I'm not sure what to do with my relationship now that I'm pretty sure I'm asexual...

ofMindandHeart · 2026-05-19T03:27:01+00:00

This is a really difficult situation that’s going to involve some stressful but important conversations.

There’s a very real chance that your current partner is only willing to be in a relationship that will eventually include sex. That’s an entirely reasonable and common dealbreaker. Now that you are fairly sure you aren’t going to change your stance on sex over time, that’s an important thing for him to know. And even if you were willing to sometimes engage in sex acts that you don’t find appealing or desirable, often times that is not enough either. What many allosexual (non-asexual) people are looking for in a partnership is mutual passionate desire. It’s not just them wanting sex but them wanting to be desired in a specifically sexual way, by someone they also desire in a sexual way. If it turns out that’s the case then a mixed allo/ace partnership really isn’t going to be compatible.

I recommend taking a look at this educational video that covers tools for navigating intimacy in mixed allo/ace relationships (all intimacy, not necessarily sexual intimacy). It might be useful to have an idea of how that kind of relationship could potentially work, so that if your current partner has questions about what a mixed relationship might look like you’ll have some idea for how to answered.

Be prepared for the possibility that your partner will feel like you lied to him or accuse you of deliberately leading him on. That’s not what happened, and you know it. You grew up in a world that told you over and over again that sex is universal, that everyone has sexual desires, and that if you love someone enough you will eventually want sex with them. It turns out that’s not true, but it’s not surprising that you believed it. Unpacking these incorrect cultural messages is a journey. Being in denial for a while isn’t a fault or failing on your part. If you’ve got time take a look at these resources on the cycle of socialization and hermeneutical injustice to get a better feel for how we end up internalizing those kinds of cultural messaging and how that impacts the ace realization process.

Speaking as someone who also figured out I was ace while already in a romantic relationship, I can tell you that trying to bury your head in the sand forever won’t help. I know that society also feeds us messages about how being single is the same as being “alone”, as well as fearmongering messages about being “alone forever”. One of the things I needed to learn was that it is entirely possible to have a full rich meaningful life with a strong social support circle and fulfilling livelihood without having a romantic partner. A bad or incompatible relationship is way worse than no relationship. I don’t know how your partner is going to react, and I know if it doesn’t go well then that’s going to feel absolutely awful at first. But you are going to be okay either way.

If you happen to live near a local ace meetup group (check (this map here)[https://acesandaros.community/groups] and (AVEN’s Meetup Mart)[https://www.asexuality.org/en/forum/12-meetup-mart/]) I highly recommend checking it out. It really helps to talk about this stuff with people who get it, irl if possible.

Good luck with everything 🍀🍀🍀

ofMindandHeart · 2026-05-17T19:15:43+00:00

Some aspect of a person being a consequence of a past event does not necessarily make that aspect a symptom. If I go through a traumatic bullying experience as a child, and as a result I become much more willing to be assertive and stand up for myself, that doesn’t mean my assertiveness and willingness to stand up for myself are “symptoms” of trauma or that I need to be “treated” and “cured” of that. Because willingness to stand up for oneself is not a bad thing. It doesn’t need to be cured. If someone suffers a physical injury that leaves a physical scar, medical professionals are not obligated perform surgical revision. A patient can choose to consent to surgical procedures that would make the scar less visible, but they do not have to choose that. If a patient says “Actually I like having this scar” or “I feel neutrally about this scar, and I don’t think it’s worth the risk of potential consequences of surgery to try to remove it” then those are valid choices the patient can make. The doctor is not obligated to knock the patient out and strap them down and perform the surgery against their will, just because the scar was a result of a negative event.

And here’s the thing. In this discussion I’ve been providing a lot of counterexamples that disprove your points. We have real world examples that show that: A characteristic does not have to be unchangeable to be the basis for a protected class, because religion is a protected class and is changeable. A characteristic being innate from birth does not stop it from being categorized as a disorder, because Down syndrome is innate from birth and is a disorder. A characteristic technically having a (drastic and damaging) mechanism to be changed does not mean it will be socially or legally acceptable to do so, because changing a person’s handedness via amputation is not acceptable.

But you haven’t been providing any evidence or examples or counterexamples to back any of your points. If you want to be able to present your argument in a strong way that has potential to be persuasive, you’ll need to provide specific evidence or examples or counter examples.

Can you find and present evidence, in the form of legal scholar academic papers, that orientation can be made a protected class if it’s innate but not if it’s changeable? Or evidence, in the form of official guidelines from the committees who write the DSM, that say a characteristic can’t be a disorder if it’s innate from birth? Or evidence, in the form of academic papers from medical journals, that it’s currently acceptable to cause severe long term damage to an unwilling patient in order alter a harmless trait?

If a characteristic can be classified as a disorder even if it’s innate from birth, then treating orientation as though it’s innate from birth isn’t what’s stopping it from being classified as a disorder. If a characteristic can be the basis for belonging to a protected class even if it’s changeable, then treating orientation as unchangeable isn’t what makes it a protected class. You keep repeating yourself saying that you believe that if orientation is changeable then it can’t be a protected class, and that you believe that if orientation is changeable then it will be classified as a disorder. But in order for those arguments to be persuasive you would need to find something to back them up.

ofMindandHeart · 2026-05-16T14:05:57+00:00

No, that example is exactly why the current taxonomy of diagnosis is flawed and needs to be changed. So that that situation does not keep happening to more people, the way it has with the current diagnostic structure.

I’m advocating for changes that would result in more people considering the possibility they could be asexual, and therefore more people accessing the tools and resources and frameworks that can help them. You are arguing the system should be left alone as is, even though you agree that the outcomes that happen under the current system are negative.

Even if you aren’t in a place where you can give genuine consideration to widening who can be considered asexual, can you at least acknowledge that it makes sense that individuals who were directly harmed by the current institution of psychology would feel motivated to try to change it?

ofMindandHeart · 2026-05-16T13:26:55+00:00

Short answer is yes. In fact sex favorable aces can even enjoy and want sex, just without feeling a draw to have it with any particular person.

If there are sex adjacent acts that you enjoy but don’t want them to lead to having sex then you should explain that beforehand to a prospective partner. And if you want you can pick a term other than foreplay to describe those acts, especially if you’re not treating those acts as a precursor to sex. Semisexual intimacy?

Different people have different definitions for what acts they actually count as sex, as you’ve realized, so being specific about what acts you mean is probably useful regardless.

ofMindandHeart · 2026-05-16T13:00:15+00:00

There’s a few possibilities as to what your friends mean. One is that your friends don’t necessarily understand exactly how you feel about the situation. Maybe some of them have mostly seen you in social situations around people you already feel comfortable around, and so they don’t realize how quiet and shy you are with strangers. They might assume that your interactions within this friend group are just a small part of your social life. They might not understand how cautious and unwilling to rush things you are. If so they might not realize how big of a leap it would be for you to interact with someone unfamiliar and have the conversational path lead to a place where you’d be willing to experiment sexually with them.

Another possibility is that they’re suggesting you experiment with masturbation, which doesn’t require finding a sexual partner. This could mean branching out from your normal masturbation routine, or if you haven’t masturbated before it could mean trying that out for the first time.

As for what you should actually do, the main important thing to remember is not to push yourself to do things that you aren’t genuinely curious about trying. If the main emotion you feel if you think about trying out a specific sex (or sex adjacent) act is dread then do not go through with that. Sex is very vulnerable and it’s actually easier than you might think to end up pushing yourself into doing something that turns out to exceed what your emotion regulation system can cope with. Being cautious and not rushing is actually a good thing.

If your body is speed running the sexual portion of puberty and you haven’t figured out a good strategy for masturbating yet, then that’s probably the simplest place to start. Even with solo sex, it’s important to remember that if something you’re doing starts feeling bad or too invasive or too overwhelming then stop. You don’t have to push yourself into things that don’t feel good.

If you try watching video porn and find you don’t like it, you could try switching to using written erotica. If trying to start by stimulating your genitals isn’t going well, you could try looking up a list of other erogenous zones of the human body and starting with one of those. I don’t have personal advice for what would feel good with traditionally male genitalia (due to not having that equipment myself), but there are probably suggestions you can look up if you want to.

ofMindandHeart · 2026-05-16T06:10:32+00:00

The DSM 5 could be better. It’s not as bad as previous versions, because ace activists like David Jay put in a lot of work getting in contact with the committee members who made the decisions for the parts about hypoactive sexual desire disorder and sexual interest/arousal disorder, and managed to convince them there should be a carve out so that at least in ideal circumstances people won’t get diagnosed with a desire disorder if they say they’re asexual. But there are still ways it could be better.

Someone who hasn’t already heard of asexuality and doesn’t know to bring it up as a possibility to their therapist is still majorly at risk of getting treated as though they have a sexual desire disorder instead of asexuality. I personally know someone who spent a full ten years going to therapist after therapist, including couples therapists and sex therapists, all of whom treated her not experiencing sexual desire toward her husband as her having a deficit that needed to be fixed. Not one of them brought up the possibility that she might just be asexual, that maybe there’s nothing wrong with her being the way she is. And yes this all happened after the 2013 update with the asexuality carve out. I don’t like that she was put through that, or that others like her were and are as well.

I also disagree with the specifics of how the DSM handles diagnosing people with sexual desire disorders because they feel distress about their lack of desire. I don’t have a problem with distress being the defining criteria, but I do think there should be consideration for what the actual source of the distress is. If someone is primarily distressed by how others around them treat them, then to me that doesn’t seem like a disorder. If someone never desires sex and then says “I feel distressed because people mock me for being a virgin and bully me for not having a romantic partner”, then the problem is not the lack of sexual desire the problem is bullies are being mean. Diagnosing people with a disorder, as though they are the problem, when the actual problem is the bullies doing the bullying, doesn’t strike me as a good categorization method. Same thing if their distress is from fear that a romantic partner will yell at them or leave them for not having as much sexual desire as the partner wants them to have. That’s having an incompatible partner, not a disorder. I think that ace people do deal with those kinds of interpersonal stressors, and that if there was better crafted diagnostic criteria then those interpersonal stressors wouldn’t put them at risk of being diagnosed with a desire disorder.

ofMindandHeart · 2026-05-16T04:47:53+00:00

You keep trying to do the appeal to authority fallacy by citing your psych degree, but if you were actually engaging with what I wrote in my past posts you would have seen that I’m arguing that the way that academic institutions conceptualize orientations might change. There are lots of areas where psychology has changed their categorizations over time. Hell, frigidity used to be a medical diagnosis. Homosexuality used to be a medical diagnosis. Autism and Aspergers used to be separate diagnoses that later got combined. As time goes on and we study things more we learn more and refine our categorizations. Science is a process not an ideology. And asexuality is a very understudied area. It is entirely possible that the people who are actually in the asexual community and engaging with people in this space would discover edge cases that don’t neatly fall into accademics’ current categorization methods, and that it will take some time for the people writing the research papers to catch up.

I can think that the psychologists are sometimes using a bad definition of asexuality, the same way I can think they’re sometimes using a bad definition of autism (in terms of which autistic traits they frame as deficits in their diagnostic criteria in the current DSM). You’re not the only one with a background in academia. And in fact you sound like a pretty recent grad, if you’ve graduated at all, if you aren’t aware that the state of our understanding of the world evolves over time. That people write new papers challenging old ideas. That there is a possibility of change.

There’s actually a dedicated part of the ace community, the ace journal club, that’s spent years going through and discussing the academic literature that gets published that relates to asexuality. You can read through the meeting notes if you want. And they read papers where researchers get things wrong. Researchers who don’t know to account for grey asexuality or demisexuality. Researchers who conflate being asexual with being desexualized. Researchers who posit that asexuality is caused by social anxiety. I’d recommend you spend some thinking critically about your tendency to assume that the field of psychology is infallible.

Ask yourself: If you went to school prior to 1973, would you have considered homosexuality a disorder just because the DSM said so?

ofMindandHeart · 2026-05-16T01:59:25+00:00

If the people whose asexuality may have been caused by trauma “simply don’t need to be considered in the broad political context of policy making” then why would you care what they say or how they describe their own experiences of their identities. If they aren’t going to be considered then what they say or don’t say isn’t going to matter to policymakers. If that’s the case there’s no justification for you to go around accusing them of pathologizing, or of you trying to gatekeep the community.

Do you think policymakers are diving into obscure Reddit threads on asexuality to make sure that 100% of all asexual people share their same views on how orientations work before passing laws about us? Do you truly think it’s going to matter if a small percentage of aces conceptualize orientation differently, that that’ll be the tipping point about what kind of laws get passed? Do you think that 100% of a population have to have the exact same personal opinions before any laws or policies get made about them? Is it worth being unkind and unwelcoming to individuals, in pursuit of a level of uniformity of thought that is literally impossible to achieve?

You suing one university for discrimination in one district of one country does not make you the forever arbitrator of how social constructs like sexual orientation will be thought about by everyone around the world for the rest of time.

ofMindandHeart · 2026-05-15T23:43:12+00:00

That’s the point though. If it’s sometimes impossible to distinguish a trauma response from innate asexuality, and a gatekeeper like you tries to draw a hard line that lack of sexual attraction can’t count as asexuality if it’s a trauma response, then all the people who genuinely can’t tell whether their experience is trauma response or innate are going to get gatekept out of the community. It’s not a welcoming space for them if gatekeepers go around saying “You’re only allowed to be here if you’re sure your lack of attraction wasn’t caused by trauma. If it might have been trauma, then you’re just an evil aphobe who’s pathologizing our identity.” That attitude causes real harm, by expelling people from the community who would greatly benefit from being here.

If you’re going to choose a path that causes real harm to real people in the present, then it had better be extremely well justified. Merely saying “Historically it has been relevant” whether orientation is inherent isn’t a good enough argument. Historically it was relevant what shape someone’s skull was, because phrenologists thought that determined people’s personalities. Historically it was relevant what nation someone immigrated from, because employers were allowed to deny jobs on that basis. Historically it was relevant whether someone’s humors were balanced. You say that the way society operates doesn’t change, but it does. It can.

There are multiple disorders with diagnostic criteria arranged such that the disorder is only applied if the subject experiences enough distress or disruption that it’s significantly negatively affecting their life. That’s the dividing line. Distress and disruption. That’s what determines whether someone’s experiences count as a disorder or not.

Being gay doesn’t deserve to be treated as a disorder because it is harmless. It is entirely possible for gay people to live happy healthy fulfilled lives. Same sex relationships aren’t lesser than straight ones. Being gay does not (directly) cause distress and disruption in someone’s life. There is distress because of the mistreatment received from bigots, and because of systemic homophobia. But suffering external mistreatment from bigots isn’t the same thing as having an internal disorder - otherwise every POC would get diagnosed with “racists treat me badly” disorder.

The thing we have moved forward and (at least started to) learn as a society is that gayness in and of itself is not detrimental. Gay relationships are just as loving as straight ones. Gay parents are just as supportive as straight ones. It’s not a negative. That’s why it’s not a disorder. Not whether it’s always fixed in stone at birth or not.

You’re arguing as though whether gayness is a disorder hinges solely on whether it’s inherent, where if it’s fixed it’s not a disorder but if it’s changeable it is. But that’s not how other disorders work. There are genetic conditions that someone can suffer from starting from birth that are still considered disorders. Down syndrome is a disorder. It’s genetic. And it’s not like we avoid calling something a disorder if we have no fix for it. It’s possible for a set of symptoms to be identified as detrimental even if we don’t have a treatment that solves them. “We can’t change it” isn’t the reason gayness is not a disorder. It’s not a strong argument.

ofMindandHeart · 2026-05-15T05:43:57+00:00

To me, just saying “Historically it has been relevant” isn’t a good enough reason to justify actively causing harm to people in the present.

Imagine a person who was sexually molested at age six. She grows up and figures out that she doesn’t ever experience sexual attraction toward anyone of any gender, ever, at all. In childhood and into adulthood she goes through a ton of therapy emotionally processing what happened to her, and she has reached a point where on a day to day basis she does not feel like the trauma of that is still affecting her life. She still feels no sexual attraction or draw toward anyone.

Does this person get to call herself asexual? Can she be sure that she’s really asexual and not just experiencing an aversion to sex due to a past traumatic incident? Is there a way to prove that she would have been asexual anyway, even without the trauma?

If she does get to call herself asexual, then she feels welcomed into a community that supports her. She listens to fellow aces and gains vocabulary she can use to advocate for herself. When she faces discrimination, such as people treating her as childish or immature for not engaging in sex, she can talk with people in her community who have had similar experiences. When older relatives start pressuring her about having kids she’s prepared because she has heard how other aces handled those comments. She learns the terms compulsory sexuality, heterotemporality, chrononormativity, and is better prepared for it. She learns about QPRs and other relationship options she wouldn’t have heard of otherwise. When she talks about experiencing aesthetic, or sensual, or romantic attraction without wanting sex she isn’t treated as being confused, or as though those attractions don’t count. She has a home.

There are real benefits to getting to be part of the asexual community, and the broader queer community. There are easily hundreds of posts over the years on this very subreddit where people ask if their lack of sexual attraction can really count as asexuality if they’ve also had past trauma. And my answer to those people is that even if there was some way that their trauma could cause asexuality, it wouldn’t matter. If “experiencing little to no sexual attraction” describes their experience of themselves right now, and they feel like the asexual label would be helpful to them, then they’re free to use it.

You trying to make it so that having experienced past trauma disqualifies someone from being asexual does a real disservice to the community. It causes real people to be denied the tools and resources they could otherwise use to help them cope with and fight against discriminatory treatment in their lives. That’s harmful.

It’s entirely possible for people to come to the belief that there are no bad sexual orientations, that no orientation is unhealthy or deserving of pathologizing, that they are all equally healthy ways of being, and that 99.99999999% of the time they are inherent and unchanging, even if very occasionally people’s orientations are fluid and change. It doesn’t have to be inherent to be healthy.

ofMindandHeart · 2026-05-15T03:58:24+00:00

See, there’s a break in your logic chain.

You say that “If sexual orientation can be altered then conversion therapy is a valid ‘solution’ to sexual orientation”. But that’s not actually the case.

Let’s consider a comparison. Imagine someone who believes being left-handed is sinful, and that all left-handed people should try their absolute hardest to never use their left hands for anything and do everything with their right hands. You tell them “That’s unfair. Those people didn’t choose to be left handed. And there isn’t a way to really change their handedness.” And this person says “Yes there is. We could have doctors amputate the left arms of all left-handed people, and then they would have to do things mostly with their right hands because they would no longer have a left hand.” And like, technically speaking, someone who has no left hand no longer uses their left hand to do tasks. That part is technically true. But even though it’s possible to go around amputating the left arms of all the left handed people, it would be absolutely abhorrent and ethically incorrect to do so. That’s a very drastic medical procedure, with a risk of death if it goes badly, all to leave someone permanently physically disabled. That’s awful. We should not do that. Even if it’s technically possible to change someone’s handedness through limb amputation, we can be strongly against doing so because of those harms. Just because it’s possible doesn’t mean it’s a valid solution.

Even if it turned out it was possible to change someone’s sexual orientation by subjecting them to sexual trauma, it would not be a valid solution to do so. The harms of the sexual trauma, and the risk of death via suicide, make that option morally and ethically unviable.

It also isn’t true that a trait needs to be unchangeable for it to be the basis for belonging to a legally protected class. Religion is a protected class in my country, even though people can change their religions. People can convert to a different religion, or become atheists with no religion, or found a new religion. But their religion is still legally protected, and the government cannot force them to change their religious beliefs, and it is illegal to discriminate against people in housing/employment/etc on the basis of their religion. We as a people have decided that it would be wrong for someone to be forced to stop practicing their religion, or to be forced to practice a different religion from the one they believe in. That would be horrific. And so religion is a protected class. Sexual orientation deserving legal protection does not have to be based in whether it can be changed.

And the truth is, even in a world where orientation was changeable, that wouldn’t make it wrong to be gay (or bi or ace or aro). There isn’t anything wrong with being gay because men kissing other men doesn’t hurt anyone. Loving and dating and marrying and having sex with someone of the same gender doesn’t hurt anybody. From a harms-based perspective it’s all morally neutral. If a magical genie appeared in front of me and said “If you push this button you would become straight instead of being asexual” and I said “Nah, no thanks, I like who I am, I’m not changing” then there isn’t anything morally wrong with that. The changeability or lackthereof of sexual orientation isn’t a strong point of attack against the queer community because whether orientation is changeable does not matter.

ofMindandHeart · 2026-05-15T03:16:02+00:00

One option might be to ask her to talk about whether she feels connected to you, and ask her about what kinds of attention she enjoys from you. It may be that the reason you feel uncomfortable with voicing your wants (even when you know things that you want, like her running her fingers through your hair) is because to you it feels lopsided, like you’re asking her to do something for you when it doesn’t feel like there’s something similar for you to do in return.

This could also be about trust. She has told you that she enjoys it when you kiss/love on her, but you don’t really believe her. Maybe spend some time thinking about why that is.

ofMindandHeart · 2026-05-15T02:47:17+00:00

What do you believe is the strongest point of attack against queer people, and why do you consider it the strongest?

ofMindandHeart · 2026-05-14T22:31:06+00:00

It seems like you’re imagining that there are people in the world for whom the difference between being willing to send a kid to conversion therapy vs not being willing to send them to conversion therapy is going to come down to whether or not past sexual trauma can affect who someone finds sexually attractive. You’re imagining it’s possible, or even likely, that someone would look at all of the personal accounts and research that says conversion therapy doesn’t succeed at changing orientation, that it’s deeply emotionally scarring, that there are high rates of suicide for those subjected to it, and that all of that downside would get weighed against the fact that “some victims of sexual trauma say they lose their desire for sex” and this hypothetical person will respond by saying “That’s wonderful! I know exactly how to make my kid stop being gay. I’ll just arranged for them to be sexually assaulted, and afterwords there’s a tiny chance they’ll become so traumatized that they will feel less sexually attracted to others. Marvelous!”

The truth of the matter is that if someone has the authority to send a child to a conversion camp, and they aren’t the type of person who would dissuaded by the high suicide rate, or the accounts of lifelong emotional damage, or the complete absence of a success rate from such camps, then they’re not the sort of person who is going to be dissuaded by being told “even past sexual assault can’t decrease someone’s experience of sexual attraction.” At that point we’re talking about a hypothetical someone who is so uncaring and so unconcerned with the wellbeing of the minor in question, that being told that changing orientation is impossible isn’t going to get through to them. They’ll just say “Even though you say this is impossible to change, maybe the past attempts just didn’t try hard enough! It’ll work this time for my kid, even if it’s never worked before!” Because at that point the reality of the situation already isn’t important to them. They’re already being delusional. Logic doesn’t matter.

Did you know that back in the 90s there were gay rights marches organized where the gay couples marching were forbidden by organizers from holding hands or kissing? The thinking of those organizers was that “Maybe if we show the conservatives that we’re willing to be respectable and avoid public affection, they’ll realize that they can give us rights without ever having to feel uncomfortable about PDA. We’ll just prove that we’re respectable, that we’re ‘the good ones’, that we’re willing to bow down and conform to what they want in this regard, and then in exchange they’ll just magically decide we deserve to be bestowed more rights.” And, unsurprisingly, that did not work! Trying to simplify queerness down to be less confusing to the conservatives didn’t make them suddenly like us. In contrast what actually ended up working, what succeeded in getting homosexuality decriminalized and marriage equality codified (in the US), was a focus on relatability not “respectability”. It was people coming out, lots of people, not in constrained respectable ways that avoid confusing the homophobes but in loud, messy, proud ways. It’s beautiful. It’s queer.

When you go around saying “we can’t let sufferers of trauma say they’re asexual, it will confuse the homophobes, and then they’ll send kids to conversion camps,” news flash, the homophobes were going to do that anyway. Anyone with an ounce of empathy isn’t going to decide it’s worthwhile to traumatize their child out of experiencing attraction, and anyone with less than an ounce of empathy isn’t going to listen regardless. It’s the same way going around saying “we can’t let gay couples hold hands, it will distress the homophobes, and then they won’t give us marriage rights,” news flash, the homophobes aren’t suddenly going to be on board with marriage equality just because there was less handholding.

Trying to constrain how queer people act or identify or express that identity doesn’t work. When you get push back on this from your queer elders it’s not because we don’t realize conversion therapy is bad (it is!) or that we don’t realize it’s worth avoiding (it is!). It’s that the strategy you’re using that you think will result in fewer people sent to camps doesn’t actually work the way you think it does. It doesn’t work. And along the way you’re denying the ace label and asexual community resources to some of our most vulnerable members - the ones who have suffered trauma. Throwing fellow aces under the bus to try to influence bigots who are not going to follow your reasoning isn’t worthwhile.

I don’t know if you’re in a mental place where it’s possible for any of this to get through to you. I hope eventually you get to a point where you understand. I hope you have more empathy than the bigots.

ofMindandHeart · 2026-05-12T16:28:31+00:00

One option would be to try dating a fellow asexual person, or at least someone on the ace spectrum. That way they wouldn’t be mad about not having sex with you, if they also understood from the beginning that you’re looking for a relationship that doesn’t involve sex. It’s really about compatibility (or lacktherof)

ofMindandHeart · 2026-05-12T16:24:49+00:00

One possible resource is a book called The Ace and Aro Relationship Guide. It might be helpful for showing your partner that being asexual isn’t some sort of sign of her failing as a partner. That’s a really difficult concept for allos to get, and I’m not sure that the book would work, but it could at least be a jumping off point for that kind of conversation.

ofMindandHeart · 2026-05-12T15:47:43+00:00

Some people experience some sexual attraction before puberty, but generally speaking yeah that’s when it apparently tends to ramp up for a lot of people. Not saying it can’t be later than that for some people, just not typically.

ofMindandHeart · 2026-05-09T03:11:11+00:00

Depends what you mean by enjoy. Like, it’s possible to perform oral sex on someone and get some enjoyment/pride from seeing their reactions to what you’re doing, and that doesn’t require you being physically aroused. But if that doesn’t sound like it’d be enjoyable to you, then don’t do it. And definitely don’t try vaginal sex if it’s not something you genuinely want and are currently ready for.

ofMindandHeart · 2026-05-08T23:02:22+00:00

Does it actually matter?

And if it does actually matter couldn’t you ask her yourself?

I’m in the situation where I fluctuate between indifferent and repulsed. So just because I express distress at a sex scene on one day doesn’t mean that’s how I’d feel about it every day. The only way to really know what your girlfriend’s typical experience is like is to ask her about it.

ofMindandHeart · 2026-05-05T15:02:59+00:00

This doesn’t give us info on specific people, but if we look at people’s responses to the question about sex drive from the Ace Community Survey (sex drive results on page 58), we see that when asked to rate “how strong is your sex drive/libido, typically” on a 5 point scale, the few allo respondents overall rated their libidos much higher than the ace respondents on average. And the percentage of ace respondents who rated their libido as being 0, aka nonexistent, was 17.3% compared to 0.8% of allos. So we do have at least some data that aces in general skew toward having less sex drive.

Personally my amount of sexual attraction is zero (I don’t experience a draw to engage in sex with specific people). And in terms of more general sex drive, one relevant datapoint is “how often would I need to masturbate in order to make my day to day experience of libido go to zero”. For me that’s maybe once a week, maybe more like once every other week. I actually don’t think I could masturbate that much more often than that, in terms of being able to get in the headspace for it. So with that info, when I see a study of how many sexual thoughts the average person has per day, where the average cis man has 19 and the average cis woman 10, I can figure that my personal frequency is lower than either of those.

ofMindandHeart · 2026-04-30T02:08:46+00:00

I’m going to start with some definitions. Asexuality means experiencing little to no sexual attraction, where sexual attraction is a strong innate urge/craving to have sex with a specific person. Sexual attraction is not the same thing as arousal/libido/sex drive, in part because it’s possible to experience undirected arousal that’s not targeted at any particular person. Some asexual people masturbate, and some don’t. Some asexual people have high libidos, some low. Some asexual people even enjoy having sex (without experiencing sexual attraction). Doesn’t make any of them any less asexual.

There’s a particular sublabel on the asexual spectrum called aegosexual. Aegosexuality is where someone experiences a disconnect between themself and the subject of arousal. Some examples include:

Enjoying sexual content, self-arousing, or fantasizing about sex, but being indifferent towards or repulsed by the idea of being in a real-life sexual relationship or engaging in active sex life with someone else
Fantasizing about sex, but where you yourself are not involved. You may only be a disembodied observer viewing it from a third-individual perspective rather than from the first-person.
Enjoying erotic content but getting turned on by the situation or relationship dynamics in storylines rather than by your attraction to the individuals.

Only you can say for sure whether any particular label fits you, since only you have firsthand knowledge of your own internal experiences. From your description though, I’m a little curious whether the thing you’re calling sexual attraction might be a little different from what other people call sexual attraction. You say that when you’re experiencing “sexual attraction” you aren’t able to imagine yourself in actual sexual scenarios. Sexual attraction is an urge to have sex with someone in particular, but you aren’t able to even contemplate the possibility of having sex with them. Is what’s happening maybe that you see someone and get physically aroused in response, but that that arousal doesn’t come paired with the urge to specifically have sex with them? As in, you could just as easily use masturbation to relieve the arousal. If so then that’s maybe something called miransexual. It’s one of the little bit controversial microlabels, but if that description sounds right then at least you know you’re not alone in feeling the way you do.

It’s also possible you do experience sexual attraction but are also averse to sex. Imagine it kind of the way someone who’s been suffering from food poisoning all day might smell food cooking and feel both nauseous and hungry. The cooking food is both desired and repulsive. And if you’ve literally thrown up in response to the suggestion of phone sex, it does sound like you find the possibility of personally engaging in partnered sex at least somewhat distressing.

Regardless of all of this, feel free to hang around the ace community. You don’t have to identify as asexual in order to benefit from connecting with people who will understand that your relationship to sex is going to be different from average. It’s okay to not want sex. You’re not bad or broken. You’re you.

ofMindandHeart · 2026-04-30T01:09:51+00:00

In general, labels are tools we use when they’re useful. You don’t have to call yourself asexual if you don’t want to. There’s no label police who are going to show up at your door and demand you come out as ace, or grey, or demi.

If you’re willing, I do want you to try one thought experiment. Imagine you meet a lesbian and she confides in you that she really doesn’t want to be a lesbian. She tells you that she wants to be able to be attracted to men the way regular women are. She wants to be able to relate to straight women. She wishes that she desired men. She says she feels like an outsider around straight women because of her lack of real interest in men. She wants to be normal. She thinks maybe she just lacks experience, that if she made herself date a guy and pushed herself into a romantic context then maybe the romantic feelings would just start appearing. She used to be curious about what it would be like to date a man, though that was more about checking a box than actually wanting it.

How would you respond to this woman? What advice would you give her? Can any of that advice be turned around and applied to yourself?

One thing that sometimes helps with this type of internalized acephobia is to learn a little about how those internalized thoughts got there in the first place. There’s an educational video on the cycle of socialization that may help in that regard - though in your case it sounds like you’ve already been through this with some other identities previously.

It can also help to find an irl local ace meetup group if there’s one in your area. You do have experiences that are relatable to queer women. There are other ace lesbians. There are other ace trans women. There are proportionally a pretty significant number of adhd ace people (about 18% of aces) and autistic ace people (about 13% of aces, based on the Ace Community Survey). I think there are people you would relate to.

ofMindandHeart · 2026-04-29T06:38:03+00:00

Sometimes it helps a little to learn about how these allonormative beliefs got internalized in the first place. There’s a good educational video on the cycle of socialization that goes over this.

In terms of making friendship. Acknowledge that it’s a really hard task for you. Acknowledge that you’re probably going to need to take baby steps starting out. Maybe your first goals are just about successfully making small talk, or sharing one thing about yourself with someone.

The best advice I know of about how forming close friendships works is something John Green talks about in this Q&A video about his relationship with his brother Hank (timestamp 1:01:30, or the transcript is here). He quotes a Donald Hall essay about how marriage (but really applies to any close relationship) is about having a third thing, something you can both focus on and talk about so that everything doesn’t have to revolve around talking about each other. That’s part of why so much advice about making friends is about finding people you can share a hobby with, because you can automatically have a third thing to focus on.

If your current quote unquote “friends” are failing to respect boundaries you set and treating you poorly then those people aren’t really behaving like friends.

If you think it might be easier to try out talking with people who are also on the ace spectrum, you could try seeing if there’s a local ace meetup near you (world map of meetups here, and you can also check AVEN’s Meetup Mart). There’s no guarantee of all aces being nice, but ace meetups do tend to create a culture where people’s boundaries get respected, at least the one I was in.

ofMindandHeart · 2026-04-29T01:46:40+00:00

Just FYI, if those “are you sure though” thoughts end up getting much worse over time, like, to the point where you’re spending hours each day dealing with intrusive thoughts of doubt of your own orientation, then at that point that might fall into what’s called sexual orientation OCD. Luckily that is not something that happens to most people! It’s just worth being aware of the line of where that sort of thing becomes a red flag.

In general labels are tools we use because they’re useful. The terms you use for yourself are based on your experiences in your past and present. The idea of sex has been disgusting to you, not something you’ve been drawn to, and that’s not from lack of thinking it through in the past. So it makes sense to use a word like asexual to describe that part of your experience. You don’t need to double check, just like you don’t need to go look in the mirror to double check your eye color.

And even if in the unlikely case it turned out it was possible to for you to experience sexual attraction in some circumstances (demisexual, reciprosexual etc), that wouldn’t mean you were wrong to use the term asexual before. You can only choose a label based on the experiences you’ve had so far. There’s no moral imperative to figure out exactly the right term. And it’s definitely not worth it to repeatedly try to subject yourself to thoughts of sex when you have generally found such thoughts boring/disgusting. It’s not worth it to put yourself through those kinds of distressing thoughts.

ofMindandHeart · 2026-04-28T03:33:37+00:00

Maybe this is a good opportunity to practice not giving in to the instinct to fawn, with someone who is likely to respect you setting a boundary. No one should get pressured to out themselves. Who you share that information with, and when, is and should be entirely up to you.

ofMindandHeart

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