Lying naked in a stranger’s bed, too drunk to remember how I even ended up here, every thought that I had ever repressed for the past seven years came rushing back. I needed to get out of there, a breakdown of extreme proportions was incoming and a stranger’s flat is not the place for that to happen.
I only had one question in my mind: why do I feel wrong?
Why do I feel like I am missing some intrinsic part of human life that everyone around me seems to need, to want, to desire?
Everywhere I go, I see people living the way humans are supposed to live – they are in relationships, they display affection, they express sexual desire. It’s all I ever hear about. It’s like you can’t even catch up with an old friend without them immediately having to recount their most recent relationship drama, or their most recent sexual conquest. I nod along, act like this type of discussion interests me, but I feel like placing my hands over my ears and blocking out the words.
Why is everyone so obsessed with sex?
I just don’t understand. There’s got to be a wire loose in my brain, or something, because why does everyone else care but me?
These thoughts and emotions have been rumbling through my head since I was thirteen and my old childhood best friend all of a sudden became boy-crazy. Obviously, the switch in her brain worked, and she acted like everyone expects teenage girls to act. The switch remained adamantly turned off up in my head, no matter how desperately I begged for it to work, to make me normal.
Ok, you have a boyfriend. Congrats? I think? Is this what we’re supposed to be doing at this age? It seems so, since we’re in Year 9 now and nobody seems to be thinking about anything other than relationships and kissing. I just don’t get the appeal. Why do you?
Maybe I just don’t like boys in the way girls are supposed to. Maybe girls are allowed to like other girls. Ok, yes, that’s it, I don’t think I want boys that way, so I am officially bisexual. Yay, I figured it out! Maybe girls just aren’t expected to be so hormonally driven when they are dating other girls. I’m not normal, because all my friends only like the opposite gender, but I am no longer dragging behind everyone on my sexuality journey. Maybe if I date a girl she will convince me to like this kind of stuff. I just need practice. I need experience.
I think I like a girl now, but I don’t want to kiss her. Why don’t I want that? Shouldn’t I want that?
I am supposed to want that.
Am I seriously this fucked up that I can’t do the one thing everyone in the world seems to have no problem doing?
At some point in my teenage years the word asexual emerged. It floated, untethered, on queer social media – free from the constraints of expectations. You would expect me to say that it was like something clicked inside me. That this word was the answer to all my questions.
That didn’t happen.
Too scared to confront what that could mean about myself, I waved the word aside and went on thinking that there was something off about me.
What does asexuality mean, exactly? The Oxford English Dictionary defines asexuality as “the state of not experiencing sexual attraction to others,” but this feels clinical and redundant.
Asexuality is a spectrum, with other factors including aromanticism affecting where people stand. The definition is different for everyone. Some are sex-repulsed, where even the thought of having to be intimate with someone makes them feel sick. Some experience some sexual attraction, but hate the idea of ever acting on it. Demisexuals are defined as “individuals who feel sexually attracted to someone only after developing a close or strong emotional bond with them.” The point being, there is no one way to define such a fluid spectrum, people have to make their own decisions on how they fit into this.
I envy those confident in their identity as asexual, as I don’t think I will ever know where I stand. I am terrified to even attempt to toe the line between unlabelled and labelled, fearing that, if in the future, my head realigns itself in the way I believe it was supposed to be, I will regret ever taking such a firm stance in an asexual identity. Ridicule, shame, disbelief, I told you so’s, will come hurtling my way and I will have no choice but to stand there and bear it.
I spoke to someone comfortable on the asexuality spectrum in an attempt to understand how she figured it all out. Vanessa Wilson is the former President of Stirling University’s LGBTQ+ society, so if there was ever an expert to talk to, it would be her.
“I realised from quite a young age that I was on the asexual spectrum,” she said
“I realised in how I looked at relationships in TV shows and movies, they’d start necking and I would be like ‘Why the fuck are they doing that? They’ve known each other for two minutes. I don’t understand this.’ I started thinking I was a little bit different. I’m not viewing people in the same way.
At the age of eight, I started researching. Is there something wrong with me? It was the classic ‘am I gay quiz’ sort of thing. I saw the word asexual, demisexual, greysexual, and I had no clue what they meant. I knew there was something a little different about me.”
“When I was 12, I realised I was under this classification,” she concluded.
Asexuality is horrifically underrepresented in the media, and in law. The Equalities Act does not explicitly include asexuality/aromanticism in its definition of ‘sexual orientation’ – “towards persons of the same sex, opposite sex, or either sex.” This exclusion has led to debates on whether asexuality should even be included in the LGBTQ+ umbrella, as it is not a sexual orientation, it is, in fact, a term to describe the lack of sexual desire.
It has its place in the queer community, and should be treated with the same respect as any other sexuality. People still fear coming out as asexual. The ridicule and condescension they experience when they do gives them all the more reason to remain in the closet. People will telly you that you just haven’t met the right person yet, like that’s the instant fix you need.
Vanessa said: “Trying to remove certain aspects of LGBTQ+ community because it doesn’t fit into your view of it – I don’t get that. Yes, maybe asexual people are nowhere near as hated as other parts of the community, but they still do receive that hatred. It may not be as severe, but it doesn’t erase the hatred, or us, at all.”
This fear is not helped by the media’s aversion to the term. Movies, TV shows, songs, books, theatre – they all love a good love story, and with a love story comes physical intimacy. Growing up, this expectation that you will meet someone and immediately want to kiss them messed with my head.
Barbie seems to adore Ken, Rapunzel falls in love in a day, kissing her saviour as he comes back to life. Taylor Swift and Ariana Grande sing about love, sex, and everything in between.
There is straight representation, and as times progressed, there came gay representation, and bisexual representation, and even small amounts of transgender representation – all found in the media if someone wanted to look hard enough to find it.
But where was the asexual representation?
Nowhere to be seen for a good, long, while. At least, nowhere mainstream. I was adamantly avoiding any confrontation of the term, and it was made easy by the lack of talk about it in the media I consumed.
Vanessa commented: “I only recently met another asexual person in university, everyone else in my life was ‘normal’. Even in TV shows and movies, any asexual representation would be people having neurodivergent characteristics, and I never really resonated with these characters.”
“I watched HouseMD,” she continued, “there was an episode with asexual characters and I remember the main plotline was that asexuality doesn’t exist, that there must have been something mentally wrong with them for them to be like this. I watched that, and I thought, are they right? Am I going to have to go to the doctors and get this fixed?”
In 2023, music artist Leith Ross released their song We’ll Never Have Sex, and it took over my TikTok algorithm like a parasite. It was as if my For You Page knew exactly what to do to bring some more repressed thoughts to the forefront of my mind. By some cosmic coincidence, this occurred just when I moved to university and felt the pressure to be a normal eighteen year old overcome me. I went to parties, I got drunk, I kissed a few people, because that was the expectation of a fresher.
I lay in that stranger’s bed after forcing myself to do what everyone else has no problem doing, and I thought about that song. The line “If I said you could never touch me/You’d come over and say I looked lovely” stuck with me in particular.
Finally, a song resonated with how I feel. I have so much love to give, but I don’t know if I would be able to fulfill all aspects of a typical relationship, and here Leith Ross is, putting words to the feeling. This representation matters more than a lot of people could ever imagine. It is telling you: you are not alone. If this person can be happy as they are, then others can too. I can too.
Yet, the fear remains. Labelling means having confidence in your decision. I’ve always been confident in my label as bisexual, apart from the first time I ever kissed a guy and immediately questioned if I was a lesbian, but that is just another tally towards the asexual label. I have had romantic feelings for both men and women, but have never acted on them, for fear that they will want to touch me, and I will panic and ruin everything.
It is a struggle to feel like a normal person. At twenty one years old I am still struggling with these thoughts. I would be perfectly content to live out the rest of my days as celibate, but that’s not what young twenty-something-year-olds are expected to do, is it? I have cousins only a few years older than me with children, my eldest brother has been in a long-term relationship for years, two of my close friends have moved in together. I cannot envision myself in any of these situations without a feeling of wrongness building in my gut. But, hey, maybe I should just stop thinking about it – what will be, will be, right? All this overthinking can’t be good for the mind.
Sometimes I wonder why platonic feelings are never valued the same as romantic. They can get mixed up, for me. I cannot tell whether I am in love with someone or if I just love them as a friend, because there is no sexual desire involved when I have romantic feelings. Isn’t that usually the tell? If you want your friend physically, you no longer have platonic feelings. How does that work for asexual people? How does it work for me?
Who knows what I am? Certainly, I don’t. Maybe I’ll figure it out one day, but for now, knowing that there is a community of people, like Vanessa, who have asked all the same questions as I have, who have thought there was a wire loose in their brain, will be enough for me. I don’t want the label, that’s way too frightening, but I am content, for now, to not know the answer.
Featured Image Credit: Leif Jørgensen via Wikimedia Commons
