You can probably already guess what this is about. for reference, I'm 21, soon 22.

if this kind of post isn't allowed here, i deeply apologise, i just need to vent so I'll just take it elsewhere.

I've dated men in the past. my life growing up was centred mostly around men. I grew up with straight love stories everywhere, i guess you could say shoved down my throat, in hindsight. I've even dated two guys... except i never met these two irl. i was a people pleaser.

in 2019, i realised i was attracted to girls after a very pretty girl joined our school and i started liking her a LOT. it was hard, but i eventually came to terms with my attraction to women and accepted that i was "bisexual". but there's a problem, i live in an extremely homophobic muslim country which is why it took me until I was 17 to even figure out i liked girls. the thought didn't even occur to me at all. i was still a muslim back then and the goal we were fed is to marry a man and settle down eventually, it felt like something i had to do.

I felt comfortable under the "bisexual" label because i could hide my attraction to women by focusing on my apparent attraction to men instead. I figured that even if i pursued a girl i liked, we'd have no future in my country. it would be unrealistic, and my family would 100% disown me if they found out i liked girls. but it's ok, if i marry a man i love eventually, they'll never find out, right?

then i had real life sexual encounters with men and i... didn't enjoy it. sex with men grosses me out. men grossed me out in general.

all these years, i also tended to just jump from male crush to male crush, like i had some kind of void to fill. one thing i noted is that even while i had a boyfriend, or while i was talking to a guy, every time i saw that one girl I first liked, I'd feel butterflies in my stomach and get giddy about her.

but that all changed very recently, when i finally began shaving off these feelings of obligation like i eventually had to marry a man. i fully stopped caring what men thought of me. i fully embraced the side of me that is attracted to women.

and the more i accept myself, the less attracted i am to men.

the idea of being with a man in any way fucking terrifies me. it's gross, i don't want to be intimate with a man, and even when i now meet guys I'm theoretically 100% compatible with, I'm just not attracted to them at all. I've even hurt someone in this process because i had to reject him even though we could've been perfect together, simply because i wasn't into him.

all this is really hard to digest for me, I've only realised this a couple days ago. I'm still processing it. I'm so scared of what's gonna happen now, especially now that the safety blanket of hetero relationships aren't an option for me anymore since I'm not attracted to men. i can't hide my sexual orientation forever unless i stay celibate my whole life. I'm so scared.

but being with a woman doesn't sound scary or gross like being with a man does.

sorry if this post is long winded, I'm just scared and i don't know what to expect. I'm scared for my safety since I'm still in said homophobic country. people are extremely hostile to lgb and gender nonconforming people here.