I heard this morning from an old friend whom I hadn’t spoken with since the early ’80s. He told me that his 2005 divorce from his former wife, whom I knew in the old days, was basically about her decision to become a full-time gay woman after flirting with bisexuality for many years. You have to roll with these situations when they happen, but imagine living in a kind of limbo state about your true sexual nature for five or six decades. My first thought is always, “What took you so long?”

The typical beer-drinking, ESPN-watching, straight-guy response to this kind of thing is to assume that the guy had something to do with nudging his formerly straight girlfriend into the clutches of lesbianism. I used to hear this crap when a highly significant ’70s girlfriend turned gay about four years after we broke up. If anything I was the one between us who took it in the neck and ate most of the pain.

I’ve been told time and again that most gay people have an inkling of their true nature fairly early in life, but I’ve also heard of older women going gay over frustration with their asshole husbands or boyfriends so maybe there’s something to it. Or maybe it’s simply delightful to be in synch with another woman who really gets you and makes you feel truly loved.

I’ve sometimes imagined that the ideal marriage situation for a straight guy might be to have a wife who’s passionately bisexual — a woman who genuinely loves being with her husband for security and love and straight sex, but who also has a yen for this or that girlfriend from time to time. That way things are always titillating on a certain level (and no, I’m not even thinking about three-way scenes) and the pressure is off the husband to be 100% responsible for his wife’s emotional and sexual satisfaction.