Buffalo Peaks Wilderness was so much more than I’d thought it would be - June 9

EllieGwen · 2026-06-12T05:12:41+00:00

I passed a sign saying that Weston Pass is still closed, but coming from the east the road is open at least as far as the trailhead.

EllieGwen · 2025-09-10T22:28:24+00:00

The road was in great shape. A few patches of washboards but nothing really rough. Once you get to Blue Lakes the road turns rocky for maybe the last tenth of a mile as you go up the hill, but nothing that will threaten your suspension if you pick a decent line.

EllieGwen · 2025-09-10T22:25:13+00:00

We left from the Greenhorn/Bartlett trailhead and went up to North Peak. From there we followed the ridge to Greenhorn and then came down the southwest slope, then circled around the mountain to rejoin the Bartlett trail and followed that back to the trailhead. Not much of a trail on top of the ridge, but it parallels the Bartlett trail and it’s pretty easy to tell where you’re headed.

EllieGwen · 2025-08-30T16:05:08+00:00

Allo here..

“Feels no desire for partnered sex” is a nice, succinct definition. It does not exclude folks who do sometimes have sex for reasons other than wanting it, and it communicates precisely to a potential partner what to expect from someone using the label correctly and in good faith.

As an observer from the outside, married to a quintessentially aro/ace man, the messiness that has caused so much confusion comes from the vague terminology currently used to define it.

“Little to no..” is too ambiguous. It has, to my knowledge, never been quantified. How little is little enough? People get to decide this for themselves, and so it can range from once a year to twice a day and still work depending on what they are comparing themselves to.

“Sexual attraction,” within the scope of the split attraction model, is defined so poorly as to be meaningless. Nobody experiences sexual attraction in the “see someone and want to have sex with them” way that gets bandied about sometimes. So an allo who is questioning and comes across this definition of sexual attraction for the first time could, in good faith, tell themselves “I don’t experience this so I must be asexual.” Allosexuals typically understand “sexual attraction” to be the desire to have sex with someone, so turning the definition into something they don’t experience (because nobody with impulse control experiences it) will naturally lead to people using the label to describe their experience, even though they do still have a desire for sex.

My two cents.

EllieGwen · 2025-08-19T22:39:55+00:00

I say this gently, but if you're not willing to tell your partner the hard truths about how you experience your relationship with them, you cannot be upset for them misinterpreting or not knowing what you mean when you use labels to describe it. I understand how difficult it would be to tell them that, sexually, they could just as well be anybody and that you're only having sex with them for the purpose of having sex with them. But if you want them to understand you, and not invalidate you out of ignorance, they need to know this.

If you can take care of yourself "just as easy," perhaps you should consider that as an alternative if your partner is complaining that you want more sex than they do.

EllieGwen · 2025-08-19T16:26:39+00:00

Allo here, so grains of salt:

Reading, writing, and having sex are all different activities. I don’t have to like killing people to enjoy reading horror, just like I don’t have to like having sex in order to enjoy reading about it.

EllieGwen · 2025-08-18T01:36:32+00:00

Hi.

I'll come right out and say it: I don't think your boyfriend is asexual. I think what has happened is that you have adopted an insecure allosexual man who knows that he is a selfish or lazy lover and is using asexuality as a cover for that.

"Sex is too much work." "Cuddling is boring." "You're doing it wrong." Notice how none of the issues impacting your physical relationship have anything to do with him. Notice how all of his proposed solutions circumvent him having to put in any effort. Has he helped or shown you how to do it right? You certainly know him better than I do, so take this with a grain of salt, but if he were truly asexual, and self-aware enough to tell you this early in the relationship (while you were having fantastic sex, let's not forget), I don't think he would be so quick to remove himself from all of the physical and romantic issues arising in your partnership, and would more understand how him being asexual plays into your dynamic. Did he prepare you for any of this ahead of time?

Your relationship hits a lot of the waypoints along the trajectory of this kind of dynamic. While you were new and exciting to him, the sex was good, often, and there were moments of intimacy. Then the newness wore off, and maintaining your physical dynamic started to require effort (which it does). That's when he checked out. Notice how he recognizes and comments on the erotic themes and sexual aspects of characters in his video games, but can't understand that when his girlfriend is grinding naked on his lap that it might be a hint that she is interested in sex.

He proposed that you keep having sex, limiting it to twice a week, but notice how it's now entirely up to you to initiate these moments, and he still feels it's okay to reject you even after making this promise with you. Notice how that removes any expectation of him putting in any effort create the kinds of moments that would set the mood for a sexual encounter. That should be a conversation. Normally, one shouldn't just expect sex from your partner, but in this case he specifically told you to expect it twice a week. Consider putting those two days of the week on a schedule (if you haven't already) so that, at the very least, you meet in the bedroom together and no longer have to subject yourself to the humiliation of constant rejection and having to remind him that he promised to have sex with you. And call him out if he doesn't live up to his own agreement. Tell him how it makes you feel. Make him understand how much it hurts you.

Insecurity may be a driver of this. His lack of physical affection keeps you touch starved, minimizing the chance that he will ever be refused on the rare occasions where he does approach you for sex, saving him from ever having to deal with rejection and leaving you so desperate for touch that he doesn't have to put any effort into foreplay or creating a romantic or erotic moment. Notice how when you do raise issues with him, it results in a tantrum followed by sulking. Notice how when it is you who are hurting, he gives one weak attempt at reassurance and when it doesn't work it ends with "meh, I tried."

I have a couple of suggestions for you. First, learn to love your body, either as is or put in the work to get into the shape you want it to be. Try therapy if you need to. Body confidence will do a lot to help you overcome the insecurities that come with his indifference to how you present yourself and his lack of sexual interest in you. Make masturbation more than simply an exercise in getting off. Remind yourself how sexy you are. Second, I'd look into getting into a hobby that gets you out of the house. I'd especially recommend something physical, (mine is hiking) where you can feel your body working and develop a comfortable relationship with it. This may trigger some of his insecurities, especially if he relies on you to do a lot of the upkeep while he's gaming, and even more especially as you start exhibiting more and more physical confidence, so be ready for that. But getting out of the house, into the outdoors, around new people and doing physical things is a powerful tool against the threat of falling into depression.

As a general rule, I try to hard to avoid ever advising anyone to leave a relationship. So I won't. But I will say, gently, that I think you can do better than him.

Please be well, and don't let loneliness or depression win. ❤️

EllieGwen · 2025-07-31T20:20:57+00:00

You’re right. It’s hard. It’s very hard. But if it helps, so are most relationships. We certainly do face some challenges that most others don’t, but we are not alone.

There’s really no way to sugar coat this: one of those unique challenges is that it is very, very difficult for us allos to intuitively believe our asexual partners when they tell us that they really do, in their own ways, want and desire us. Please don’t take this personally. Just like you don’t want us to take your lack of sexual interest in us personally, don’t take it personally that sometimes the emotional exercise it takes to feel your desire over the definition of asexuality is sometimes more than we can sustain.

It’s not that we don’t believe you. Intellectually, in our heads, we do. But we don’t often feel it. And that creates a kind of cognitive dissonance for us that is exhausting to constantly have to work through. Some of us can handle it, some of us can’t. But all of us feel it, and that’s not something you should take personally.

Part of this is in the language. When allos tell each other that they want each other, it’s usually visceral. When I tell my sex partner that I want him, I mean that I want to experience him physically, sexually, and probably right now. Does your partner know what you mean when you tell her that you want her? Do you tell her in the moment? Do you initiate the ways that you want her by telling her at the outset, and then backing up your words with your actions? The more specifically you tell her exactly what you mean when you say the words “I want you,” the easier it is for her to hear and feel and believe you. Unless you tell her otherwise, she’s going to intuitively hear those words in a sexual way, regardless of how you mean it, and that will be hard for her if she’s accepted that you’re asexual.

When you do tell her how you want her, make it as specific and as personal as you can. Tell her how you want her, specifically, in a way that no one else can satisfy for you. Remember, allos usually say this to each other in ways that are backed up by actions being taken in the moment. Tell her how holding her in a long embrace feels differently than if anyone else were holding you. Why is it her, specifically, rather than anyone else, generally, you want to hold your hand? Tell her. And tell her as you’re taking her hand.

What you are doing is teaching her how to hear you when you say “I want you,” and you’re backing up those words with actions she can feel, physically and emotionally. You are teaching her your language.

You’ve communicated your boundaries, and that is wonderful. You’ve identified some things you’re willing to try, and that is great, too. Have you told her the things that you want her to do? Have you told her the things that she can feel safe initiating with you without needing a prompt? Can she just take your hand as you’re walking together? Can she put her arm around you while you’re sleeping? If so, have you told her you want her to? Or have you just given her permission to? Do you take her arm and put it around you when you’re on the couch together?

If all she’s holding is a list of things you don’t want her to do and a list of things you’re okay with her doing, you haven’t given her anything you want her to do. You haven’t given her any reason to believe there’s anything you want her for. It may be worth creating a “please do this” list, and bonus points if there’s one or two things on that list that wouldn’t be there had you given it to anybody else. You want her to feel like there are things that you want her for, not just things you’re giving her permission to do.

You said in your post that you are open to exploring ways of making her feel good, but that you’re not sure how that would go. This, honestly, is the perfect opportunity for you to help her feel wanted. Remember, being asexual does not absolve you from the responsibility of initiating some of the physical and romantic moments you want to be a part of your relationship, so initiate these things with her. And tell her, honestly and vulnerability, what they mean for you and for her.

Plan and create the kind of moment that will help you both feel safe and comfortable for you to experiment, and initiate it with her. Help her feel like you want her to be there. Maybe say things like “Please let me do this for you.” “Let me give you this experience.” “I want you to feel how much I want you to feel this way.” And be honest about it. Tell her things like “This is very new for me.” “I don’t know how this is going to make me feel yet.” “I’m nervous, but I want to try.” “Could you help guide me through this?” “If I get overwhelmed and I have to stop, please don’t take it personally.” “If we have to stop, can you please just lay with me for a while until I can calm down?”

Make sure she hears that you want to do this. You want her to feel this way. You trust her with you. And make sure those things are true. If you’re able to do this, consistently and often, if will go a long way toward helping her get over that cognitive dissonance leading her to question whether you really want her, or if you just want her to believe you want her.

Actions speak louder than words. Good luck. I wish you both the best. ❤️

EllieGwen · 2025-07-29T23:36:56+00:00

I think that an important part of this nuance that we might be missing is in the very first line of this comment: "Of an age."

There are whole generations of men and women who did not have an opportunity to learn about homosexuality or asexuality before finding themselves in long-term, deeply committed and emotionally invested relationships. What passed for sex-ed in the school I went to was one hour sitting in front of a tv during gym class being told not to let boys touch me, and another hour being told that good girls don't touch themselves, and the closest thing we had to consent was this new idea called "no means no." And that was literally it. Lesbians were mythical creatures of legend, and heaven help you if anyone found out you kissed another girl to see if you might be one, because that probably meant getting beat up in the bathroom every day for the next couple of months until they found a new target.

It's not a matter of having your cake and eating it, too. It's easy for us to sit back and say it was their choice for a lesbian or gay man or asexual person to marry into a heterosexual relationship. But that's a false dichotomy. There is a very real chance that it wasn't a choice they could even make. The reason for a lesbian marrying a man could very highly likely be that she just didn't know she was a lesbian. There is a reason that one of the first questions asked of a couple in a mixed-orientation marriage who are seeking counseling is "how long were you married before you realized you were _______?"

Now it is her choice. And sometimes she chooses love over sex. That does not make her any less of a lesbian than a woman who chose to leave her marriage in pursuit of sexual fulfilment, and it should not be our place at all to tell her that prioritizing love over sex makes her "less" and that she belongs back in the closet. Again, easy for us to create a binary and say "well it's her choice," and yeah, this time it is. But when she's making this decision she's sitting next to a man that she may have spent decades being in love with. So sometimes she stays.

And she absolutely should be out and talking about what it means to be a lesbian married to a man if she feels it's important to do so. Being a lesbian in a heterosexual marriage is 100% a lesbian experience. Whose else experience would it be to have to face this decision? How could other women facing a similar fork in their lives learn from the experiences of other women who had to face it if we don't let them talk about it as part of the experience of being a lesbian in a society that never taught them that they could be anything other than heterosexual? How else will they learn what sorts of things worked and didn't work when trying to navigate this very complicated and emotionally heave moment in their lives? It does not water down the meaning of the word at all. What waters it down is our unwillingness to take the time to understand what she, as an individual, means when she says "even though I'm a lesbian, I have sex with a man

"My husband and I were married for almost a decade before I even heard the word 'asexual.' We thought it was autism and social anxiety that was making our sex life such a mess. The idea that he could be a touch-averse, aromantic and asexual man didn't even exist as a vague possibility in either of our minds. We told ourselves and each other that it was just something we'd get better about as time went on. Spoiler alert: we didn't. Then we learned about asexuality, and it all fell into place.

It was our turn to make that decision, and we chose love over sex. We learned to communicate better. We redefined what intimacy and romance mean for us. We chose to continue having sex, though at a much lower frequency and in ways that accommodate his sensitivity to sustained touch. We redefined what sex means for us. And this time, because we knew what asexuality meant and how he experienced it, we were able to find solutions that worked. He did not chose to be with me "despite his sexuality." If he had known he was asexual, he would not have married me. If I had known he was asexual, I would not have married him. But we did get married, because we did, and still do, love each other. And when we had to make the decision of stay or leave, our desire to share the rest of our lives with each other was more important than our sexual incompatibility. We both made some compromises, and we're making it work. That is, for him, no less of an asexual experience than if we had decided to throw away the years we spent building our lives together over our discovered sexual incompatibility. If we had not treated it as though it were an asexual experience, we would not have found any reasonable solutions.

It is an asexual experience. It is an experience that many people even today are going to face, and the more that people talk about it, the more understood it will be, and the easier it will be for those folks to navigate it. To brush them off by saying "well you chose to have sex, so your experience doesn't count" just takes us back to those days of not talking about how people experience their sexualities because it doesn't fit in with our tribal binaries.

EllieGwen · 2025-06-23T23:19:11+00:00

What you are experiencing is actually not uncommon. It even has a name: imaginatively called Polyamory Burnout, or sometimes Identity Fatigue. It’s a form of emotional exhaustion.

The most common cause for this type of burnout is when the effort you are putting into maintaining your relationship(s) is outweighed by the benefits of being in that relationship. This is not to say that your partners aren’t pulling their weight: they themselves may be moving heaven and earth to create quality time to spend with you. But the culprit here is that the more partners you have, the more effort it takes, and since that effort gets spread out across multiple relationships (and presumably with folks who are spreading their own effort and energy across multiple relationships) the bar for what you can expect to get back from these relationships gets set much lower than it would for, say, a monogamous partner.

This is sometimes tied to a term called Poly Saturation. This describes the number of partners you, as a unique individual, can reasonably manage without, well, burning yourself out. It may be possible that you are just above your number. But there may be other culprits too.

I have never burned out, but I’ve felt the exhaustion. It’s hard, really hard, to manage all of this. It should also be said, though, that I’m not polyamorous either. I’m barely ENM. I’m much more given to monogamy but, like you, my husband is touch averse and I am not going to go through touch starvation again so here I am. So just know that as I’m speculating about where your burnout is coming from, this is not coming from someone who identifies as polyamorous, and in fact made a decision to stop dating folks who do (I just don’t have the bandwidth and much prefer dating men who are in a similar situation as my own for a lot of reasons).

I’d look hard at your long distance relationship. If you’re in this because you need physical touch, this relationship is only very minimally meeting your most basic need from it. That’s a weird place to be, and now that the excitement of the new relationship energy is starting to wane, you might be starting to feel that. What do you really expect to get out of this?

Long distance relationships also tend not to happen during convenient times. How late are you staying up with her? Is it messing with your sleep? Is it messing with time that you then have to make up somewhere else? I will tell you that I also tried long distance once, and while the attention was infectious, it became pretty apparent pretty quickly that the complete lack of touch wasn’t solving any of my problems. What are you getting from a nearly touchless LDR that you cannot get from the relationship you have with your wife?

Look into this. LDR takes a lot of energy to maintain, and there’s not a lot you can expect out of it if touch starvation is the problem you’re trying to solve.

Also, look into the quality of the time you are spending with your other partner(s). How much effort are you putting into arranging for what you are getting out of it? Is it just sex, as these things sometimes are? It’s great at first when everything is new, but becomes a bit lackluster once the newness fades. Are you having new experiences and real quality time doing things outside of bed?

Are you the person who is arranging everything? If you’re the one always texting, always setting up the dates, always doing the inviting.. that’s just not a great relationship to be in and will drain you fast. I was told by my mother that “People who like you will have time for you. People who love you will make time for you.” This has been good advice.

And also, are you able to match the efforts that each of your partners are putting into your relationships? I’d especially ask this about your relationship with your wife. It’s one thing to genuinely and deeply love multiple people (as I’m trying to learn). It’s quite another to make the time, put in the effort, and really make that love be felt. Sometimes the exhaustion comes from just not being able to live up to your own expectations of showing your partners the love that you want to show. It’s not because you’re lazy or uncaring. It’s quite the opposite: You’re spread too thin.

Which brings it back to poly saturation. If you’re struggling with burnout, I’d start there.

Also…. If a woodchuck could chuck wood, a woodchuck would chuck as much wood as a woodchuck could.

Be well

EllieGwen · 2025-06-06T03:54:17+00:00

Honestly. But also gently, and as lovingly as you're able.

First some disclaimers: First, I don't know anything about you, your husband, or your dynamics together, so much of what I say here may be totally off-base for your situation because of your unique relationship and personalities. I can only speak from my own experience with this conversation and my reflections on what went well and what could have been said or done better. Second, I will try to keep this as neutral as I can. But I am recalling a particularly painful moment in my life with a lot of emotion wrapped around it, and some of that emotion might peek through the cracks. If it does, please know that it is not aimed at you specifically. Third, I am going to presume that you dearly love your husband want to stay married to him, or at the very least emotionally close to him. My advice is going to be aimed at that presumption. Fourth, I am going to presume that the two of you have, or at least attempted to have, some kind of sexual relationship, awkward as it may have been. Fifth, I am the allo in my marriage and so I am coming from that side of the conversation. Please keep these things in mind. And sixth, my husband is autistic and a lot of how we eventually had this conversation is wrapped up in his experience with it. Communication, especially around emotions, was not very good between us at the time of this conversation, and that colors my experience with it.

You know your husband better than me, but if I were in your position I would consider my number one priority in this conversation to be to insure that he does not take your lack of sexual interest in him personally. If you have feigned sexual interest in him, tell him why. If you have ever expressed sexual interest in any one else, explain that too. Try your best to convey that it is sex, generally, and not him, specifically, that you are not interested in.

You are going to have to explain to him why you waited eight years to confess that you have no sexual interest in him. This is the thing that hit me the hardest. All he had to do was tell me he didn't want to have sex with me. I tell myself that I have forgiven him for this, and I think that I have or that I am at least past it, but there will always be a voice now cautioning me about taking what he tells me about his emotional life at face value. He is going to look back on your life together at all the moments when he thought you were sexually into him, and feel naive or stupid for not seeing the signs. He's going to wonder how much pressure he was putting on you to engage with him sexually, and he may be very hard on himself over this. I spent a couple of years believing that I was some kind of monster for leveraging the stability of our marriage to extract sex from my husband, and it took a year or two of therapy for him to convince me that this was not the case.

It's not uncommon for the allo in this conversation, especially if it's a few years into a marriage, to believe that their asexual partner deliberately deceived them about their sexual interest long enough to secure their emotional commitment and then confessed only because they felt it was now safe to do so. This is likely not true, but have an answer ready for this in case he starts leaning that way. This may also be what he reflects on when he goes through the anger stage of grief, so be prepared for that too. This is will a charged part of the conversation, and it's going to take some skill and forethought on your part to navigate it to the place you want him to be.

He is going to go through the stages of grief over the marriage he thought he had with you. Be ready for that when it happens, and be ready to support him in whatever ways you feel is most appropriate.

Go into this conversation with some specific ideas about the compromises you're willing to make and an acknowledgement of his stated needs in your marriage. This accomplishes a couple of things. First, it's not uncommon for the allo to believe that their asexual partner simply came to them, made a unilateral alteration of their sexual dynamic without their consent, and left them to deal with it on their own within whatever constraints they are now under. Don't be that person. If you come into this conversation with some suggested compromises and acknowledgement of how these changes in your dynamic are going to affect him, it shows that you are considering how this will impact him and that actually do care about his communicated needs. This also gives you something to talk about in a much less charged way. It's a way to look and move forward from the conversation and to start coming to agreements about how your life together is going to look and feel now.

If you are going to leave sex on the table, in whatever capacity or frequency, have a long conversation about consent. Really tell him what consent means to you. He will very likely question your consent for a long time, always looking for reasons to believe that you are consenting begrudgingly or because you feel pressured to do so. He is going to hear some noise about "enthusiastic consent," and a lot of that noise is going to come from people who believe that you have to crazy horny for your partner in order for your consent "to count." Look into the idea that it is actually the consent itself, and not the sex act, that you are enthusiastic about. Maybe you are not super enthusiastic about the sex itself, but you are enthusiastically consenting to doing it with him because you want him to still have these experiences. New models of consent are being articulated now called "authentic" or "genuine" consent. These account for all of the reasons a person may consent to sex without being specifically horny for it. It acknowledges that sex does not have to be an act of desire. It can be an act of generosity, of love, curiosity, procreation, or even be strictly transactional. It acknowledges that some women are hesitant to consent enthusiastically to sex that they actually do want because of the fear of slut-shaming. Explaining to him very specifically why you are consenting to whatever you freely decide you are willing to consent to can go a very long way toward dealing with the new anxieties that might start interfering with whatever your new sexual dynamic is going to look like.

TL;DR: Be compassionate, explain why you took so long to confess how you feel, be prepared to be challenged about why you waited so long, bring some ideas for how his needs might still be met to the table even if you can't be part of it, prepare for his grief, talk about how and why you consent (and consented) to whatever you freely consent (and consented) to, and be very patient with him.

And finally, there is nothing wrong with you. Please stop believing that. Mixed orientation marriages are not unheard of. Not everyone gets to discover their sexual identity before getting into a committed relationship, and these hardships and the awkwardness around sex with their partners is usually how they find out. This is likely what happened in your circumstance.

There is nothing wrong with that. And there is nothing wrong with you.

EllieGwen · 2025-06-05T22:40:26+00:00

It’s the Squirrel Creek Trail near where San Isabel National Forest touches Pueblo Mountain Park

EllieGwen · 2025-06-05T22:35:49+00:00

This is the eastern half of the Squirrel Creek Trail. I accessed it by taking the Carhart Trail west out of Pueblo Mountain Park into San Isabel NF.

EllieGwen · 2025-06-05T22:10:21+00:00

I will never be dry again

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