| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺南大學 === 諮商與輔導學系碩士班 === 104 === The study aimed to investigate bisexual women’s prior contextual experience and decision-making processes regarding whether or not to come out to their partners. A narrative approach was adopted in this qualitative research; purposive sampling was used to select four bisexual women who either had considered coming out or had come out to their partners during the relationships as research participants. The researcher underwent semi-structured in-depth interviews with the participants; the obtained data was analyzed and compiled through the holistic-content method. The findings are as follows:
I. Prior contextual experience regarding whether bisexual women would come out to their partners or not:
1. Family experience involved with heterosexual thoughts is the first major impact to how bisexual women construct sexual identity.
2. Common people punished the person who transgressed mainstream values made bisexual women afraid of coming-out.
3. Social stigma and insufficient resources caused identity indecisiveness; bisexual women yearned to solidify their identity through coming out.
4. Bisexual women’s philosophy on love influenced their decisions to come out to their partners.
II. Bisexual women’s decision-making processes regarding their initiative coming out to their partners:
1. Decisive factors of coming out or not
Bisexual women’s decisions on whether or not to come out to their partners consider six aspects involve the following factors: bisexual women desire to face the true self in an intimate relationship; bisexual women used to select partners through coming out; bisexual women have different order of coming out on partners’ gender and sexual orientation; partners’ homophobia or biphobia attitude make bisexual women to lock the closet; bisexual women desire to be understood, accepted, and supported; bisexual women hope for improving the intimacy and trust in a relationship through coming out.
2. Decision-making processes of coming out or not
A decision is a result from a complicated process. Prior experience, compounded by decisive factors, makes every bisexual woman encounter different transition processes and consider different critical factors during their decision-making processes:
1) The fluctuating bisexual identity under the dominant power of monosexuality - ranging from believing in to facing homophobic/biphobic partners’ concealment and/or giving up
2) The desires of enjoying equity in relationships like monosexuals do, which urges bisexual women to turn trauma and withdrawal into taking chances in love.
Lastly, based on the research findings, the study proposed specific suggestions to researchers and related fields, such as counseling and social work, for reference. In this way, those professionals can have a better understanding of bisexual women’s relationship experience and thus be able to provide them with the most proper service and assistance.
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