Sexual fluidity (Diamond)
A capacity for attractions to shift with time, setting or a particular relationship. Diamond treats it as flexibility layered on a person’s general orientation, so a woman who mostly desires men may fall for one woman, or a lesbian may later be drawn to a man. It describes change that happens. Diamond has said her research does not mean that therapy aimed at changing orientation would work.
What drives it
Many people assume orientation is fixed by adulthood, so a new attraction later on can feel like a crisis: was I lying before, or am I lying now. Fluidity allows a third reading, that both were true at the time. For identification it helps someone whose attractions have moved without fitting either old label.
How it shows
Work
A colleague married to a man for 15 years who now has a girlfriend, and an office trying to decide what she ‘really’ is.
Relationships
Falling for a close friend of the same sex after years of straight dating. A partner whose attractions change during a long relationship, and both people unsure what it means for them.
Self
Notice whether your attractions have changed over the years, and whether any change frightens you for what it means or for what others will say.
What tells it apart
Bisexual invisibility and binegativity: Bisexuality is lasting attraction to more than one gender. Fluidity is change over time. A bisexual person may never shift, and a person whose attractions shift may never call themselves bisexual.
Coming out later in life and mixed-orientation marriages (Buxton): Some people who come out later had same-sex attractions all along and hid them. Others report new attractions. Only the person can say which fits, and it may be some of each.
Conversion therapy (sexual orientation and gender identity change efforts): Fluidity is change that happens unbidden, often in a direction nobody planned. Change efforts try to push attraction one way, and the APA review of 2009 found insufficient evidence that they work.
A test
Ask the person to draw a line of their attractions since adolescence, without labels. A line that moved, especially around particular people, with no sense that the earlier attractions were false, may fit fluidity.
Questions to carry
- Who was I with when my attractions first surprised me?
- What am I afraid a change in me would say about my past?
How strong the research is
moderate. Lisa Diamond followed 79 lesbian, bisexual and unlabeled women for 10 years (Developmental Psychology, 2008). Two thirds changed the identity label they started with and a third changed it two or more times, more often toward bisexual or no label than away from them, and ‘unlabeled’ became the most common identity. In US national survey data (Savin-Williams, Joyner and Rieger, Archives of Sexual Behavior, 2012), identity was more often stable than not over about six years, most stable in men and in heterosexual people, and bisexual was the least stable label. Whether women are more fluid than men is less settled. In a retrospective study of 762 adults (Kinnish, Strassberg and Turner, 2005), heterosexual and gay women reported more change than men. In one longitudinal youth sample, males changed identity more often than females (Rosario and colleagues, 2006). In a daily diary study, women’s attractions moved more from day to day, though women did not recall larger changes since adolescence (Diamond, Dickenson and Blair, 2017).
Where it comes from
Lisa Diamond, ‘Female bisexuality from adolescence to adulthood: results from a 10-year longitudinal study’, Developmental Psychology, 2008, and Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women’s Love and Desire, Harvard University Press, 2008, from her 10-year study of about 100 young women
On the family tree: Lisa M. Diamond