Kim Kaletsky, New York Times, 7/2/15
They were words I didn’t expect to hear from my therapist: “I don’t believe a person could possibly be asexual.”
Two
weeks into life as an asexual-spectrum-identified human being, and I
was already facing that age-old reaction to any act of coming out: the
“does not compute” response. Normally I shy away from conflict, but in
this case I had to put my combat-booted foot down.“I’m going to have to disagree,” I said.
But
my therapist’s view is easy to champion. Movies, books and television
shows routinely glorify sex as some be-all-end-all, the main indicator
that a romantic relationship is serious and that love is present.
In
“How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days” (yes, I’m a sucker for a good romantic
comedy), the two main characters — one in the relationship for research,
the other because of a bet — immediately have sex after deciding they
have serious feelings for each other. Romeo and Juliet marry, in part,
so they can consummate that marriage. Even language itself holds sex in
high esteem: The phrase “make love” stands in for “have sex,” as if it’s
the only true way to express love.In
my high school health class, we spent two months discussing sex. We
studied diagram upon diagram of body parts that were foreign to us,
examined with painstaking detail the wide array of infections and
diseases our partners could bestow upon us, and talked about how
abstinence is the only guaranteed way to prevent pregnancy.Along
the way, we heard plenty of assurances that it’s perfectly O.K. to not
have sex. But nowhere in that lesson did I hear the words, “It’s O.K. to
not want sex.”After
all, we were a room full of pubescent 16-year-olds on the cusp of
discovering ourselves as adult human beings. My health teacher just
assumed we wanted sex. How could we not?But
during interactions with friends, I saw the real-world results of all
that class time spent looking at drawings of reproductive systems. A
close friend from high school texted me the morning after she and her
boyfriend first had sex. She recounted feeling strange, somehow changed.Another
friend updated me on the status of her latest relationship: “He wanted
his first time to be with me, he says he loves me, we’re soul mates.”During Hurricane Sandy,
a dozen of us sat in an electricity-less Lower Manhattan dorm room and
played truth or dare without the dares. Almost all of the questions were
about sex (“Have you had oral sex in the last month?”) as if we
couldn’t have had anything else on our minds.All
this talk of sex had me forever ready for my own sexual desire to kick
in. I expected to look at someone one day and think, “Wow, that person
is hot.”Yet
in a journal entry from the previous year, I had written, “I don’t seem
to be attracted to anyone and I don’t understand why.” I remember lying
on the floor in my parents’ living room, listening to the Smiths and
thinking something was horribly wrong with me.My
friends oohed and aahed over pictures of shirtless male celebrities
that I shrugged at. They dreamed about making out with various
classmates. My dreams were all about failing classes or zombie
apocalypses.I
don’t remember where I first I saw the word “asexual” — somewhere on
Tumblr, I imagine. But during my second year of college, in a class
called “Approaches to Gender and Sexuality Studies,” we read a paper by
Anthony F. Bogaert, a psychologist and a professor at Brock University
in Ontario, Canada, that tried to define asexuality and argue for its
validity as a sexual orientation. It wasn’t until I spoke to a friend
who identified herself as falling on the asexual spectrum that I
realized how much the term resonated with me.“I just don’t think romance necessarily has to involve sex,” she said.
And
that made sense to me. I felt an urge to be with certain people
romantically, but that urge did not involve feeling sexual desire for
them.At
the time, I had experienced only two romantic relationships that I
considered serious. Sex played a pivotal role in the first of them. I
knew the boy from high school, though we didn’t start dating until the
summer after graduation. I graciously accepted his advances. He was
nicer and more attentive than most of the boys I had interacted with,
and I was eager to be in a romantic relationship, convinced that it
would stir the sexual beast I assumed was within me.For
him, physical and emotional attraction were intertwined. The more
deeply involved we became physically, the more seriously he took the
relationship. He uttered his first “I love you” while we were making
out, half-naked. After we finally had sex, he invited me to meet his
extended family on Christmas Eve.The morning after, as I sipped coffee at McDonald’s, I texted a friend: “I don’t feel different.”
From
then on, nights when he and I didn’t have sex of some sort became rare.
Whenever I returned from a weekend visit to his upstate college, I
spent the rest of the day in bed, unhappy with him and myself, though I
didn’t have the words to explain why.After
we broke up, I began dating a girl from the Midwest I had met online.
Our relationship consisted of daily Facebook chats, long-distance
TV-watching.We
hardly ever brought up sex, except to talk about it in theoretical
terms as something that happened to other people. Our relationship was
all words on laptop screens, all jokes and emotional openness and cute
Facebook messenger stickers.Three
and a half months into that relationship, I spent 10 days in the
Chicago suburbs with her. We did nothing more physically intimate than
holding hands, kissing and taking a nap together.I
returned home with an intense sense of relief. This was the
relationship I wanted. Not the kind that treated sex as necessary, or as
the indicator of a healthy relationship, but the opposite: a
relationship in which sex wasn’t compulsory. I felt more content with
that than I thought possible.Ultimately
the long distance was our undoing, and after she and I broke up, I went
on OkCupid dates with people who identified on the asexual spectrum. I
spent hours scouring the website of the Asexual Visibility and Education Network, comparing others’ experiences with my own. Asexuality began to make sense to me in a way that sexuality didn’t.People
I explain asexuality to often struggle to think of sexual attraction
and romantic attraction as wholly separate feelings. For many who
experience both kinds of attraction — and certainly for much of the
media — sex and romance are indissoluble, like two-in-one shampoo and
conditioner.But
for anyone who identifies as either asexual or aromantic, they’re more
like separate bottles of shampoo and conditioner. They may work well
together, and sometimes do, but having one doesn’t necessarily mean you
have the other.That
distinction, between the sexual and the romantic, between the physical
and the emotional, is something I end up explaining each time I come out
to someone. Asexuality, I tell people, is not necessarily about a lack
of desire for relationships. It’s not celibacy, and it’s not a choice.
It’s simply a lack of sexual attraction.Understanding
and embracing this can open the door for more diverse experiences of
love. It gives us permission to say, “Yes, some people want to have sex,
and that’s cool, but I don’t feel that kind of attraction to other
people.”And
we don’t have to believe it’s some kind of pathology for us to be this
way. It gives people who want to experience only nonsexual, platonic
love a community in which others understand and don’t say, “You probably
haven’t met the right person yet.”At
the start of my last undergraduate semester, my school’s L.G.B.T.Q.
Center welcomed a new group called Aces and Aros, which discusses
identities that fall within the asexual and aromantic spectra. I felt a
sudden rush of belonging during the first meeting and spent most of it
nodding vigorously, feeling oddly thrilled as I listened to other
attendees sharing their experiences.While
I think of myself as loosely panromantic (romantically attracted to
people regardless of gender) and willing to compromise with a partner
when it comes to sex, that meeting had me convinced that if I were going
to experience love, it was going to be on my own terms, without any
pressure to conform to some preordained notion of what does or does not
constitute love.“I feel like I’ve found my people,” I told my therapist a week later. This time, his response was, “O.K., tell me more.”
So I leaned back on the couch and told him.
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