Is my love queer enough for you?

Image Description: A young queer couple sharing an embrace in a glass box surrounded by floating eyes.

Editors note: This story is published in collaboration with Obodo Nigeria as part of Intersect, a series exploring the ways queer love, trans identity, and cultural expression collide with and sometimes push back against social expectations. Read a foreword from the editor, Richie Wills and other stories in the series here.

On an unassuming day in October 2022, I met my current partner. At the time, I mistook him for someone else and called him the wrong name, yet neither he nor our mutual friend corrected me. The early days of our friendship were filled with music, memes, banter, and me running off with his phone as I was without one myself at the time. I had bricked mine trying to change the operating system.

After about four or five months of honest conversations, sharing immaculate music finds, and creating time for each other amidst our busy schedules, we became a couple. And that’s when the questions began.

As a queer person in a relationship with someone who isn’t queer, I have had to defend and explain my love to so many people: friends and strangers alike. For an allocishet person—someone who is allosexual, cisgender, and heterosexual—being in a relationship with a queer person often comes with the pressure to claim a queerness that may not feel like their own. My partner has been asked questions like, “Are you really straight if you’re dating them, a queer, gender non-conforming individual?”. Though usually well-meaning and born of curiosity, these questions continually put us on the spot and, at times, make me feel like a traitor to the queer community.

I recall a discussion with my friends about the dynamics of my relationship. Amidst the barrage of questions, I tried to explain myself while downplaying my discomfort, feigning indifference to hide how disconcerted I felt. They weren’t trying to hurt me or undermine my love; they were simply trying to fit it into their pre-existing notions of what love “should” look like: cishet people should date cishet people, and queer people should date other queer people. I tried to explain that identity doesn’t always dictate who we love—that love just does its thing. Yet, as my partner and I joke that he’s “gay by proxy,” I can’t help but wonder: why is there this reflex to categorise, question, or mock love when it does not conform? 

The debate over whether an allocishet person in a relationship with a queer person can still be considered entirely “straight” is widespread, especially online, and I’m no stranger to it. But I believe that pressuring people to pick up a label or change their behaviour to fit societal expectations does more harm than good. When society cannot make sense of my relationship, it often feels like one of us has to compromise: either I conform to traditional gender roles and heteronormative standards, or he acknowledges a supposedly hidden queerness to justify his attraction to me. Neither option is fair or fulfilling. 

This pressure to conform doesn’t come solely from the outside world; it is also prevalent within the queer community. In pushing back against marginalisation and erasure, a form of internal policing is created where queer people are implicitly taught that subverting the norm is essential. And that means only dating people whose identities challenge heteronormativity. The unspoken hierarchy goes like this: the queerer the individuals in the relationship, the more valid or “radical” their love is deemed to be.  But doesn’t that contradict the very essence of queer culture, which is to let people simply be?

This isn’t just my experience. Others in different-gender queer relationships share similar experiences, revealing a broader pattern. Research has already begun to capture these nuances. People in different-gender relationships face stigma from both the general public and within the LGBTQ+ community. Lesbian women in heterosexual-presenting relationships, especially those with partners who have transitioned, often report being shunned by the lesbian community. And let’s not forget how the bisexual community is steeped in rhetoric of disdain towards bisexual women in relationships with cishet men. 

Adun, a bisexual person dating a straight man, says that people, including other bisexual women, treat being attracted to or partnered with a man as some sort of moral failing. “Those comments about bisexual women and their straight boyfriends, or [people] making fun of bisexual women and assuming their male partners are with them as a fetish, can be very irritating and annoying, but they don’t affect how I view my relationship in any way,” she says. “[The fetishisation] is definitely a thing, but it’s unfair to assume that that’s always the case or to laugh at babes in that situation, because what’s funny about being fetishised?”

Darey, another bisexual woman in a similar relationship, mentioned that when people found out she was dating a man, some girls texted her saying she would “change overnight.” 

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These comments, regardless of intent, are hurtful and insulting. However, as Adun said, we do our best not to let them affect how we view our relationships.

One pattern I’ve noticed in how we cope is through humour: we joke about our identities, both perceived and real, with our partners. Darey and Adun both joke that their partners are bisexual. As I said earlier, my partner and I joke that he’s “gay by proxy.” Not only does humour strengthen our bond, but it also helps us deflect external scrutiny. Despite the questions and microaggressions, our relationships are full of joy. It shows in the way we laugh at the labels people try to impose on us, in the conversations that deepen our understanding of each other, and in the simple, radical act of loving without apology. Our love is a reminder that joy is just as much a part of the queer experience as struggle.

At the end of the day, people will keep querying what it means to be a queer couple. But my partner’s identity doesn’t need to “shift” for our love to be valid. It’s time we challenge these expectations and embrace the many, beautiful ways queer love can manifest.

Edited/Reviewed by Richie Wills, Caleb Okereke, Awom Kenneth, Sarah Etim, and Uzoma Ihejirika.