The Double Edged Sword: Being Asexual and Arospec at Christian College
The shower is an excellent place to cry when you don’t want your roommates to hear you. On Valentine’s Day of my junior year in college, I took advantage of this prime crying spot right before I went to bed. I hadn’t just gone through a breakup, and I wasn’t dealing with relationship drama. As a matter of fact, I had never even been in a romantic relationship before, and that’s exactly what had made me so sad. I was pining, not after any particular person, but the concept of romance in general. I desperately wanted a relationship but had no idea how to start one. Why was it so easy for other people? What on God’s green earth was wrong with me?
As it turns out, being on God’s green earth was exactly the problem. I went to a small, conservative, evangelical Christian university. School was great in some ways, but it wasn’t easy being ace there. I wouldn’t get to unpack this idea until many years later, but I never would have found myself sobbing in the bathroom if I weren’t asexual and on the aromantic spectrum. My sexual and romantic orientation clashed hard with Christian college culture, but as a young woman feeling lonely and rejected, I didn’t know that. I just knew that I was lonely. And perhaps, somewhere deep inside, I also knew that I was different.
Double Teamed: Purity Culture and Amatonormativity
Christian college culture is a perfect storm of purity culture and amatonormativity. Purity culture comes from conservative church teachings about sex. The idea is that all sex is bad and wrong and sinful for absolutely anybody who is not heterosexual and married. Virginity is synonymous with purity, and while married couples were expected to become instant sex dieties with each other once they said their vows, sex for everyone else was impure. Dirty. Shameful. And you could never get your “purity” back once it was gone.
In theory, Christians believe that there’s no such thing as a sin hierarchy. All sin is the same, and nobody is perfect. In practice, that’s not how purity culture works. Nobody said that unauthorized sex was worse than other supposed sins, but it was absolutely implied. Why else would Christians be so obsessed with making sure only the right people were having sex? The Christian publishing industry has an entire book genre about the importance of not having sex. Many evangelical teenagers were pressured to sign “purity pledges.” In some evangelical circles, it’s still popular for girls and young women to wear “purity rings”on the left ring finger to symbolize their commitment to virginity until marriage.
Worse, virginity isn’t even enough. In purity culture, you have to avoid falling down a “slippery slope.” You may not be having sex, teens are told, but are your minds pure? Impure thoughts can lead to sex, you know. I know some Christian couples who never even kissed or held hands before they got married, as if the touch of hands or lips would open the floodgates and make degenerate sex unavoidable. Masturbation was also bad, though nobody could quite articulate why. I once heard one girl calling another girl a slut because “she buys vibrating toothbrushes.”
Christian colleges are centralized hubs of purity culture. Many of them forbid sex outside of marriage in their codes of conduct. Combine that with the fact that most of the students come from purity culture backgrounds, and you’ve got a recipe for a very sex-negative environment.
And then there’s amatonormativity. Amatonormativity is a big deal in many Western cultures, even the secular ones. It’s the idea that romance is the norm and that being single is abnormal. It puts relationships in a hierarchy with romance at the top and friendship as a consolation prize.
Amatonormativity is exactly why Valentine’s Day can be painful enough to make someone cry in a bathroom. Is Valentine’s Day a silly holiday? Absolutely. But celebrating Valentine’s Day is a privilege that society only gives to romantic partners. If you’re single, then you’re acutely reminded that this day is not for you. It’s for members of a club that won’t let you in. Movies, events, and other Valentine’s Day activities praise couples for having unlocked an achievement and shame singles for not having reached the prize.
As bad as amatonormativity is for secular cultures, it gets even worse in Christian circles. The romance default isn’t just implied. It’s outright encouraged. Young Christians hear their older peers say “when you get married” instead of “if you get married” because marriage is just as expected as attending school. It’s just what people do.
In evangelical Christianity, there’s this pervasive idea that you’re not really an adult unless you’re married. As a result, single adults get excluded from certain events and conversations. Nobody thinks that this exclusion is wrong, because again, marriage is the default. Being single is temporary, and everyone joins the marriage club eventually. Unless of course you can’t find the keys to the clubhouse, but nobody mentions that.
Amatonormativity on Steroids
Christian college is where purity culture and amatonormativity create a perfect storm. Since Christians idealize romantic relationships while purity culture forbids unmarried sex, there’s a huge amount of pressure for single students at Christian college to find a romantic partner fast. Everyone pursues romantic relationships with a feverish desperation so that they can get married, fit the mold, and have all the sex that they weren’t allowed to have before. It’s not at all unusual in Christian school circles for people to get married before they’re even old enough to drink beer. Being single is a problem to be fixed. When you’re single at Christian college, you’re made to feel like half a person, and only a romantic partner can make you feel whole. At Christian school, purity culture is amatonormativity on steroids.
Protected but Erased
Which brings me back to my asexuality: purity culture was a double-edged sword for me as an arospec ace. In a weird way, my asexuality protected me from purity culture. Usually, purity culture makes people ashamed of their sexual attraction. When you’re educated by purity culture, you learn to equate sexual attraction to “temptation,” which Christians are taught to resist. In an attempt to be a good Christian, you are taught to shut down your sexual attractions as much as possible.
As you can imagine, the results are sad. People who grow up in purity culture become ashamed of their own sexuality. Many find, to their horror, that their bodies won’t let them have sex even after they get married. It turns out that when you spend your entire life shutting down your sexuality, you can’t just turn it back on. The human body is too complex and a wedding vow is not a light switch.
The stories that come out of purity culture are heartbreaking, but because of my asexuality, those stories aren’t my stories. I had no sexual attraction to shut down in the first place. I faced none of the guilt and shame that my peers faced. All of these years later, it amazes me that I had no idea how much everyone was struggling.
There are two sides to that coin though. I was protected from the shame of purity culture, but purity culture kept me from my sexuality in a different way. Namely, I didn’t know what my sexuality was until I was well into adulthood. Most allosexual people start getting a sense of their sexual orientations around puberty. It doesn’t always work that way for aces. Aces can take much longer to figure themselves out. We define our sexuality by what we don’t experience, so there’s no defining moment or sexual awakening.
In secular circles, aces often find their identity once they realize that others experience something that they don’t. They hear people talking about sexual attraction and realize that they can’t quite relate. In Christian circles, things are different for aces. When people are ashamed of their sexual attraction, they don’t talk about it, and when people don’t talk about it, aces don’t realize that they’re not experiencing the same things as everybody else. They just assume that everyone feels the same way that they feel.
It wasn’t until I was 26 years old that I started calling myself demisexual. When I was 27, I finally settled on the ace label. Most of my peers started discovering their sexuality at 12 or 13. I was almost two decades late to that party.
When I finally found the ace label, it fit beautifully. It felt like I was putting on a coat that was always meant to be mine. In a lot of ways, though, I’m still an adolescent. I’m still in the self-exploration stage that my peers left a long time ago. They’ve moved on to a level that I haven’t quite reached. I’m essentially riding a bike with training wheels while everyone speeds off ahead of me. Eventually, I’ll get rid of the training wheels and catch up, but for now, I’m still peddling slower than everyone else.
Plus, it can be strange and scary to add a new piece to your identity as an adult. As a teen, you expect growth, and you have the flexibility to accommodate it. As an adult though, you’ve planted roots that don’t move quite so easily, and the uprooting can be painful. Necessary for healing, yes, but painful. Purity culture stole my exploration from me, and I’ve had to wrestle that exploration back. I’m excited to get to know myself better. But I’d be so much more confident owning my identity today if I’d had that time to explore.
Healing from Purity Culture
Now that I’m well past college, I’ve more or less settled into my ace label, and I’m learning more every day about my romantic orientation. I still have a foot in the closet, but I’m figuring out what I want and how to carve out the relationships that will work best for me.
I’m also healing from purity culture, though my healing looks different than most others’ healing. I’m unlearning the harmful messages I’ve learned about sex, romance, and marriage. It’s been difficult and scary, and I still have a long way to go, but my healing is worth the effort.
I don’t know where exactly this process will take me, but I do know where it started: when I first revisited the young woman crying in a bathroom on Valentine’s Day. Sometimes I let myself go back to that place, and I give that young woman all of the love and compassion that she deserves. I tell her that she’s not broken, that she’s perfectly whole, and that she’s exactly who she was always meant to be. I acknowledge that even though better things are on their way, her pain is very real and that it matters. In spite of all of that pain, though, I know that I don’t have to worry about her. She’s a lot stronger than she thinks she is.
