Hey, I Want You To Read This . . . Discovering my Asexuality

I don’t know if I could pinpoint the exact moment or reason that I first began to… explore sexuality. But I think it was sometime in the 7th grade (maybe 8th?). The internet was still a fairly new thing when I was in 7th grade. I’m not sure if that made it easier or harder to find porn online… but I think it was pretty easy for me. And it definitely aroused me when I started watching it, although I did not know how to masturbate really at the time. I think the most that ever came of it was me sitting on my hands, and eventually I lost interest.

No one ever talked about asexuality when I was growing up, and I didn’t exactly have a home-life that explored the nuances of the world in the 90s or early aughts. My dad was an alcoholic and my mom, aside from suffering from an undiagnosed mental health disorder, had a very active dating life. She might not think that is a fair assessment of her life as a single mother, and I have never talked to her about it honestly, but from my vantage point, that’s how it seemed. And she wasn’t just leaving us at home to go out on dates, she would bring these men home and then sleep with them…. with my sister and I just down the hall. I don’t know how single mothers are supposed to do things, or what is or isn’t appropriate, but I would consider it something that traumatized me. Maybe my discomfort with sexuality stems from that or maybe my disgust with my mom’s sex life stemmed from my discomfort with sex. I imagine that kids with married parents must have experienced their parents having sex at home all the time… but that’s a whole other tangent.

I may have always been uncomfortable with sex, but I had always had crushes on boys, ever since kindergarten. I transferred classes and schools a lot growing up, so I had lots of crushes on lots of boys. I guess I always assumed that was pretty normal for girls, but I do wonder why I was always developing so many crushes. I was pretty good at making friends when I was in elementary school, I think. Although, maybe there was some sort of superficial crushing going on there as well, since they never really developed into deeper relationships.

I always felt like my girl friends liked me a lot, and I liked being so well liked. But there was always this kind of… disconnect. When I moved schools in fifth grade, one of the girls who I had become friends with made me go to the school counselor with her after I announced that I was leaving, so that she could basically give us grief counseling. But I wasn’t grieving. Moving around and leaving people behind had never really bothered me. 

I think the thing that did bother me when I was younger was when someone else was well liked, or liked by people that I wanted to like me. I developed jealousy at a very young age. That… fetish over being the most liked by someone definitely fueled my overt sexuality in high school and probably fueled most of my long term relationships in adulthood. It’s also probably why all the times that I have been rejected or dumped by friends have such a long lasting and powerful effect on my life. I don’t think I ever realized what was happening either. I didn’t consciously desire people's attention or affection, but I loved when I had it. I wonder how that played into this fear I have of ever coming off as disingenuous or fake – a fear that, ever since high school, has affected how intimate I am with others. Like I said, prior to high school, I think there was a disconnect between me and the people who liked me. I just didn’t realize it at the time, and since I was so good at making new friends, there was no reason for me to think much about it.

Anyway, I stopped looking at porn pretty quickly. I’ve tried a few times to masturbate, but… it’s never grabbed my interest. And I feel…. uncomfortable when I try to masturbate. Like, I’m being disingenuous. When I am by myself, I can’t lie to myself and make myself think that there’s someone else there that I would want to be having sex with. And I just don’t do it for myself. I don’t know, I’ve never spent a long time thinking about it. But I am 30 years old and I have never masturbated to completion, nor have I ever orgasmed; alone or with a partner. Sometimes I worry that I’m missing out on something really important and life changing, but I have just never been that compelled to figure it out.

For a girl with little to no sex drive, I was a decently sexually-active teenager in high school . That line between my fetish for people's favor and sexual arousal was a fine line. There was always that moment once I started having sex where I realized that I did not know how to enjoy it. I didn’t know what I was supposed to be doing. I didn’t know when I was supposed to be moaning, or clenching, or… anything, because I just don’t enjoy sex. I enjoy being teased, I love kissing, and cuddling, and being wanted. And again, there is such a fine line there.

It’s interesting to imagine how an asexual person ended up with such a character-defining fetish as getting turned on by attention and someone’s desire for me. Seems like a pretty one-sided relationship. Plus, it keeps me tethered to relationships that I need to let go of out of fear that they are going to find someone one day that they like better than me, which I take as an extremely hurtful betrayal. This, of course, is ridiculous. 

I’d also just like to say that, I don’t think that I am heterosexual or homosexual. My history of romantic partners is heteronormative, but I have hooked up with women before. All of these attempts at sexual relationships with others, whether it’s the men I’m dating or random people I’ve hooked up with, stem from my arousal of being most liked, or most wanted, of feeling like I’m the chosen one. It’s gross, actually. But my point is, my arousal has no sexual preference. 

I started figuring out my asexuality in my last long term relationship, which was… very toxic. I honestly couldn’t even tell you why or how we started dating, let alone dating seriously. Everything about us is diametrically opposed (which of course became more and more of a problem as we dated and politics simultaneously became a harder topic to avoid). Our biggest problem was his enormous sex drive, and my absolute lack of one. He picked up on my discomfort during sex right away, which, you might be surprised to know does not happen often. Due to the toxic nature of our codependent relationship and my own personal struggles with food (and my reliance on food as an emotional crutch), the longer we were together, the more weight I gained. And the more weight I gained, the less he found me attractive (which was not cool on his part… but, whatever). And the less he found me attractive, the less I found I was able to tolerate sexual encounters with him in any way at all. It went from a thing I found no interest in, to a thing that I felt I was obligated to do, which made me feel objectified, and used, and disgusted. Then, suddenly, we weren’t having sex any more, and I found myself wondering if I had ever enjoyed sex and why I was so okay with spending my time in a sexless relationship.

Even after we stopped having a sexual relationship and began participating in some form of queer one, I still had not really faced my sexuality head on. I was only just beginning to make discoveries about myself. Although we came to some sort of mutual understanding that we were no longer going to have sex, my ex and I never had a real conversation about my sexual identity. But, as we continued to drift apart, I began to open up to new friendships, which led to a situation where someone who I was romantically interested in wanted to begin a sexual relationship with me.

We all know that in 2020 the opportunity for actual human contact was pretty slim, so the way that I had to face this sexual encounter was through text... and just the thought of it makes me cringe. How do you tell someone that you like that you don't want to sext them. My whole sexually-active life (at this pivotal moment when I'm on the verge of sex even though I don't want to do it), I've always just done it because that's what the other person wanted me to do. Because it was more important for me to be accommodating to them than to be myself and tell someone what I wanted, or who I was. And here I was, one more time, standing on the verge of this new sexual frontier… and I couldn't do it. I participated because I still couldn't tell someone that I was interested in that I was simultaneously not interested in sex (because the thought of losing that intimacy with someone else was scarier than accommodating their desires). I didn’t want to make that decision for the past 14 years, and I certainly don't want to keep making that decision in the future. So... this is my coming out. I'm sorry that I was too afraid to present myself to the world before. 

Truthfully, I didn’t even make most of these revelations until I started writing this essay, which I’m glad I decided to write, because I have spent years not feeling like enough of an expert on my own sexuality to even bother talking about it. But I don’t want to keep hiding myself to accommodate others. I don't want to be sorry for who I am or engage in things that make me uncomfortable anymore. I want to value myself just as much as I value others. I think finding someone who wants to date me on my terms will be… difficult, but I also don’t want to continue to define my life by my romantic relationships with others. I have so much that I am capable of, and so much that I can offer the world. So, yeah, this is me.