"JAL;c-18325324" wrote:
Did you leave the "explore sexuality" option on by mistake? I've sometimes been surprised with townies sexual orientation, but I haven't seen anyone switch if I have blocked the option for them to do so and clearly set them to one or the other.
Same. I think you hit the nail on the head and this is often what people are doing without realizing it. I think people also don't realize, or have forgotten, that our sims were always bi "under the hood," long before we had these preference options. Waaaaaaay back in the beginning of TS4, before we ever got these options, I had a happily married-to-a-man female sim who was having a long, friendly chat about books in the park with a neighbor, and when the other women complimented her (not an appearance compliment, just a Heartfelt compliment), my sim suddenly had a small romance bar with her (even though there were no interactions that I would have considered flirty). Her husband yelled at her for flirting, and she was mortified.
Even though I intended for that sim to be one of my heterosexual sims, and generally still consider her so... and she has a wonderful relationship with her husband aside from that incident... I didn't lose my shit over it. For me, it's actually one of the more endearing (and rare, until recently) moments when your sims can surprise you. So I decided to roll with it, and my head canon is that my sim had never realized before that she was just the tiniest bit bi-curious, and was flustered by it, but that after the momentary drama, she and her husband were both fine with it because they are still 100% monogamous and it's just part of the tapestry of who she is.
That being said, if the settings are impacting your plans for endgame pairings, or making sims cheat when you don't want them to, or having romance interactions at all when you want them to be aromantic/asexual, then I can see where that would be more of an issue. I just think people do often focus on the first and third options and forget to turn the "exploring romantically" section to No. Since that's the intended fix, as the developers have repeatedly said, if it's not working then it may be a bug, rather than people being intentionally "left out."
As far as the game mechanics are concerned, I don't think it happens because of some "agenda"
but rather because the TS4 struggles with tuning for EVERYTHING. But that's nothing new. And here, "everything" includes flirting or even platonic friendly interactions. Particularly with multi-party conversations. I wouldn't be a bit surprised if some of these incidents are because the sim is flirting with their partner and has a romance bar, and then some third sim comes up and jumps into the conversation, and now all of a sudden your sims are flirty with everyone in the conversation... which leads us back to tuning, and now suddenly that's enough to make your sim a little bi, if you haven't locked down all of the preference settings.
