I've managed a lot of enjoyment and some pain in trying to figure out how to live happily, both socially and sexually, as a bisexual man. Early on, I tried threesomes, and while a triad provided a lot of advantages during sex, the social situation was almost always fraught. Often, each of my partners thought of himself or herself as having a primary relationship with me. I found trying to behave as if a primary couple existed within the little menage stressful, and eventually one or both partners would be wounded and leave. The few times these relationships really worked, they were wonderful, especially when the three of us went out and confused men and women trying to pick one of us off.

Alas, most of us grow up, and for me that meant finding a nice girl and starting a family. In this case, a nice girl had to understand my sexual attraction to men with something more than desperate tolerance. Surprisingly, I found such a woman fairly quickly. Now, how was I going to avoid a life of compartments, one with my soul mate and one with other men? My wife was willing to try establishing a triad, but the work we were doing as a couple didn't allow either of us to give enough time to the guy and Ann wasn't wildly enthusiastic about trying to keep the sexual idiosyncrasies of two men straight in her mind, so the relationship sputtered out.

Ann suggested that I could just have a series of sexual relationships with guys, provided I wore a full-body condom. I tried that approach for a while, and met some very good men and not a few asses. Something about these serial encounters, defined mostly by the sex, didn't meet my need for continuing intimacy with another man.

Finally, my wife and I settled on the strategy of finding another man whose situation mirrored mine--working on a primary relationship with a woman, but needing a stable relationship with another man that didn't threaten the primary one. Easy, right? Either I was looking in all the wrong places, or I was inept. Apparently, there are a lot of happily heterosexually married gay guys out there. And, they would really appreciate my hanging up the phone if their wives called. After many attempts, I finally found just the right guy and he found me. We maintained a healthy relationship for many years, both of us continuing to love our primaries and raising families. The logistics were often frustrating, but we all made it work, awkward family picnics notwithstanding. Sexually this construct was not as satisfying to me as a threesome, but who gets everything he wants in life?

If you're bisexual, how do or did you handle your relationships with men?