Petra, agreed, most folks who don’t inhabit the overall alternative sexual not only don’t know the proper terminology, they don’t grasp the differentiations among the many varieties of non-traditional erotic and affiliative/domestic arrangements. I suspect most Americans would struggle with all the terms bundled into the acronym LGBTQ.
Even on this board there are more folks than I would expect who don’t appear to grasp the difference between MFM and MMF, or between FMF and FFM.
What troubles/annoys me about the periodic spates of articles in the popular press on non-traditional sexual and domestic arrangements is two-fold. First, the writers and editors don’t seem to bother being accurate. Second, they don’t seem to care; they are publishing clickbait that more titillates than informs their readerships. But I also remind myself that iterations of these sort of articles, as flawed and inadequate as they may be, probably in the fullness of time help change societal attitudes. (Most Americans are today cool with gay and Lesbian people; the majority weren’t a half century ago when I was a boy and young man.)