"love with no body"
I.
I was seven years old when my mother told me not to touch myself. I hadn’t been, but she mentioned it anyway, a thread of worry tacked on to the end of the same conversation where she warned me about boys (“Don’t let them touch you there”).
She did that a lot — passed unsolicited advice out of left field after long stretches of silence, often passing it off as a good night message before she tucked me in to sleep. Although I didn’t know how to respond most of the time, not touching oneself sounded simple. It never occured to me why I would even want to disobey. The concept made no sense.
And besides, it’s gross down there. It’s the part of your body that’s used when going to the bathroom. Why would anyone want to touch that?
II.
I was nine years old when I was allowed to have my first girls’ sleepover night at my best friend’s house. At long last I could finally experience sleeping (or not-sleeping) under a different roof from my parents’ for a night. It was one long hangout with no end in sight. We could play games, eat snacks, watch movies, or do other “girly stuff” until as late as we wanted.
Once we hit lights out, we tucked ourselves snuggly away beneath the covers, cheeks buried into our pillows, facing each other.
“Do you want to daydream about our crushes?” she suggested, a mischievous smile alighting her face.
“Crushes?” I asked, confused.
“Yeah. Like boys that we like like,” she explained. Emphasis on the first “like.”
“Oh.” I furrowed my eyebrows in concentration, thinking of all the boys I knew in my life. Names and faces came to mind, but nothing really stuck. “What if you don’t have one?”
“Come on,” she said disbelievingly. “Everyone’s got to have one. Aren’t there boys who you think are cute?”
Sometimes, I thought. But they always felt fleeting and meaningless in the wake of all the other things happening in my life, like piano lessons, swim lessons, or playing in the park.
“I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours,” she prompted. “It’s only fair.”
She then proceeded to reveal that she had a crush on a boy we both knew from our church, one whom neither of us were close to. When she continued to describe how in daydreams she would imagine what it would be like to hold hands or kiss, a part of me felt alien. I wanted to indulge in similar fantasies because it seemed like she was having so much fun. Maybe if I tried I could develop the same kind of feelings. For the time being, I owed a crush revelation of my own.
So picking the cutest guy we both knew from church, I gave her a name.
Besides, it didn’t mean all that much to me, and we were just roleplaying in our heads, right?
III.
It wasn’t until college that I learned that touching oneself was a thing that people actually did, a thing that people I personally knew in my life did.
The women of my Christian fellowship had a big sleepover one night and at the end of a mini bible study session, the person who led our time shared a confession:
“I struggle sometimes with masturbation.”
The admission spurred on other members of the group to confess any “sexual sins” they might have been dealing with: impure thoughts, toeing physical boundaries with significant others, and other echoes of dealing with masturbation. I respected them for their courage to share, but I also couldn’t relate.
“I don’t get it,” I mentioned to a close friend from church a week later. “If people don’t want to feel guilt over sex, just… don’t have sex?”
She laughed, perhaps interpreting my straightforward reasoning as naïveté. “I don’t think people operate that way.”
“Why not?”
She gave me a pitying look before replying, “You’ve never even had a boyfriend. Maybe you’ll understand when you get there.”
But even though I’d had my fair share of crushes, even though I’d seen several couples in high school exhibit public displays of affection and had been told that sex was an act of deepest intimacy, I couldn’t understand it as a legitimate temptation.
I hardly even cared for holding hands.
Maybe you’ll understand when you get there.
IV.
Some time in college, my best friend at the time told me he loved me, and for the first time, I understood.
It did not dawn on me in waves or in the middle of a heated kiss, nor did it feel like an awakening. It came quietly, in that vapor-like space between thinking and feeling, when I was alone and tucked away beneath my blankets, lost in my own thoughts: I want to be close; I don’t care how.
So this is why people want to have sex.
Something clicked in my head that night. People want to feel close. I wanted to feel close — emotionally, mentally.
Totally.
And yet, at the same time, wanting it didn’t involve my body. No physical desire to speak of. It was never a necessary component.
I just wanted to be close. Closer than feeling his arms around me. Closer than burying my nose in his shoulder. Closer even than a kiss. After months of deeply entrenched emotional entanglement, there was only one possible step left that could further our intimacy.
But we never got there.
On a cloudy Christmas morning, he boarded a plane. In my head, against all my own desires, I had already decided it was over before it even began.
V.
Sexual Aversion Disorder (SAD):
“A persistent or recurrent extreme aversion to, and avoidance of, all or almost all, genital sexual contact with a sexual partner which causes distress or interpersonal difficulty.”
I walked out of my Abnormal Psychology lecture that night feeling confused. If the four criteria psychologists use to determine whether a behavior is “abnormal” include violation of social norms, statistical rarity, personal distress, and “maladaptive” behavior, then what did it mean if everything SAD described sounded so normal to me? If this “disorder” sounded exactly like my personal reality?
When I walked out, I voiced my question to my friend who was taking the class with me.
“Do you think sexual aversion really is that abnormal, to the point where it’s considered a ‘psychological disorder?’”
“I don’t know. Why?” he asked. “Do you relate?”
“Maybe…” I replied, completely failing to be cryptic. He had hit the nail right on the head: reading the definition for SAD on the PowerPoint felt very close to reading a description of myself. “Would you think it’s abnormal or weird if I said I never think about sex?”
“‘Never?’” he had to clarify. “Not even a little?”
I shrugged. “Nope.”
He began listing off scenarios. What about when you’re daydreaming or fantasizing? What about in your actual dreams? What about when you walk down campus and see a cute guy?
“Nope. Nada,” I said. “And I almost never see a guy and think he is cute upon sight.”
“That is weird,” he told me. Then, after a pause: “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that though.”
I sure hoped there wasn’t. The more I observed my colleagues around me, the more I wondered how I’d face the dreaded act of sex if I ever got married and whether I really would “cause distress or interpersonal difficulty” and be qualified as “abnormal.”
But that was a problem for future, hypothetical married me.
VI.
While browsing Facebook one night, I found an article about two people who are married but never have sex. There within the title contained a word I’d seen before in ninth grade biology but had never considered in the context of the human psyche.
Asexual.
Heart thrumming in my chest, I opened up the page to read.
I discovered two things that day:
1. The relationship depicted in the article was exactly how I’d always envisioned my ideal marriage to be: deep emotional intimacy with no sex, but no less full of love.
2. The relationship depicted in the article was not what the majority of the world envisioned their ideal marriage to be.
Without an explanation or caption tacked on, I shared the post onto my own page.
Later, my now-husband, then-boyfriend at the time, texted me to ask if I thought I was asexual.
Maybe? I typed back. I’m not sure how to label myself, but this article fits the kind of marriage I’ve always expected and hoped to have.
I hit send, unsure how he’d take it, and waited with baited breath.
A moment later, my phone buzzed with his reply.
Oh. Okay. That’s cool. We can do that.
