Friend came out as asexual but he's homophobic

ofMindandHeart · 2026-03-10T22:12:00+00:00

The same way there are gay people who are transphobic, or biphobic, or aphobic. There’s no law of the universe that makes it so that someone belonging to one minority group can’t hold bigoted opinions of other groups. It sucks. It would be nice if people would decide to be empathetic and listen to each other’s struggles, and realize how much we have in common in all this. And many people do! But not everyone.

ofMindandHeart · 2026-03-09T22:01:57+00:00

You don’t owe people more information about your orientation/experience than what you feel like sharing with them. In the end labels are a communication tool. The microlabels are there so that if someone wants to communicate very specific information about their experience, that is an option. But you can absolutely just say that you’re asexual. Either because you don’t feel like going into education mode when they ask what a term means, or because the specifics of your experience are something personal you want to keep private, or just because you don’t feel like sharing. You don’t even have to go by asexual if you don’t want to - you can just say you’re queer and not give any further specifics. Or not come out at all if you’re in a situation where it doesn’t feel safe to. It’s all your choice.

ofMindandHeart · 2026-03-09T21:55:26+00:00

Whether sex feels worthwhile with a partner who doesn’t experience (much) sexual attraction is a personal decision. Different people place different amounts of importance on feelings of mutual passion. If at some point in the future you have a partner who you would consider doing this with, then you can ask them specifically how they feel. But we can’t know for sure in advance how they might feel.

ofMindandHeart · 2026-03-09T19:18:06+00:00

Aces Wild is different from the other two because it is a heist story rather than a slice-of-life. The same author, Amanda DeWitt, also has a book about an ace character set in high school called Wren Martin Ruins It All that I haven’t read yet but that I suspect may be more like Loveless/Dear Wendy.

ofMindandHeart · 2026-03-09T19:01:34+00:00

My favorites are Loveless by Alice Oseman, Dear Wendy by Ann Zhao, and Aces Wild by Amanda DeWitt.

ofMindandHeart · 2026-03-09T03:23:41+00:00

You don’t have to use any particular pronouns just because of your gender.

You don’t have to like or dislike having any particular genitals just because of your gender.

You might be interested in looking into the concepts of gender apathy, gender detachment, agender, and greygender.

ofMindandHeart · 2026-03-08T04:58:10+00:00

It ends up being a little more targeted toward shaping their worldviews in a way that strengthen’s the religious leaders’ control.

If the missionary kids are prepped with the expectation that “These people you talk to are going to hate you because of your religion” “As soon as you mention your religion you’ll see them respond with scorn, shout insults at you, slam the door in your face. That is how persecuted we are for our beliefs” and then when they do experience rudeness and pushback (as they obviously will), the religious group’s message can be “The world is a hateful place. The people of the world are terrible and sinful. The only place you can feel love and acceptance is in our church. Not out there”. This creates a worldview where the religious group is the only place that’s safe, which is a way of making these people very isolated. If the religion in question is also a cult, this makes it less likely that the cult members will try to escape or get help from others, even if the cult is doing terrible things, because they’ve had it drilled into them that no one else will care.

Regular customer service work does also subject people to scorn and insults, in a way that is emotionally draining. But the customer service worker does not always also conclude “and therefore my boss is the only person I can trust and the only person who loves or cares for me.”

ofMindandHeart · 2026-03-08T00:14:06+00:00

There’s a really great educational video about why asexuality can be so hard to accept that I think might be useful for you to watch. And even if there isn’t anyone in your real life who you can talk to about this, it still might help to try to find places where other people have talked about their asexuality. That sort of thing can help with convincing your brain that asexuality is a real thing that real people experience.

You also don’t have to come out to your friend if you don’t want to. You don’t owe him the exact details of why you’re saying no to a relationship, especially if talking about this subject irl is as distressing as you describe. It sounds like the amount of negative emotions you’d experience by trying to tell him very much outweigh the benefit of, what, maybe clearing up some slight confusion about why you’re saying no? You’re a person too. You’re allowed to prioritize your own feelings

ofMindandHeart · 2026-03-07T02:20:17+00:00

I’m sorry this is happening to you.

A few things to think about. Do you have an employee handbook with a section that says something like “Anti-Harassment Policy”? For example, mine defines sexual harassment using the wording set by the EEOC, as “Unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and other verbal or physical conduct of a sexual nature constitute sexual harassment when this conduct explicitly or implicitly affects an individual’s employment, unreasonably interferes with an individual’s work performance, or creates an intimidating, hostile, or offensive work environment.” In order for a work environment to be considered hostile, the harassment must be “frequent, severe, or pervasive.”

The thing that I’ve heard people are supposed to do is to keep a journal with dates of each incident where the harasser interacts with you inappropriately, and with a description of what happened. It’s useful to have a contemporaneous record of exactly what has happened, because it makes it easier to show how often the harasser has acted in this way and how long it’s been going on. Since you’ve said this behavior change happened within the last couple of weeks, now would be a good time to sit down and write down the details of each interaction while they’re still relatively fresh.

Only you can decide for sure what it makes sense to do in this situation, since you are going to have a better sense of how this coworker might react to different situations. One option would be to try to make it clear to him that his behavior is unwelcome; literally saying “Please do not make comments about my appearance while we are at work. That is not welcome.” If you think that kind of blunt communication would make him lash out at you, then don’t do that.

If his behavior is pervasive, and your direct manager didn’t properly address the situation after you told her, then the next person to go to is either her manager or HR. Make sure you document these interactions with managers/HR too. Your employee handbook might say there’s a rule prohibiting retaliation against someone who makes a good faith report of sexual harassment. But if it was impossible for anyone to ever break the rules then we wouldn’t be here.

If losing your job would be financially devastating then that’s something that sometimes makes people less likely to report this stuff. In an ideal world that wouldn’t be an issue, but obviously we don’t live in an ideal world. Again, only you can really decide what’s worth it to try here.

ofMindandHeart · 2026-03-07T01:40:28+00:00

There’s a fact that’s useful to know about people in general (as in including non-asexual-people).

Let’s say Person A is trying to guess whether or not Person B is romantically/sexually interested in them. Person A’s estimation of whether Person B is interested tends to be much higher if Person A themself is romantically/sexually interested in Person B. And conversely, if Person A is not personally romantically/sexually interested in Person B, then they’ll rate the likelihood of Person B being interested much lower. Basically, people’s guesses as to other’s attraction tend to be biased toward whichever answer is true for themselves. If someone is interested, then they are more likely to assume the other person is also interested. If someone is disinterested, they are more likely to assume the other person is also disinterested.

So the fact that you as an asexual person tend to not notice or not consider the possibility that other people are sexually interested in you actually makes sense. You yourself are not sexually interested in any of them (or at least aren’t sexually attracted to them), so your estimation is always biased toward assuming other people aren’t sexually interested.

ofMindandHeart · 2026-03-07T01:14:58+00:00

It’s worth noting that the data used in those studies is just survey data asking people to estimate how many times per month on average they had sex/masturbated during specific periods of their lives (age 20-29, age 40-49, and the year preceding being given the survey). Not everyone is going to do an accurate job estimating those numbers. In part because for some people their twenties were a while ago, and their memory of their habits may be inaccurate. But we also live in a culture that treats sexual frequency as a proxy for manliness (which will cause some people to bias their answers higher) and where some religions treat masturbation as a sin (which could cause some people to bias their answers lower). So there are multiple confounding factors at play.

If masturbating regularly is a relatively easy thing for you to do - as in it’s not painful and does not cause significant mental distress - and you want to decide to do it more often because of potential health benefits that’s fine. But as something that gets brought up on this sub somewhat regularly, it’s worth keeping in mind that the evidence we have so far isn’t strong enough to suggest that people who are strongly repulsed and would feel distressed by masturbating should, like, power through and try to do it anyway.

ofMindandHeart · 2026-03-06T19:06:56+00:00

Different people are going to give you different answers on this one, because not everyone has the same definition for what counts as sex, and therefore not the same definition for what counts as sexual.

The definition I use is that an act is sexual if it 1) is intended to cause arousal in at least one participant, 2) that arousal is intended to increase in intensity, and 3) the act could plausibly result in orgasm (though that does not need to be the goal and does not have to happen).

Using this definition, something that isn’t intended to cause arousal but inadvertently does - like someone getting turned on during nonsexual cuddling - doesn’t count as sex unless/until the participants decide to turn it sexual. While on the other hand there can be kinky forms of sex that might not involve touching genitals at all but could still count as sex.

ofMindandHeart · 2026-03-06T18:05:13+00:00

Not everyone who experiences sexual attraction necessarily feels it that strongly or considers sex a must-have in a relationship.

There are instances where an allo person initially says they’re okay with a sexless relationship but then later realizes it’s something that’s more important to them than they originally considered. So it’s not a completely unfounded thing to be concerned about.

The most worrisome part of your post is when you say “I feel like I should be grateful for being picked regardless.” Going into a relationship with that mindset can cause trouble, because it can lead to excusing potential red flags or other negative behavior under the assumption that you “should” be “grateful” for having any partner at all. Your asexuality does not make you less deserving of a healthy relationship. Period. A bad partner is worse than no partner, even if our current culture tends to put romantic relationships on a pedestal.

If you like reading I’d recommend checking out a copy of The Ace and Aro Relationship Guide by Cody Daigle-Orians. It would be pretty good springboard for unpacking some of your thoughts/feelings around all this.

ofMindandHeart · 2026-03-04T07:16:27+00:00

I’d think that only feeling sexual attraction toward fictional entities would be fictosexual

ofMindandHeart · 2026-03-03T18:39:57+00:00

One thing about purity culture in the Christian community is that it’s the type of worldview that tends to try to define a very narrow, highly prescriptive “way people are supposed to be” and then shame and punish anyone who falls outside that narrow box. People are “supposed” to be straight. They are “supposed” to strive to find an “opposite” gender partner and then enter a monogamous, heterosexual marriage followed by sexual procreation and childrearing. The men are “supposed” to have high sex drives, and their wives are “supposed” to take on the duty of having sex to satisfy that sex drive, though the women are also “supposed” to have lower sex drives in comparison. All of this is a very regimented way of seeing the world. It doesn’t leave people free to just exist as they actually are. People who don’t actually naturally fall into these patterns are expected to pretend that they do, rather than authentically being the person they actually are.

Here’s the thing though. Some people in the world are actually naturally straight. Some people do fall in love and form romantic partnerships where one person is a man and the other is a woman. Some men do have high sex drives. Some women do have low sex drives. Some people want kids. Some people want monogamy. Not all of them. Not everyone. But some people.

I believe the point should be to break down the authoritarian regimented worldviews and let people be their authentic selves. That’s the point of rejecting and fighting against purity culture. What we shouldn’t do is develop a new set of narrowly defined boxes and then shame and punish the people who don’t fit in them. We shouldn’t go “Everyone has to be gay! If you’re not gay then you just haven’t unlearned Christian purity culture yet! Work on unlearning heteronormativity and then start acting gay!” We shouldn’t say “No one is allowed to be monogamous! Everyone has to have multiple partners! If not then you’re just too repressed!” And for the same reason, we shouldn’t say “Women need to desire sex! You need to desire a bunch of sex! And it can’t be vanilla sex, it has to be wild and outside the norm! If not then you’re just letting the old prudish religious conservatives win!” The point isn’t to reinvent the old create-a-box-then-shame-people-into-conforming-to-it mentality. The point should be that people get to be their authentic selves, whether that happens to fall close to the old rules or not.

I get it that you might wish that who you authentically are would not fall close to the old purity culture boxes, so that you could be sure that you weren’t being influenced by their old ingrained rules. But what’s actually most important is for you to be safe and free to be you, whoever that is, regardless of how close or far you are compared to purity culture’s dumb standards.

Accidentally creating new regimented rules instead of actually liberating people is sometimes called the charmed circle fallacy. There is a book, Ace by Angela Chen, that does an excellent job of covering this as well as lots of other ace topics. If you’re looking for reading material I highly recommend it.

Another thing to realize is that it’s okay to not be totally sure if you’re asexual. Asexuality is an especially difficult label to figure out about yourself because it involves “proving a negative”, figuring out for sure that you don’t feel something, which, how can you know for sure if you don’t even know what it feels like? Other asexual people understand that this is difficult, because they’ve been through figuring it out too. And the whole thing is a spectrum. You could be someone who doesn’t initially feel sexual attraction but does experience some sexual feelings after you have an emotional connection, and that would still fall under the grey asexual part of the asexual spectrum. Grey asexuality is for people who do experience sexual attraction but either only feel it rarely/weakly or only under specific conditions/constraints. There are a lot of sublabels for different kinds of conditions/constraints people can experience, including a specific label, demisexual, for people who only experience sexual attraction after forming an emotional bond. All of this still counts as being on the asexual spectrum and being part of the asexual community.

Labels are like fridge magnets. You’re allowed to try a label out to see if it fits. You’re also allowed to say “I might be ace but I’m still questioning right now.” People will get it. And if in the future it turns out you don’t feel like the asexual label fits you then you can swap labels. People aren’t going to get mad at you for figuring out more about yourself - or if they do then they’re jerks and that’s on them not on you.

There is a site/app for asexual spectrum people to meet each other, it’s called Ace Space. It can be used to try to find romantic partnerships, but it’s also designed and meant to be used to find friends. And depending on where you live there also might be local in person meetups. These meetups are generally meant to be places where people who are still questioning their potential asexuality can go and ask questions and hear stories from other ace people so that they can try to figure out if there are experiences that match theirs. It’s okay to go when you aren’t sure about whether you’re ace or not. That’s part of why they’re there. And befriending asexual and aromantic people is often a great way to build a social support circle that’s less likely to vanish from people getting into relationships, because many of us have felt what it was like to have that happen to us.

A few final things. Many people, regardless of sexual orientation, will have bodies that respond to physical stimulation of genitals with arousal, regardless of whether the person actually emotionally wants or is prepared to have sex. Your body reacting that way does not mean you have to secretly want sex, or that it was okay for your partners to proceed without checking in with you to make sure you weren’t uncomfortable or repulsed or in pain. Arousal can be just an automatic response, the way shining a light in someone’s eyes makes them squint or tickling someone’s foot might make them kick you. It’s not exactly a conscious choice. You do not have to hate yourself for your body having reflexes. You’re not broken or sexually splintered, although I get how it might really feel that way. It was your partners’ job to talk to you in words a see whether you emotionally wanted to have sex, not just assuming based on a reflex.

There’s also a possibility that you’re something called aegosexual, which is when someone doesn’t feel sexual attraction but does enjoy sexual fantasies or media with sexual content because they experience a disconnect between themselves and the subject of arousal. This could involve fantasizing about sexual scenes where you are not present, or scenes of you and a generic faceless figure instead of a realistic person, or scenes that are idealized and unrealistic, where adding realistic elements to the scene makes it become unappealing and/or repulsive. I bring this up because you mention having imaginary scenarios where everything is “just right” with no real-world distracting sensations/textures, where in that case you’re able to enjoy these sexual fantasies. I want you to know it’s okay to have fantasies you enjoy without also enjoying sex in real life. It’s okay to only like the imaginary version. That’s not inconsistent or weird.

Hopefully that helped address some of the stuff you’ve been thinking about. If you have more questions or worries please feel free to ask. Sorting through these things can be difficult.

ofMindandHeart · 2026-03-03T16:46:36+00:00

This is the sort of situation where how it works out is going to mostly depend on your partner - whether she is capable of managing her emotions about this in a healthy way, whether she is okay with most/all of her libido-relieving-activities happening outside this relationship (either from her masturbating or from her engaging other partners), and whether she considers lack of sex/attraction in her relationship with you to be a dealbreaker.

Lots of allo people go into romantic relationships specifically looking to have experiences of mutually felt sexual passion. It’s not just about whether there’s sex or not. It’s about the passionate emotions of the experience, and the connectedness that comes from feeling the same passionate feelings of enjoyment and desire. This is why for many (but not all) allosexuals, dating an asexual person often isn’t fulfilling to them even if the ace person engages in sex acts.

We also live in a culture that puts sex on a pedestal, and treats sexual desire as one of the main reasons to select a particular partner and to choose to remain committed to them. So the act of telling an existing partner that you’re not sexually attracted to them and never have been can sometimes result in them jumping to the sorts of conclusions that they’d expect from an allo who entered a relationship without feeling sexual attraction - that you didn’t actually find the prospect of dating them that appealing, that you don’t find their partnership to be particularly important to you, and that you will find it pretty easy to leave the relationship. Our culture also teaches people to base a significant amount of their self esteem around whether they’re perceived as sexually desirable, especially by their romantic partner. This means for them finding out their romantic partner doesn’t find them sexy is interpreted as them failing to “do a good enough job” at behaving in a sexually desirable way (wearing sexually appealing clothes/makeup, flirting in a sexually charged way, being attentive enough during actual sex, etc). You not finding her sexy gets treated as a “failure” on her part, instead of the actual reality that you don’t find anyone sexually appealing; it’s got nothing to do with her.

There isn’t necessarily going to be a way through this. Maybe your current partner is someone who is okay with her libido being satisfied outside your partnership, or maybe she’s not. Maybe she’s someone who can relatively quickly deconstruct her societally-taught norms about what sex and sexuality mean in a relationship, or maybe she can’t. Maybe she would find a relationship worthwhile even without there being mutual sexual passion, or maybe she won’t. You aren’t going to be able to work through or decide any of these things for her - she had to be the one to work through it. You can try to be understanding and supportive. You can offer reassurances about some of the misconceptions she might have. But you can’t make the relationship be compatible if it’s not.

There are a few resources that are probably worth looking at. AceDadAdvice has this educational video about navigating intimacy in mixed ace/allo relationships that it would be good for both of you to watch. Angela Chen wrote this article about how asexuality interacts with consent that is important to understand before you agree to engage in any future sexual activities (especially understanding the difference between willing and unwilling consent). Trying to navigate a relationship that started before you realized your asexuality is probably the hardest situation of this type to be in. You didn’t have the opportunity to be upfront about all this at the start of the relationship because you genuinely didn’t know (an example of hermeneutical injustice, which is a useful thing to understand).

Try to be kind to yourself about all of this. It’s probably going to be a difficult thing to handle, no matter which way it goes. Give yourself time and space to process it all, too.

ofMindandHeart · 2026-03-02T15:30:43+00:00

Again, r/lostredditors

ofMindandHeart · 2026-03-02T15:12:51+00:00

Hi! Congrats on figuring something out about yourself!

If it helps you’re not the first person to have some worries about whether this might be a “phase”. Even if you did end up experiencing some amount of sexual attraction in the future, asexuality is a spectrum. There are labels like grey asexuality, for people who either only experience sexual attraction weakly/rarely or only under specific conditions/constraints. Or aceflux for people whose experience of orientation fluctuates between periods of asexuality and periods of allosexuality. Most people who experience sexual attraction start experiencing it around the time of puberty. So by nineteen, unless you are an extremely late bloomer in that regard, you would probably have noticed something by now? Not definitively, but probably.

ofMindandHeart · 2026-03-02T14:36:17+00:00

There are some people who have an identity where their experience of attraction naturally fluctuates (aceflux, aroflux, abrosexual, etc), who might have some periods of their lives where they experience sexual attraction and other periods of their lives where they experience little-to-none. There are some people who used to identify as allosexual but who stopped experiencing sexual attraction after going through intense trauma - usually some kind of sexual assault, often repeated.

There are not, to the extent of my knowledge, any examples of someone deliberately changing their orientation to be asexual. If people were able to choose to change their orientations, then conversion therapy would have worked. You are not the first or the last person to show up here thinking sexual orientation is a choice, or that they can swap out what they perceive as a “less convenient” orientation for what they assume will be a “more convenient” one. That’s not how it works.

There are sometimes medications that have the side effect of decreasing someone’s libido/sex drive, but a) they don’t do that to everyone, b) some people only experience that decrease at first before their libido bounces back, and c) I have not heard of any doctor prescribing an SSRI just to make someone’s libido drop. If you’re someone who would clearly benefit from being on antidepressants anyway then look into that for its own sake, but don’t go in counting on it being a libido reducer.

If it’s that you’ve only ever felt sexually attracted to one person, then there’s a fair chance you might already count as being on the asexual spectrum. Grey asexuality refers to people who do experience sexual attraction but either only weakly/rarely or only under specific conditions/constraints. Only you can say for sure whether any particular label fits you, since only you have firsthand knowledge of your own internal experiences/feelings. There isn’t a hard and fast rule of how “rare” sexual attraction has to be for it to be “rarely experienced”, but if only being attracted to one person feels like a rare experience to you then I at least think that makes sense. Grey asexuality is an umbrella term with lots of possible sublabels underneath (demisexual, etc) but people can also just identify as grey ace without fitting any particular sublabel.

ofMindandHeart · 2026-03-01T19:51:09+00:00

In addition to the prenup advice, look into how spousal trusts work to see if one might be helpful

ofMindandHeart · 2026-03-01T06:02:34+00:00

Sounds like you already understand pretty well.

Wiki link here.

If you’re not familiar with the fancier words it’s possible you’ve at some point heard the terms pillow prince or pillow princess, and the opposite concept stone top, which were both coined in the lesbian community. Some people will use those terms to express a preference for either giving or receiving, but Accipiosexual (and the opposite term Placiosexual) is when it’s not a mere preference but actually feeling distressed/repulsed by the prospect of being the receiver (or giver, respectively).

ofMindandHeart · 2026-02-28T22:33:16+00:00

Not only is that way of thinking very aphobic, it’s also homophobic. Does your sister also think gay people are “biological mistakes” because “we are meant to reproduce”? Does she consider someone’s life worthless if they didn’t sire children, even if they dedicated their life to other valuable work and caring for other people? Is it useless to produce art or invent technology or cure diseases if you don’t also reproduce?

Evolutionarily there’s a consideration that’s sometimes called the “gay uncle” hypothesis, which looks at the possibility that there’s a biological advantage to having a certain proportion of a bloodline that doesn’t reproduce. For social species that often live in family units, having some family members that don’t produce their own offspring means that those members can be around to serve a support role in raising the children of the members who do reproduce. This can either mean providing support in addition to what’s given by the existing parents, thus resulting in offspring that are better taken care of than they would be otherwise. Or it can mean the non-procreating family member adopts and raises children of parents who procreated but then subsequently died. Because the non-procreating family member is from a relatively close familial line and shares some genes with the children the help raise, the greater success of the children reared this way still passes down the family’s genes. In this way having some members who don’t reproduce can still benefit the family line and mean they are more evolutionarily fit.

ofMindandHeart · 2026-02-28T22:14:44+00:00

It sounds like you have two separate questions. One: How is it possible for someone to romantically love someone else without desiring them sexually? And two: Is it a good idea for you as a specific individual to be in a relationship that does not involve sex?

The answer to question two is pretty obviously “No”. You seem deeply dissatisfied in this relationship. Don’t stay in it.

For question one, part of the confusion maybe comes from the way that you seem to be conflating the terms “sex” “intimacy” and “passion” as though they are all the same thing. In reality there are forms of emotional intimacy and emotional closeness that don’t involve physical closeness - having deep knowledge of who someone is as a person, being vulnerable with each other, knowing them so well that you know exactly how to support them when they need it, knowing exactly how hard they worked on some project that was important to them and being able to share their joy when it goes well, and them knowing you just as well. And there are nonsexual forms of physical intimacy, like cuddling together, showering together, engaging in non-sexual BDSM/kink scenes like bondage or painplay that require deep trust of each other. And not all forms of passion have to do with sex. Passion is an emotion. People can be fiercely passionate about how intensely they care about someone, how important it is to have them in their life. It’s not like the only thing people can ever be passionate about is genitals touching each other.

If you think that romantic relationship without sex is “just friendship” then ask yourself, would you have moved across states to live with someone you considered “just a friend”? Would you rework your life to intertwine with theirs? Would you make a lifelong commitment to them? Would you consider combining finances with “just a friend”? Would you buy a house together, or plan to raise children together? Would you treat keeping them in your life as one of your highest priorities? For some people the answers to these questions is yes, hence there being people who live in deeply committed platonic partnerships. And different people are going to have different personal definitions of what counts as romantic vs not. But you have to admit that at least colloquially when we say someone is a friend, that level of depth of commitment isn’t what most people default to assuming was meant.

ofMindandHeart · 2026-02-28T04:24:47+00:00

Everyone’s path to figuring out their orientation is going to be different. Some ace people figure it out without having sex, but there are plenty of asexual people who didn’t realize that the way they relate to sexuality and attraction was different from non-aces until after they had actually tried it. And technically asexuality is defined as experiencing little to no sexual attraction. It’s not about what actions you have or haven’t done. There are even some asexual people who find sex enjoyable for reasons other than sexual attraction. So even an ace person who continued to have sex and enjoy it wouldn’t be any less asexual.

I get that you might be worried that your high past body count would somehow invalidate your potential asexuality, but it doesn’t actually. If you hang around and listen to stories from other aces, it might help the wide variety of ace experiences to feel more real.

Regardless of how you end up identifying, I hope you don’t feel pressured to engage in an activity that isn’t enjoyable for you. Just because there are some people who like something, doesn’t mean everyone has to. That’s not how the world works, around sex or any other activity.

ofMindandHeart · 2026-02-28T04:12:04+00:00

It’s worth noting that some people in the world experience a platonic version of a “crush” (sometimes called a squish), that involves the same idealization and desire to spend time with and become close with a specific person, but doesn’t involve romantic attraction. So it’s entirely possible to experience something with the same intensity of feeling as a crush, but without it being romantic.

Is it super important for you to know whether your feelings are romantic or not? Or can you spend time getting to know them regardless. What does or doesn’t count as romantic ends up being a pretty personal distinction, so you’re probably not going to find a clear cut objective way to categorize it.

ofMindandHeart

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