. I’ve experienced the same thing over and over and over again, starting in my teen years.
My first kisses were with girls — you know the routine, we were just “practising” — and my first dates were with girls, too. However, I dodged any relationship with them because I feared my pansexuality/bisexuality (I never know which word is more fitting for my confused sexual orientation, so I use the terms interchangeably). When a beautiful girl told me she was in love with me at age 14, I swooned but then fled when people in my school found out, and the homophobic bullying kicked off.
I broke her heart — and mine — to save face and dismissed my interest in women as a fleeting teenage fantasy, even though my lust for them had been burgeoning since I developed my first childhood crushes on the girls in Totally Spies.
I buried my interest in women by adhering to society’s compulsory heterosexuality, convincing myself that any relationship with a women was purely sexual and not destined for anything serious. Brittany and I both treated our relationships with women as fleeting fancies, simply life filler between long-term relationships with men. I, too, firmly believed that I would never be in a serious relationship with a woman because all women are destined to marry men. And all this, even though I never want to get married! That’s how completely compulsory heterosexuality formed my relationship with my own sexual orientation.
In the show, Devin’s uncomfortable response to Brittany’s coming out expands our understanding of compulsory heterosexuality. He appears inherently uncomfortable with the idea of a queer woman expressing all the pieces of herself. Unless our sexuality is an opportunity for men to access queer women sexually through threesomes, they rarely show any respect for our orientation.
Thankfully, Devin didn’t lean into this particular stereotype. Still, his discomfort reflects why so many queer women suppress their true selves or dismiss the idea of long-term relationships with other women. After Devin opened up about his experience of suicidal ideation due to a chronic pain issue, Brittany responded with equal vulnerability by talking about her sexuality. His response was anything but open and accepting.
Devin expressed that he needs time because “it’s a lot for me to process” because he’s never been with someone who’s had same-sex experiences. He seems momentarily reassured when Brittany says that she’s only into monogamous relationships. But despite this, he goes on to say that her sexuality is definitely something for him “to think about.” Luckily, his response also turned Brittany off of him, and she left the experiment shortly after.
Brittany’s desire to marry a man forced me to reflect on my own experiences, which gave way to the realisation that so many of my past relationships never embraced my sexuality, only begrudgingly accepting it. And, if I’m really honest with myself, I never fully embraced it either. It’s only recently that I’ve shrugged off the constraints of compulsory heterosexuality and acknowledged that I’m rarely attracted to men; I’m more enamoured by the idea of a romance with a man.
And that’s probably what brought me to sit in front of a show based on the premise of heterosexual love and marriage, right? The fantasy of finding a man who fits all my ideals of romance, the ones I picked up from my childhood obsession with Jane Austen’s dashing gentlemen and Disney’s heartthrob princes. It’s like I’m stuck in Build-a-Bear trying to form my perfect man because society tells me that my happy ending can only come about when I commit to the right penis.
Seeing compulsory heterosexuality play out on screen, especially in a mainstream show like Love Is Blind, has given me hope that more bisexual women will confront the internalisation of their sexuality, too. I’m not telling anyone that they should force themselves to commit to women if it’s not what they want, least of all Brittany, who deserves to experience her sexual orientation on her terms. But, I do hope that more queer women will accept the role compulsory heterosexuality has played in their romantic choices and challenge its dominance in future dalliances. After all, if we’re queer, we are allowed to embrace all facets of that queerness and romanticise women just as much as we do with men.
