When Mina told me she was bisexual, I said it did not bother me. I thought an honest answer was sufficient, that nothing behind it needed examining. We had been together several months and agreed on a monogamous relationship. She was changing no agreement, only sharing something about herself. Yet the next time she went to dinner with a female friend, I caught myself asking questions I had not previously considered necessary.
I asked how long they had known each other, whether they had ever dated, and whether anyone else would join them. Mina answered the first, then paused at the second. She said the woman was a friend and asked why the conversation resembled an inspection. I tried joking that my competition had suddenly doubled. She did not laugh. She said the people in her life were no list of potential replacements for me.
She went to dinner while I stayed home angry, mostly because I could invent no reasonable explanation for my behavior. She had neither cheated nor requested different rules. I had turned information about attraction into an account of reliability myself. When she returned, I said I understood I was unfair. I did not immediately add but. It took several attempts to keep the whole sentence without that small exit.
Mina sat beside me and said she could discuss our relationship but would not repeatedly defend every friendship. She did not promise I would be the world's only attractive person to her. We had never required that of each other. We promised certain behavior and honesty. Now I needed to decide whether to trust her actions or constantly ask her to remove imagined dangers.
My jealousy did not disappear overnight. I stopped making every jealous feeling a question she must answer. When uneasy, I first examined whether there was an actual reason or simply a previously unnoticed habit. Mina did not praise every small improvement. She kept seeing friends, loving me, and saying when something hurt. Our relationship grew easier when I spent less time calculating who might take her away.
Months later I met the friend from that dinner. We discussed old bicycles and spent half an hour seeking the name of a part neither could remember. Mina teased that we finally found a shared subject that was not her. On the way home I held her hand. I felt no victory over an imaginary rival. I was glad finally to have met another person from the life of the woman I loved.