A few years ago, I wrote a piece about how a lot of straight women (statistically speaking) don’t want to date bi men. At the time, I was careful to make one thing clear: no woman owes a bi man a date. We are all allowed to decide who gets us going and who doesn’t.
What I challenged was the reasoning.
If you don’t want to date a bi man because you think he’s secretly gay, inevitably going to cheat, incapable of monogamy, or somehow less of a man because he’s had sex with another man, that’s not a preference. Those are biphobic stereotypes, and they’re wrong.
The research at the time painted a pretty bleak picture. Straight women consistently rated bi men as less attractive, less masculine, and less desirable as romantic partners than straight men. And unfortunately, the latest research suggests that particular problem hasn’t gone away. New YouGov polling found that 66% of straight British women would be unwilling to date a bi man, with just 19% saying they would be willing. Even among straight women with a “very positive” opinion of bi people, almost half, 46%, still wouldn’t date one.
In my years writing about bisexuality, I’ve heard the real-world consequences over and over again. Bi men who suddenly stopped getting matches after adding “bisexual” to their dating profile. Men too scared to tell their girlfriends. Married men reaching their 40’s and 50’s before finally admitting to their wives that they have always been bi.
So no, the problem I wrote about hasn’t disappeared. But something around it is beginning to change. The straight dating market has shifted at precisely the same time as the cultural image of the bi man is improving.
The straight dating market has become a bit weird
I haven’t been on the dating market myself for a long time, but I follow it almost like a sport.
Judging by the reports coming back from friends and colleagues who are still out there, things seem pretty bleak. I have female friends who have given up on dating apps and started paying to attend singles events, only to tell me they’re having not much luck there. Others are still endlessly swiping but increasingly convinced that the apps aren’t actually getting them any closer to a relationship.
Then there’s another complaint I keep hearing from women: men don’t seem to want to settle down anymore. Obviously, that’s anecdotal. My friends are not a representative sample of the population. But the frequency with which I’m hearing it has made me wonder if we’re witnessing a subtle shift in the heterosexual dating dynamic.
For generations, the expectation was that men did the chasing. They approached, impressed, planned the date, and paid. Men proved that they were worthy of a woman’s attention and, eventually, commitment. Increasingly, the attitude I hear being described by women feels more like: this is who I am; you either want me or you don’t.
Some men seem less interested in the chase altogether. They’re less willing to endlessly perform, persuade, or prove their worth to someone they’re dating. Perhaps that’s just confidence. Perhaps it’s laziness. Or maybe men are exhausted by the dating market.
Equally possible, perhaps some men have looked at the traditional relationship bargain and started asking a question women have been encouraged to ask for decades:
What’s actually in this for me?
Some men look at the modern relationship deal and wonder why they should be falling over themselves to sign up. Work hard, prove your worth, provide what you can in an economy that makes that harder than it was for your father or grandfather, take on more at home than they ever did, and if the marriage falls apart, potentially lose half of what you’ve built. All while being judged less for the hundred things you get right than the three things you forgot to do. Throw in a relationship where sex and desire have quietly disappeared, and you can perhaps see why some men aren’t exactly sprinting towards the altar.
Research suggests something really has shifted. Studies from Pew Research Center and Bank of America show that fewer single Americans, particularly young people, are actively looking for relationships or dates. I’m not suggesting heterosexual men have collectively held a meeting and canceled romance. But something is going on.
What exactly is the modern deal for men?
We’re comfortable discussing what men get wrong in relationships and encouraging women to expect more. But equality means examining both sides. Men are still expected to provide while taking on more responsibilities at home. Perhaps some men are simply asking whether the commitment on the table makes their life better.
Housing costs, dating apps, changing gender roles, and delayed adulthood all play a part, so there is clearly no single explanation. But something isn’t working. Men seem less willing to play the old dating game, while plenty of women are wondering where the men willing to play it have gone. Which brings me to one group women have historically been rather quick to rule out.
Enter the bisexual man
The interesting part of this shift, as a bi man, is that it’s happening at the same time as what Gay Times has called “The Bi Renaissance.”
If you had asked me a few years ago what bi male representation needed, I’m not sure I would have answered two ridiculously attractive ice hockey players having lots of sex. Turns out I should have!
Heated Rivalry has been one of the most interesting developments for bi male representation in years. Ilya Rozanov is attracted to both men and women, but none of this is presented as evidence that he’s confused, secretly gay, or somehow less masculine. He’s confident, successful, desirable and, frankly, just hot.
Women seem to agree. The analytics firm Nielsen found that seven in ten Heated Rivalry viewers were women, while British Vogue has written about the huge female response to the show.
Of course, watching Ilya have sex with Shane from the comfort of your sofa doesn’t mean you’ll automatically swipe right on a bi man tomorrow. But culturally, it matters. When I wrote my original article, attraction to men appeared to reduce a bi man’s desirability to many women. Now one of television’s most talked-about romantic characters is a man whose attraction to men is part of his sex appeal.
And Ilya isn’t alone
The Wall Street Journal went as far as running an article this year titled, “Why the Bisexual Man Is Hollywood’s Breakout Star”, pointing to Heated Rivalry, Challengers, and other recent examples.
Look at Benedict Bridgerton. In Season 4 of Bridgerton, Benedict tells Sophie openly that he has been intimate with both men and women. Crucially, he then gets the big heterosexual romantic storyline anyway. He doesn’t have to pick a sexuality before getting the girl.
Then there’s Evan “Buck” Buckley in 9-1-1, a character audiences had already watched for years as a conventionally masculine firefighter who dated women before the series explored his bisexuality.
Nick Nelson in Heartstopper has given an entirely younger generation perhaps the clearest message of all: a boy can genuinely like girls, discover that he also likes a boy, and not have the first half of his life retrospectively declared fraudulent.
In Challengers, Patrick Zweig‘s dating app is explicitly set to men and women, while the sexual tension between him and Art exists alongside his relationships with women. The film hardly stops for a Bisexuality 101 PowerPoint presentation. It just lets the attraction exist.
Then there is Jeremiah Fisher in The Summer I Turned Pretty, one of the central male love interests in a massively popular heterosexual love triangle, who casually talks about kissing boys and girls. Creator Jenny Han described the television version of Jeremiah as sexually fluid and deliberately reflective of a younger generation that views sexuality as more of a spectrum.
Put all of this together, and something is clearly happening.
For years, bi male representation tended to arrive with baggage. The bi man was confused, promiscuous, deceptive, maybe secretly gay or just going through a phase. Now some of the men being held up as romantic and sexual fantasies for women are men who aren’t 100% straight. It feels like the tide has turned.
Before we declare victory…
Let’s put the bi champagne back in the fridge for a second.
We’re nowhere near where we need to be. GLAAD counted 98 bisexual+ characters across broadcast, cable, and streaming television in its 2024 to 2025 survey. Only 27 were men. In fact, overall bisexual+ representation had fallen for the third year in a row. So television is not suddenly awash with bi men.
What’s changed is something slightly different. A handful of bi or sexually fluid male characters have become culturally prominent in a way they weren’t before. We have gone from struggling to find bi men at all to having some who are romantic leads, sex symbols, and characters women actively fantasize about.
Baby steps.
And the real world is still somewhat behind. Pew’s 2025 research found that of bi people in committed different-sex relationships, 93% of bi women said their partner knew they were bi, whereas for bi men, it was just 69%.
Think about that for a second. A significant number of bi men are in committed relationships with women who don’t even know that the man they’re sleeping next to is bi. The culture may be changing, but the consequences of coming out have clearly not disappeared.
Standards or prejudices?
This brings me back to where I started all those years ago. Women shouldn’t lower their standards for men.
In fact, I’d argue the opposite. Have good standards, but also be willing to ask whether everything you’ve put on your dating checklist is actually a standard. Some of it might simply be prejudice that we’ve dressed up as preference. Being straight doesn’t make a man faithful. It doesn’t make him a good father. It doesn’t make him financially responsible, romantic, or capable of building a healthy relationship. And being bi doesn’t prevent him from being any of those things either.
Perhaps one unexpected consequence of how miserable modern dating has become is that people are being forced to think harder about what actually makes somebody a good partner.
Straight women are complaining that they can’t find men who want commitment. Some men appear increasingly reluctant to play the old dating game. Maybe, in the middle of all of that, there is an opportunity to throw out a few assumptions that were never particularly useful in the first place.
Bi men should never become some consolation prize because the straight dating market isn’t working. “Fine, I’ll try a bi one” is hardly the cultural progress I’m looking for. The point is more challenging than that. Perhaps some women have spent years ruling out perfectly compatible men for reasons that have very little to do with whether those men would actually make good partners.
In my original article, I described something of a vicious cycle. Women reject bi men. Bi men become scared of coming out. Their invisibility means fewer people encounter openly bi men. And because people don’t encounter them, the old stereotypes survive.
Maybe, just maybe, that cycle is starting to run in reverse.
Visibility creates familiarity. Familiarity challenges stereotypes. Stereotypes weakening makes coming out easier. More men come out. More women actually meet bi men rather than imagining who they are.
When the bi man can become the romantic fantasy, it becomes increasingly difficult to explain why he must remain the real-life dating deal-breaker.
Perhaps bi men didn’t need to become better catches.
Perhaps people are finally starting to realize we were catches all along.