Bicurious

The defining contrast is one of certainty rather than degree. Wikipedia's entry on bicuriosity draws the line plainly: bisexual people have established attraction to more than one gender through experience, while bicurious people are still working it out. Merriam-Webster, quoted in the same article, frames the term as openness or curiosity about partners whose sex differs from one's usual partners, without any commitment to a fixed identity label.

On the Kinsey scale - the 0-to-6 continuum Alfred Kinsey introduced in 1948 to capture variability in same-sex experience and response - bicurious people typically sit at 1 or 2, predominantly heterosexual but not exclusively so. The Klein Sexual Orientation Grid, developed later, tries to capture the same nuance across attraction, behavior, fantasy, and self-identification, which lines up with how bicurious people often describe themselves: same-sex fantasies present, behavioral history limited or absent, identity still heterosexual.

In lifestyle profiles, bicurious is overwhelmingly used by women, and it carries practical implications for play. A bicurious wife may welcome bisexual contact in an FFM threesome but decline a full bisexual identity or a full-swap scenario with another woman alone. Lifestyle etiquette respects that boundary: the bicurious partner sets the pace for any girl-girl interaction, scenes are usually negotiated as soft-swap or mutual touch rather than penetrative, and pressure to escalate is treated as a hard violation of consent norms. Bicurious men exist in the community too, but they are far less common in profiles and often face stricter vetting from couples seeking single male play partners.