I know the panic of knowing you’ll never fall in love. (Or the panic of knowing it’ll be really unlikely). I know how it feels to be expecting something your whole life and then realize that you can’t have it or can’t have it as easily as other people seem to. I know the panic of thinking there’s something wrong with you, something broken, something that should be there and isn’t. I know.
I know the relief that comes with it. I know the feeling of finally understanding why you never quite understood, of knowing why you always felt that alway about romance. I know the relief that comes with understanding and trying to accepting. I know.
So let me tell you this: It’s hard.
It’s hard because you’ll have to tell yourself that there’s nothing wrong, nothing broken, and you’ll have to tell yourself that again and again because people will tell you that you are. There will be romance all around you. There will be everyone falls in love and love is what makes us human and you’ll have to try really hard to not believe that.
Believe me. I know.
There’ll be days where telling yourself that won’t be enough. There’ll be days in which you’ll realize your brothers and sisters and siblings in the LGBT community don’t always support us the way they should or even believe us. There will be times in which it’ll feel like there is no happy ending for you, like you’ll live completely alone.
You won’t. I promise you. It gets better.
We’ve got you. We, the aro community, we got you. You’re not broken. There’s nothing wrong with you, there’s nothing wrong with us. You are fine just the way you are.
And there’ll be those days, yes, but they’ll get less and less frequent. And we’ll be here for you.
We’re building a community here. We’re building a family. You are all my sisters and brothers and siblings. We’re building the foundations so the next generation won’t have to feel as broken.
I’ve got you. I’m trusting you to get me too.
Welcome to the community. You can always talk to me. I’ll understand. I’ll at least try to.
Ace culture is saying, “Is this what sexual attraction is like?” about increasingly ridiculous things that very obviously have nothing to do with sexual attraction.
If you think of asexual as “not having a sex drive,” then you’d probably be surprised to learn that aces used to be a part of the bi community.
But if you think of it as “not having a sexual orientation,” then it might suddenly become clear.
Because in a world where so many people only ever think of, or mention, “gay or straight” as possible orientations, there’s not that much difference between “not having a sexual orientation” and “not being either gay or straight.”
When the question is only framed as “which of these opposite points does your arrow point to,” I don’t feel like there’s a huge difference between your answer being “point???????” or “arrow???????”
Ohhh, everything makes sense now (says the bi ace)
SWEEET
Which is I think why a lot of aces identify as bi or pan at some point in their lives before landing on “asexual.” If you know you’re not gay or straight, there’s much more awareness of bisexuality than of asexuality, so it makes sense that people would end up there by default.
Yes! And if you were coming out 20 oror more years ago, there was basically zero awareness of any other things.
this perfectly describes my late teens, most of which I spent convinced I was bisexual because I was equally attracted to men and women. Thing is, I actually wasn’t attracted to either, and I thought that that weird uncomfortable feeling I got each time something was overly sexualized was because I wasn’t used to feeling lust and/or arousal, and those new urges were making me uncomfortable, instead of just being plain uncomfortable with sexualization. I didn’t even know that asexuality was a thing until I read about it in a fanfic a year ago.
Chiming in as another aro/ace person who identified as bi for a couple years before realizing the ace spectrum existed. The poster right above me pretty much describes exactly my thought process. Basically, it went:
I’m not gay, and I’m definitely not straight, so I must be bi, because I find people of many different genders attractive (notice i say find attractive, not attracted to). I chalked my icky-squirmy feelings when thinking about sex and to a lesser extent relationships up to lack of experience as I’ve never been in a relationship or even been on a date.
But then in the past year or two I finally learned about asexuality and one night I had this huge emotional revelation when things just clicked suddenly.
So yeah, until recently, bi is where i fit best, and where i felt most accepted.
Up until now I thought “ace ppl were bi/pan?? that makes no sense????’
But reading this I remember–I thought I was bi/pan too!! When I was in high school, I thought I was romantically attracted to men nd sexually attracted to women (I knew almost nothing about gender). I didn’t know about split-attraction so I was horrified of being some kind of freak and doomed to be alone and/or unhappy, to say the least.
People get all offended and insulted and furious about how aces identified as bi/pan, but you need to understand: I only did so because I didn’t know/think asexuality was an option. I wasn’t gay, I wasn’t straight. What else could I be?
At 15, when I was just starting to use the internet to learn about sexuality I came across this: “Bisexuality is the ability to reach down someone’s pants and not care about whatever you find.” And that was, I thought, the closest thing I could find about how I felt.
You might be thinking, “But this is such a wild contradiction to what asexuality is! How could you possibly be bi/pan?” In my experience at least, the logic was something like, “Being bi/pan is an attraction to all genders, but I don’t experience attraction to two+/any gender. Which is similar in that I’m equally indifferent to multiple/all genders. They cancel out, or something? I’m romantically attracted to men, sexually to women, they cancel out?”
When you don’t know what asexuality is, you’re going to come to some conclusions that may make no sense at all to someone else. And they might not make sense to you, either. But what choice do you have? You have to be SOMETHING, or so we’re taught.
And then once I realized I wasn’t REALLY bi or pan, I chose not to identify as anything, since no labels fit me. I thought it would be freeing, not having to worry about labels. But god, it was so lonely. Here I was, some kind of anolomy, brimming with so many questions and no answers. And this is why asexuality is an orientation, rather than a lack of a sexuality. Ahaha, high school was misery in terms of finding my sexuality.
I don’t know, does this make sense to anyone? It’s hard to explain, at least for me.
“I’m nothing” eventually became a common response for me as well.
and gee, I wonder if the feeling of “I’m nothing” contributes to the higher rates of suicidality for a-spec people, like bi erasure does for bi people
for that matter, I wonder if the double whammy of “what I am doesn’t exist” and “what I think I am doesn’t exist”, of bi erasure and the even worse ace erasure, does too
and by “I wonder if” I mean “I bet that….”
I’m Ace and my girlfriend is bi. We were best friends in high school and both went through the process of figuring out our sexualities around the same time. It was surprising how many parallels we had during that time. We were both baffled by how much gender seemed to matter to everyone else since neither of us had a strong pull towards one over the other. We had both assumed that we were straight for a long time – her because she was attracted to boys and me because I wasn’t attracted to girls. It was a huge relief to the two of us to realize that “both” and “neither” were options.
Another word that we seem to default to a lot? Broken. Especially if we’re not just sexually uninterested, but sex-repulsed, like I am. Or also on the aromantic or demiromantic side of that spectrum (yes, it also me). Relief is nowhere near a strong enough word for how I felt when I found out I am allowed to just not want any of it. I’m allowed. I’m not nothing, or wrong, or broken.
And less-than-surprisingly, the bi and pan people I know tend to be a lot more accepting of that, on average, than the heterosexual and homosexual crowds
some people say there’s a red string that connects fated lovers
psa don’t look at the notes bc there are so many people completely missing the point that these are non-romantic strings of fate and making dumb jokes about where the red string “must be” and it’s making me really angry bc we can’t even have a good artistic representation of aromanticism without people desperately grasping for a romantic interpretation somehow
When my aunt was in her late 20s people used to rudely ask her “Why aren’t you married yet?” and she’d reply “Just lucky, I guess” which I think is one of the best things I have ever heard
I want to try to show younger a-specs that we’re out there and that it isn’t just an identity for kids to grow out of.
45 years old and demisexual.
I only figured out my orientation 3 years ago. It didn’t come as some “big revelation” but little but little, as I learnt more about it, it helped me put pieces together. I wasn’t broken – actually I had never been. It was just who I was, how I was born. I wasn’t alone – and in some way it was a relief to me. I had a word to describe myself, my experience, and this word was a statement, a fact, the answer to all the questions I had been asking myself for decades about my unsatisfying love (no)life. Finally there was a “BECAUSE” to the “WHY”, and the explanation was so simple, so obvious, I could fully accept it.
Tumblr has been the place where I found out, thanks to younger A-spec people who reblog, talk, teach about asexuality. YOU ARE WONDERFUL to do so, and to support and empower one another. It is so important not to feel alone ! Back in my younger days, I felt like I was “the only acealien in the village”. Raising awareness is so very important, as inacceptance (sadly) can do much damage. I’ve been through times and places I wouldn’t wish anybody to go.
To those of you who’d been rejected because they didn’t fit the mold of relationshipsTM, I know it hurts as Hell, it hurts so deep. Never forget that YOU DESERVE HAPPINESS as much as anyone else. There are so many ways you can connect with other people, as long as they’re compatible with you or acceptant of who you are. You are unique, and so is your happiness.
*HUGS TO YOU ALL*
Aro/ace and just turned 33!
Honestly, I was in my late teens when I started warning potential partners I wasn’t sure if I was able to love them. I was in my mid-twenties when I took myself “off market.” It wasn’t until a couple years later I started using the aromantic and asexual labels.
And also? I’m a mother. I was 22 when my son was born, so, yes, any young aros and/or aces out there wondering if you can still have a family, I’m proof that you can. And I don’t have a partner, and that’s OK. If you do or don’t want a partner, that’s fine. There’s no right or wrong way to be aspec.
¯_( ಠ_ಠ)_/¯ 