I remember sitting in my therapist’s office, eyes focused down on my two hands clenched into fists, not being able to even fathom making eye contact, speaking in something just above a mumble.
“The thing I can’t figure out… how am I going to do this? How is anyone going to love me? How is anyone going to put up with this? Being asexual is just like… one more hurdle I have to –”
“Why do you think it’s a hurdle?”
Because what else could it be?, my mind thought. I sat there, thinking it through.
My therapist gave me some silence to process. Then, very gently: “What if it’s not a hurdle to overcome? What if it’s just a fact of yourself? One of many facts that are true of who you are.”
“But it’s a fact of me that makes me broken, and –”
“Who says it makes you broken?”
“Everyone. My entire life, people have told me I’m not quite good enough. Partners have told me I’m not a good enough lover for them, and they find someone else. I try to make friends with gay guys, but they don’t get me, because I don’t think about or care about sex the same way they do. I’ve always felt like there was something different about me – more different than just being gay – that kept me cut off from most people, and now I know what it is. But knowing what it is doesn’t make it less of a liability.”
“Do you think they treat your asexuality that way, because they see you treat it that way, and they feel as though they have permission to do so as well?”
My breath caught in my throat. Oh man, I thought. I never looked at it that way before. Sure, I’d experienced plenty of negative responses to my asexuality, even before I knew what it was. I’d felt a lot of shame and rejection because of it. There were messages coming from everywhere around me, telling me that how I was experiencing the world was a problem.
But I was also relaying those messages to myself. The calls were coming from inside the house, as well. And for every negative message I was getting from someone “out there,” I was reinforcing and affirming it with a negative message of my own, too.
That shift in thinking was instrumental in my journey to not only love myself as an asexual person, but to develop stronger relationships with my partners.
How you treat your asexuality sets expectations for the way prospective partners will treat it. They’re taking cues from you, and what you project, they’ll likely reflect. If you treat your asexuality as a problem or an obstacle, they’ll probably do the same. If you treat your asexuality as something worthy of respect, you stand a better chance of getting that in return.
So treat your asexuality as a feature, not a bug.
So often in the relationship game, we apologize for our asexuality. We present it to our prospective partners as “something they’ll have to get used to,” or “something they’ll have to learn to accept.” We place our asexuality on the relationship table as an issue that will require resolving, a puzzle that requires solving. That’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. We tell our partners, “asexuality is a problem!” and it becomes one.
But, we don’t have anything to apologize for. We aren’t a puzzle or an issue or a problem. Our asexuality is a just part of who we are, one facet of our complete story, and anyone who enters into a relationship with us should see it as a cool feature of us, not some bug in the system that needs repair.
Will there be work to do? Sure. Without question. You’ll have to negotiate with your partner how your asexuality intersects and interacts with their sexual identity. But this negotiation isn’t unique to asexuality. Everyone goes through this. Every relationship requires this work. The challenges you and your prospective partners will face are grounded in the challenges of relationships, not of asexuality.
Relationships are hard. Asexuality isn’t.
Treat your own asexuality the way you want a partner to treat it. Lead by example.
I Am Ace: Advice on Living Your Best Asexual Life by Cody Daigle-Orians, © Jessica Kingsley Publishers. Reprinted with permission. This article may not be reproduced for any other use without permission.
Residence 11 readers located in the U.S. or Canada can receive a 20% discount off a copy of I Am Ace by using code IAA20 when ordering directly through Jessica Kingsley Publishers.
You may also like Cody Daigle-Orians’ guest post “My Fat, Queer, Asexual Body.”