Nonbinary is how they view their own gender. They don’t really see themselves as male or female, or they can identify with elements of both, and anything in between.
Sexual preference in a partner is where you would use the terms hetero, gay, bi, poly, ace…
Like I identify as female. I was assigned female at birth. But I am by no means a girly girl. I am more comfortable hanging out with fellas. I do like dresses, sometimes. I do like heels, sometimes. I don’t like makeup. I do like jewelry. Most often you will find me barefoot. I like smutty books, and football, and crochet, and power tools, and flowers, and using my truck for truck things like hauling, towing, and pulling my husband’s cute little convertible out of a ditch.
My old college roomie is nonbinary. They kind of have the same dressing and hobby and entertainment preferences as me. We are really compatible. I’ve often thought if I wasn’t with my husband, I could see myself with them. But they made the call that they are more in the middle, and don’t identify female, yet not quite male either. Their term (it may be a loaded term for some folks) for themselves is something other, with ‘nonbinary’ being the closest they can come with today’s terminology to describe it. Yet they do have a preference in sexual partner, they are not bi or poly, maybe a little ace.
Tl;dr nonbinary is how some folks see themselves and how they feel in their own skin, not what genitals they prefer on a sexual partner.
And that’s totally ok for both of you to feel that way. It ultimately depends on the chemistry going on in one’s brain. Just because your wife and I are tomboys doesn’t mean we view ourselves as nonbinary, but for my roomie who was also not a girly girl yet also not a tomboy, they decided that nonbinary more accurately described how they thought about themselves. I could have a tomboy identical twin and they could feel like they were more nonbinary or transgendered than I do. Or they could feel like a girl (like me) and be more attracted to girls than I am. It’s up to the individual to determine what seems most right for them.
My hubby isn’t a “manly man” in the sense that he doesn’t religiously follow sports or go hunting or tinker in the garage, but he very much identifies as male, and his coworkers often call him the ‘alpha’ (which I hesitated to mention because we both feel the alpha/beta categorizing culture is pretty cringey, but I went ahead and brought it up to illustrate that others see him as quite assertive). He just has an authority rebelliousness and speaks up for the group and calls people/mgmt on their bullshit.
If 2 people are really alike in terms of hobbies and style and personality, they could still differ in how they perceive their gender. And to make things even more complicated, how one perceives their gender may not match up with the sexual equipment they have. That is a factor in how many trans people experience dysphoria. What they see in the mirror doesn’t match up with how they feel. Imagine if you got Freaky Fridayed into someone else’s body unexpectedly, how you would react to looking in a mirror. That can be how they feel about it every time they look in a mirror.
I will say that I’m proud of you for asking questions and being curious. That’s how we learn. I myself went through the “isn’t gender and sex the same thing??” And once I grasped how it’s not how society labels a person but how that person determines this for themselves, same as how I determine for myself that just because I don’t like makeup doesn’t mean I’m trans, that it kind of clicked that how people present themselves and feel about themselves is a very personal journey, and that two similar people can come to two very different conclusions, both of which are correct. And that was a horribly long run-on sentence, but thank you for sticking with me to the end. 😄✌️