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Last year, Bianca Emde, 28, was living in a home she and her husband had recently bought together. The couple had just thrown a formal wedding weekend in a mountainous resort town with 170 guests. Now, they were talking about starting a family. “I felt like I had it all together,” Emde tells Cosmopolitan. “I’ve always been a high achiever, planning my life out perfectly.”
Emde met her husband at a prestigious university, where she excelled academically and graduated with a job at a major tech company. On paper, she had everything: the partner, the house, the job. “But that wasn’t how I was feeling deep down inside.”
In February 2024, she stopped taking birth control—a nightly ritual she had maintained since high school—to prepare her body for pregnancy. By spring, Emde felt transformed. “Suddenly, my energy levels are through the roof and I’m feeling in touch with my body for the first time in years,” she says. “It was like a veil had been lifted.” With that shift came a startling realization: her attraction to her husband was fading, and she was beginning to desire women. “I had no idea how numb I had been,” she recalls. By May, she was dreaming about women and consumed by the urge to experiment.
In September, she told her husband what had consumed her brain for months, and they eventually decided to end their marriage. By the time they separated, Emde had joined the exclusive dating app Raya, where she matched with a woman. “I knew I was gay after that first experience.”
Emde is part of a growing number of women leaving heterosexual marriages to pursue relationships with women. “There’s been a big increase in the last five years of women coming out later in life and exploring their sexuality,” says Frankie Bashan, a psychologist and matchmaker who specializes in working with LGBTQ+ clients. She emphasizes it’s not that more women are sexually fluid now, but that more feel safe to come out.
For many women, self-realization comes with age, notes Lisa Diamond, author of Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women’s Love and Desire. “As women get older and they get more confident and comfortable with themselves, they’re better aware of just how disconnected they might be,” she says. “It may only be later in life that women feel comfortable openly challenging heteronormativity.”
Still, coming out later in life, especially while married, can feel terrifyingly isolating. “Not enough people are talking about this and normalizing it,” Bashan says. For women stepping into their sexuality later in life, community becomes essential. “The number one most important thing when a woman is coming out later in life is a support network and finding women who are going through the same thing,” she explains. “You’ve got to find similar people where you don’t feel like a pariah, where you can mirror each other and feel seen.”
But what happens when that mirror is missing? On TikTok and Reddit, you can find just about every niche imaginable—but for women questioning their sexuality from inside a heterosexual marriage, representation is almost non-existent.
The year before she got married, then-22-year-old Hayley Folk had recently discovered that she was bisexual and was finding herself connecting more with women she was meeting than with her own boyfriend. At 23, Folk found herself unhappily married and in love with another woman.
When she finally separated from her husband eight months later, Folk scoured Reddit for resources on bisexuality. “At that time, there was literally nothing,” she says. Adjusting to her new life proved difficult; she was suddenly carrying a stack of new labels—bisexual, polyamorous, divorcée—and dating under the weight of them all. In the back of her mind was the voice of her ex, who had insisted that being bisexual was the same as being a “slut.” “I ended up drinking a lot,” Folk, now 30, admits. “I was trying to process everything.”
That shame, says Diamond, is hard to outrun. “We still have a society that does not encourage cisgender girls to embrace their own capacity for pleasure,” she explains. Instead, girls are taught that “it’s their responsibility not to get pregnant, to keep those legs closed, to say no.” Those lessons, Diamond adds, get embedded early. “When you give those messages consistently to a young person whose brain is still developing, those messages get wired in deep. You can’t just undo that repression overnight.”
For Taylor Strecker, those messages translated into a conviction that she was asexual. By her late 20s, she hated giving blow jobs, never enjoyed sex with her boyfriends, and felt entirely disconnected from her body. The verdict was in. “This is who I am,” she thought. At the time, she was co-hosting a Sirius XM morning show with Cosmopolitan, where she dished about everything from hemorrhoids to friendship break-ups. “It was kind of like Sex and the City on the radio,” she says. Except Strecker didn’t actually enjoy the sex part. “I always felt like sex was for the man, not something for me to enjoy too.”
At 26, she was engaged to a man her audience nicknamed “Mr. Perfect.” He was stable, would make a good father, and didn’t pressure her for much intimacy. But still, something felt off. “I didn’t feel ready to get married, but I also wasn’t ready to break up with this guy who was a good person,” Strecker remembers. “Even though my gut was telling me something was off, I went ahead with the wedding.”
Joking on air about hating sex was part of Strecker’s shtick—until one day her dad asked if it was real. It was, she told him. “Hearing this made him really sad,” she says. “That stuck with me.” Looking back, she wonders whether she would have allowed herself to explore things sexually with women if things hadn’t gone south in her marriage. “I probably would have just lived in mediocrity.”
Diamond sees Strecker’s story as a symptom of broader cultural pressure. “We still have a culture that actually encourages women to be somewhat disassociated from their bodies,” she notes. “We shame women’s sexuality, and we expect them to reach certain life stages, because if you don’t, there’s something wrong with you.” That message, she says, often drives women into marriages — and staying in marriages — even when their instincts are telling them otherwise.
For Emma*, a 40-year-old writer and mother of two, the hardest part wasn’t realizing she was unhappy—it was acting on it. “I stayed a lot longer than I should have because [the shame] felt insurmountable,” she says. “How could I break up my family?” She hadn’t been cheated on or mistreated; she simply wasn’t happy—and that, she says, made the guilt even worse. “There’s a massive societal expectation that women should put other people’s happiness first, and I don’t think I realized how deep that ran until I left.”
Motherhood was the catalyst that finally pushed Emma to leave. “What society expects from mothers is insane, unrealistic, and so damaging,” she says. “I kept imagining my daughter in the same position one day—putting everyone else first—and realized I couldn’t model that for her.”
Diamond says that the pressure to get married often leads to unstable marriages. “When you’re ignoring the signs in your brain and body, you [end up] picking the wrong person. People don’t make great decisions when they’re super young.”
When Emde looks back at her wedding, she “cringes so hard.” “Did I really want that?” she reflects. “Or was that literally just society telling me what I want?” In her marriage, she often felt like the caretaker rather than an equal partner. “Making sure dinners were cooked, the house was clean. It felt pretty thankless,” she admits. “Since then, I’ve come to realize that there is, in fact, more out there for me.”
But leaving her marriage, disappointing her husband, breaking the news to her parents, coming out to her peers, and reckoning with a bunch of new labels was a big pill to swallow all at once. “When I went through this, I didn’t know anyone that had gone through something similar.” She struggled to find influencers, articles, or podcasts that spoke about this specific transition. “The lack of resources on these subjects makes you feel really isolated, even though so many people are going through the exact same thing.”
“Women in hetero relationships aren’t talking about the fact that they’re not getting satisfied from their partners,” she shares. “Now that I’m sharing my story online, people are constantly like, ‘I know someone who went through the exact same thing.’ It’s actually more common than you think.”
What felt like a gap in the media to Emde is actually part of a larger cultural blind spot. “It’s a threatening message for individuals who view themselves as completely straight,” says Diamond. “Society is more comfortable saying, let’s accept those gay people. It’s harder to accept that you can be [an adult] and still not know your sexuality.” That uncertainty, she adds, is exactly why so many women feel alone. “To have something as fundamental as your sexuality feel unpredictable is destabilizing and scary. That’s part of why it gets silenced.”
Folk knows the silence all too well. “I felt super anxious to leave,” she remembers, adding that she feared her friends would judge her not only for being queer but for being polyamorous, too. “I thought no one was going to understand and no one did.”
Years later, Folk is remarried—to a man who, unlike her first husband, accepts the full range of her sexuality. “He really embraces my queerness,” she says. Their second wedding felt incomparable to the first. “I felt so elated. I was like, ‘Oh, this is truly me.’”
“It’s just in our nature as human beings to be curious, more so with women,” says Bashan. “We don’t live in a society that supports curiosity. But I do think women are finally feeling like it’s a time where you can explore.” She calls this moment a “sexual exploration revolution.”
Ever since Strecker’s divorce was finalized and she came out on the air, her listeners have been flooding her lines with their own stories. “Many have told me, ‘You were in a bad marriage, you got a divorce, you pursued relationships with women, so I was like, you know what, I can do it too,’” she says.
Strecker fell in love with videographer Taylor Donohue soon after her divorce. “When we first had sex, I was like, ‘Oh my god, I get why people like sex. This makes so much sense.’” They married in 2021 and are now expecting their first child. “There’s so much dissatisfaction with my friends who are single and straight and dating,” she says. “I feel like a lot more women are considering [queer sexual exploration]. I’m not trying to convert the world, but I highly recommend it.”
*Name has been changed
