My first queer break-up

RELATIONSHIPS When Rebecca Cox wrote in ES last year about her first same-sex relationship, she was inundated with messages - now single again, she is finding perceptions of her bisexuality hard to navigate

-  Rebecca Cox

WHEN you're a single mum, dating is always slightly more complicated than "meet someone, fall in love, settle down, live happily ever after". By single parenting's very definition, often you've tried that before and there is an unfortunate fifth stage of "s*** hitting the fan". Call it being realistic, call it being jaded, when it comes to dating I keep an open mind and hope for the best, while quietly expecting the worst. My relationship with my ex-girlfriend was beautiful and challenging, and we taught each other so much, but ultimately she was set on a course of "happily ever after" (that everybody deserves to strive for, and I hope she finds) while my awareness of the invisible, but highly possible, step five left us moving in opposite directions.

And so, I entered 2023 single. But first, how I became a single mum. I married my first boyfriend after 10 years together, had a baby, separated and divorced. After slowly rebuilding my life, I decided to remould myself too, and started dating for the first time since being a teenager- and I was open to meeting both men and women, having always considered myself to be (an admittedly slightly inexperienced) bisexual.

When I met my girlfriend, it felt perfectly ordinary to me that my new partner was a woman, but I was slowly faced with the reality, one stare, glare or ignorant remark at a time, that it was less-so to the rest of the world.