Am I Bisexual or a Lesbian? - Please help

Hello!

I'm new here and I all I can say is that I feel very grateful for have found your website.
I have 24 years old and I'm from Portugal so my native language is not English so I apologize in advance for my writing skills.*
I have been arguing with myself for years with the question “Am I bisexual or a lesbian?”. I really would like to truly know this because I suffer from depression and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder so this issue about my sexuality have been beating hard on my brain and I had started to feel desperate. I feel that I need to know what I truly am in order to know what to expect of my life. To have a bit of control over things.

My history is:

When I was 12 years old I started to become interested in what sex was. I read about it and watched a lot of sex videos. I usually get aroused by the man body and apparently nothing was “wrong”. However I fall in love with a female teacher and at the time I really didn't put to much attention in it because in my point of view it was something so strange and forbidden that I really didn't want to know what was that I was feeling. This went for more than a year.*

After this I met an old rock star (I have been with him in person less than 10 times) and I believed myself in love again however nowadays I question myself if it was really love or just a great admiration, a person who I saw as an inspiring role model. Like a teen crush with someone who is a lot older and inaccessible. I also doubt my feelings for him because when I usually imagined a life with him who I saw more often as her girlfriend was not me but my mother and I was not jealous with that though. In that time I felt like he was hot and had apparently a perfect personality and just have him in my life everyday will be awesome. Now I feel that maybe I saw him a little like a parent figure. Also I have to admit that I truly didn't know him, he was not like my teacher who I saw everyday. This huge crush lasted about 2 years.

When I was 15 years old I started dating a lot of boys and experimenting the usual staff. I felt aroused and excited and I liked doing things with them but I never fall in love with them, not even a crush, not even liked any of them. It was about that time that I lose my virginity. I had intercourse 3 times with a guy and what I felt was “Is it really just it what everyone talks about? I didn't felt pleasure. It was just a mechanical thing. Like ok it doesn't hurt and don't disgust me but the only good thing for me in this is the feeling that I am giving pleasure to someone, apart from that I don't respond and I can't feel what you are feeling. I ended the relationship pretty quickly because I could not allowed myself to continued with a guy who I just felt friendship and also the sex wasn't that good. I begun to felt that something was amiss.

I slowed down and decided that I will try to only date guys who I felt something. The next 2 years I dated sporadicallly and almost didn't do anything with them (I guess I only do little things because I was desperate to have human contact and not because I felt something for the guys).
About this time I have two crushes for two of my female friends, however I still refused myself to acknowledge my feelings.*

It was when I was 17 that “the world literally ended”. I fall heed over heels in love with another teacher who at the end of the year become a friend outside school (she was 23 and prefered to hang out with us and not with the other teachers who were a lot older). We formed a normal friendship, the year after I was not her student anymore, who ended when I couldn't contain my feelings anymore and told her (she already had suspicions because it was obvious, my friends at the time were always saying that it was written all over me). She was straight, didn't like it at all and shut me out of her life. It hurt a lot, I felt that my life was over and it took me 2 years to forget her.
*
Finally I had to admit to myself that I have feelings for girls and that truly I was not straight at all.
I started to analize all my life until that point and I saw the signs, the crushes, all the things that had always been there and I didn't want to see.
I assumed myself as Bi to everyone and begun exploring LGBT things (movies, books, gay bars, etc). It was at this time that I discovered that women turn me on a lot and that I were not only turned on by the girls that I have had feelings but women in general. The first girl that I kissed (I don't really liked her) but I enjoyed the kiss, it was somewhat better than when I kissed boys and the woman body felt really good to the touch.

I experimented a bit, dated a woman briefly (I had a crush on her) and finally met the girl who would be my first girlfriend and with who I did a lot of sex. It was a a marvellous relationship. For the first time in my life I knew what was not only love but been loved in return and it were 2 years of my life that I will never forget. She completed me. I felt full. But problems arrived and in the end she dumped me. It was the worst pain that I had ever felt, it took me years to forget her and it was only last year that I could truly moved on with my life.*

It was around last year that I begun to desperate feel that I need to know what I truly am.*
I can tell that I have crushes on famous man and woman (inaccessible people like actors) and get aroused watching love scenes of both of them but I have to confess that the girls scenes turn me on more. I also noticed that I can feel sexually attraction by both men and women that I see around in the street however the men had to be a lot more handsome than the girl to catch my attention (the girls that I had loved in the past were not what is considered beautiful). I begin to think that maybe it is time to try to date guys again for a change, maybe I need to try intercourse again to truly know. However when I imagine myself in a relationship with a man I cannot see the “whole picture” unless the guy is one of the impossible inaccessible crushes. When I imagine myself with a “normal” person I feel that I can only feel fulfilment in every aspect if the person is a girl. Maybe it is because I had never fall in love with a man in spite of how hard I tried for years for that to happen. The truth is I had always ended head over heels in love with women against my will and it was always a feeling very very intense.*

I don't know if the facts that I'm going to list bellow really matter but I will put a few things people usually say to me about what it is that out me as not straight:
I was a tomboy until I was 16 years old and more than once I was mistaken for a boy. Until that age I dint't really had any sense of fashion and I only got that with the help of two gay friends.*
I hate shopping for clothes, I rarely wear make up. I'm not butch but I'm not femme either. I can dress girly one day and I can dress more masculine in the other. With girly clothes I felt more confident but with the others I felt more comfortable. It really depends on my mood in the day and the level of my laziness.
I hate the fact that people tend to judje you by your appearance when I don't like to have to care for it.
I did sports, mainly basketball.
I don't polish my nails and I hate beauty products.
People say that my way of walking, hold things, eat, drink, etc are not feminine.
My ring finger is a lot bigger than my index.

In conclusion I feel that I can feel physical attraction and do things with both genders but that I can only involve myself emotionally with a women. I always felt that it was a wall between myself and men. Something that don't allow myself to fall in love. Something that is missing in the guys. That I'm incapable of feel more than a physical thing for them. Like a girl who can "empty her balls" with a guy but who can only fall in love and achieve fulfillment with a girl. When I had sex with a boy it felt more like mechanical and when I had with a girl it felt marvellous and right.

Thank you,

Susana

Susana,

It appears that you are more towards the lesbian side.

However, to truly know, you should drop having any expectations. Until you drop having any expectations and preconceptions, your experiment in self-analysis (you presented it very well) is incomplete and, as such, not truly valid.

This is because you fell in love with women AGAINST YOUR WILL and experienced very intense feelings. It is possible that the forbidden aspect of your relationships with women caused the intensity. In other words, you did not want to fall in love with women, but did nonetheless, and felt intensity.

If you allow yourself to fall in love with either gender (allow - in your mind, that is), then you will remove the "forbidden" aspect, and THEN you will be able to truly assess where you stand on the spectrum of sexuality. But you need to remove the forbidden factor as it taints the results of your experiment in self-analysis. You need to just allow yourself to experience life and those various feelings it brings with it as they come, without judging them against some sort of a standard that you hold in your mind.

My take would be bisexual with lesbian leanings. You say that you DO enjoy being with boys, just that when you are with women, the feelings are more intense.
I identify as bisexual, although I have more hetero leanings. I enjoy being with women, and I have loved several women. I tend to find myself drawn to men more often and experience those relationships more intensely.

Sexuality is a continuum. I know VERY few people who are absolutely 100% one way or the other. I have several friends who identify as solidly homosexual, yet who were married to women at some point, and apparently enjoyed the experience enough to create a child. I know some straight-identified people who have been known to play around with the same gender occasionally. I know bisexual-identified people who tend one way or the other, or really do seem to ride right down the middle.

I'd think that, from what you say that I would classifiy you as Bi. What REALLY matters is how YOU feel about yourself, and what YOU would like to say.