My current partner and I have been together for over a year now, and every day I’m surprised by how easy our relationship is. How safe it makes me feel. As an asexual person, I’d never been in a relationship where I didn’t feel I needed to change myself, give up boundaries, or sacrifice my own needs, for the other person. From a young age, fear of being alone, of not having what society told me I needed, was a constant presence in my life.
This fear meant that when I did get into a relationship, my desire to stay in it overrode everything else. I never considered my own emotional needs and boundaries, beyond the basic requirement that my partner respect my asexuality, because I didn’t think I deserved to have any. So I set them aside, and stayed in the relationship long after it had stopped working or become unhealthy.
Threaded throughout it all was the assumption that my asexuality, and my less-than-certain relationship with romantic attraction, were problems, things to apologize for and work around. And underlying this: the idea that I was the problem, not the world around me.
It wasn’t until I wrote my second book that things started to change. Ace Voices is a wide-ranging exploration—though not a guidebook—of the asexual, aromantic, demi and gray-a community. It explores a whole host of topics relevant to our lives, but the common thread is lived experience, not only my own but others’ as well. I spoke to forty-one people, of all ages and from all over the world, about how they experienced asexuality, aromanticism, or other ways of being on the ace-spectrum.
Their words changed my life. Not only did I get to dive deep into the beauty and diversity of my community, but I also learned that I was not, and had never been, alone. Nearly everyone I spoke to had, like me, been told for their whole lives that there was something wrong with them because of who they are.
Like me, many of them pushed aside their own boundaries, needs and wants, in order to keep a partner. Many of us never even knew we could have needs or wants outside the norm, or that sexual fulfilment might mean freedom from as much as freedom to.
And while I was speaking to people within my community, I also started noticing people outside of it, who let that same fear of aloneness, loneliness or discomfort rule how they lived their lives. Breakups were devastating, and every effort was put towards finding a new partner as soon as possible, no matter whether that person was a good fit. This realization resonated with me, but it also made me wonder, Why are all of these allo (meaning not ace or aro) people so terrified of being alone, when finding a partner is so much easier for them?
The answer to this question was another result of writing Ace Voices: I learned that there isn’t actually much difference between ace-spectrum people and allo people; we have much more in common than we have differences. The problem isn’t asexuality or aromanticism, but the way society tells us we’re not complete people outside of a relationship, or outside of a certain kind of relationship. From a young age, all of us are taught to fear what it means to stand on our own.
In the two years I was writing Ace Voices, I was broken up with by a partner who was willing to admit before I was that the relationship wasn’t working, and moved into a flat on my own. Sudden solitude, and the process of writing the book, had me thinking deeply—for the first time in my life—about whether I actually wanted a relationship, and what I wanted it to look like.
During those six or so months, I realized that while a committed romantic partnership sounded nice, it wasn’t the most important thing in the world. I liked living on my own (and more importantly perhaps, I could afford it), and I was already surrounded by deep, close friendships: people who cared about me and who I cared about, and who I knew wouldn’t neglect our friendship in favor of an intimate partner. Close relationships that nourished and challenged me, and that didn’t demand anything I wasn’t able to give.
For the first time in my life, I started to think that I might be enough on my own. And so when I started dating, I was comfortable and confident in a way I’d never been before. I knew I was a complete person, and, after speaking to people and writing about the a-spec experience for a year and a half, I also knew that my asexual, demiromantic existence was a worthy, valuable, beautiful one, regardless of whether I had a partner. The deep-seated insecurity that brought out all my worst tendencies within a relationship was gone.
This meant that when I did get into a new relationship—with another ace person, no less!—I was able to establish new boundaries that I’d never had respected before. I was also able to be radically honest with my partner about why those boundaries existed. I knew that my neurodivergence and insomnia, for example, weren’t going away anytime soon, and I wasn’t afraid to admit that, if they were dealbreakers for her, we were better off apart.
They weren’t dealbreakers, and more than a year into our relationship, she knows all about my Stuff, and has never made me feel broken or inadequate for any of it. And because I know what it’s like, finally, to feel safe and secure in an intimate relationship, I can also work hard to make sure she feels the same.
I’m no longer terrified of being alone, because I know there’s nothing wrong with solitude. I know that whatever happens, I’ll always have my friends and communities, and that, most importantly, I myself am enough on my own. And because I’m not afraid, I can be present in my relationship in a way I never thought possible.
Ace Voices is available from Amazon and Bookshop.
Read an excerpt from Ace Voices on how asexuality and queerness are intertwined.