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littleoldpessimistme · 1 year

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So, it’s been a hot minute.

Today I wanna rant a bit about sexuality, because that’s what’s been on my mind in the last couple days. (Warning: long post)

(Also, there’s a bit about a bad relationship I had, nothing graphic, and I wouldn’t call it abusive, just some misunderstandings and hurt feelings, but let me know if I should put a tw.)

Let me just start this whole thing by saying that growing up I believed myself to be straight (I feel like it’s also worth mentioning that I come from a historically very homophobic country, I was like 13 when I first realized that queer people actually exist). I don’t remember having any crushes in my early childhood like how people say that they had crushes on cartoon characters, but by the age of 12 I discovered fandoms and I started becoming obsessed with certain actors and singers.

I don’t know if this is embarrassing or not, but I can’t say that I grew out of my celebrity obsession phase until around my late teen years. As time went on my classmates and my friends kept getting into relationships and for the life of me I could not understand why you’d wanna date our classmate Gary when he’s not Andrew Garfield. I kind of felt like an alien sometimes and not in a fun way. Looking back I do think I was a bit overdramatic (as teenagers usually are), but I did feel very isolated and I kept thinking that something was fundamentally wrong with me cause I did not like the things my peers did.

(I did occassionally have some fleeting crushes on boys from my school, mostly on friends but those usually passed in like a week)

I remember one time (around the age of 17) I was talking to a girl from my school and the topic somehow came up and I told her that I’ve never been in love with a real person, only fictional characters or actors 20 years older than me and she kind of jokingly called me childish. Although now I realize that she most likely wasn’t trying to be mean I remember feeling really embarrassed and hurt.

Ironically a few months after this conversation one of my (at the time) best friends confessed to me and I felt like I kinda had some feelings for him as well, so we started dating. The first few months of the relationship were really nice we spent a lot of time together and I was genuinely sad when we were apart. I did feel like I was in love with him.

A few things however became apparent early on in the relationship. One of which was the simple fact that I did not want to have sex with him. We were both virgins and when I told him I’m not sure I’m ready, he said that he totally understands and he won’t force me to do anything I don’t want to do. After like 6 months we started having more and more problems. I remember one time we were having a conversation about sex, mainly that he really wanted it. I know now that it’s partly my fault for not communicating my own feelings clearly but in my defense I didn’t really understand them myself. I just knew that the thought of sex made me very uneasy and I couldn’t really imagine myself in that situation.

One thing I could articulate was the fear of getting pregnant (which was a genuine fear of mine, but deep down I knew it was only one aspect of the whole thing) and that’s what I told him. This turned out to be a mistake because he started coming up with reasons as to why my fear was irrational and listing contraceptive methods (as if I didn’t know that condoms existed). I started crying because I couldn’t handle the amount of pressure I suddenly found myself under which made him upset and he started saying things like he thought that we could talk about stuff like this and this made me feel even worse, like I was letting him down.

Obviously I don’t want to blame him and he had his own mental health struggles. I remember he used to tell me that I was the only person in the entire world who loved him and the only happiness he ever felt was when he was with me, when we were apart he was so depressed that he couldn’t function at all. I guess he thought that this would sound romantic but it just deeply scared me.

After a year of dating I eventually broke up with him, mostly because I felt inadequate at helping him overcome his depression and ptsd and spending time with him started feeling like a chore rather than a thing that I actually enjoyed doing. While we were in the process of breaking up he told me that he regrets never sleeping with me because the hormones released during sex help build a connection and I remember feeling really weirded out about that. The whole thing was especially hard on my part because I felt like falling out of love was my fault and obviously he was upset to the point where he literally quoted Green Day’s song “Nice guys finish last” on me which to this day makes me cringe.

I hate to admit this but I still feel kind of guilty about breaking up with him when I think about it, but I felt that it would be cruel to keep him in the dark and pretend that everything was alright when in reality I didn’t love him anymore.

Another interesting thing is that I had my first kiss with him and to this day he’s the only person I ever kissed. I am aware that this kind of makes my judgement questionable, because I don’t have anything to compare it to, so he could just be a bad kisser but I kind of hated kissing him. I rarely initiated making out because whenever we did I felt weird. Sometimes I could tolerate it, but mostly it just felt kind of gross and it didn’t really do anything for me. I know that he noticed this, along with the fact that I never let him kiss me in public, or in front of our friends and he told me once that it bothered him that I “never acted like his girlfriend” in public. I kind of knew that this was unusal but I really couldn’t help it, I felt like I’d rather die than engage in any form of PDA because the thought just made me incredibly uncomfortable, but I knew that this wasn’t because of him, just the general idea of others seeing me like that bothered me.

And this is how we get to the sexuality part. It’s been almost 2 years since we broke up and in the last year I’ve been kind of connecting some dots and I read a lot about different identities and other people’s experiences. I still kind of say that I’m questioning, but I find that I resonate a lot with ace folks’ stories and came to the conclusion that I might be somewhere on the asexual spectrum.

So I just started kind of accepting the fact that I may not have all the gears in the big scheme of attraction, but in the last few days I’ve been sent into a romantic attraction crisis as well. I’ve been saying to myself that it’s okay if I’m asexual, because I can still feel romantic attraction and will eventually fall in love with someone who will accept me for who I am. I’ve always been a hopeless romantic, I’ve read hoards of fanfics about my fave characters over the last like 7 years, it’s one of my favorite hobbies. But I started to realize that I don’t care much for romantic relationships in my own life.

When I think about it, I realize that I’ve always been this way. I remember my mother (oh boi I could talk about her for hours as well) telling me as a young teenager that I was too closed off, “like an ice queen” and I needed to be more approachable if I wanted boys to like me. But I don’t think I actually wanted them to like me. I only wanted to be liked by boys because I felt left out, and embarrassed that I was the only one of my friends who didn’t get a Valentine’s from a secret admirer.

One of my closest friends got engaged last summer and she’s been telling me about the wedding preparations and how she wants everything to be, and that also made me realize that I’ve never thought about what kind of wedding I’d want, not even as a child. I have two other friends who are also in committed relationships and they too talk a lot about marriage and having kids in the near future and I feel so disconnected from them.

I still meet with my old friends from high school sometimes and some of them always ask me if I have anyone I’m talking to at the moment and I always just say no, and they always look at me with pity and I don’t know how to explain to them that I’m perfectly fine this way. I’ve noticed that people seem to accept the concept of a single person longing to be in a relationship and actively putting in effort to find someone, but they simply can’t wrap their heads around the fact that someone might not want to be in a relationship at all?

Whenever I tried to explain this to people before I was always hit with “you’re too young/haven’t found the right person yet/you’ll change your mind” and these always make me question myself and feel bad about myself.

But to close this on a hopeful note I do believe that it doesn’t really matter. Right now I feel like the asexual-aromantic spectrum resonates with me and if I do turn out to be “too young to know” and I eventually “find the right one” then I’ll do that. And it’s not gonna be a big deal at all.

So yeah, that’s about it for today. If you stumbled upon this nonsense and had the brainpower to read it congrats and thank you! And if you’re aspec and want to share your experience with me, go ahead I’d love to read it! 💜 🖤 🤍 💚

Stay rad!