fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #5788 ]

[ SECRET POST #5788 ]

⌈ Secret Post #5788 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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I'm starting to wonder if I'm asexual. It's very rare for me to feel sexual attraction to someone IRL (really only once). In fantasy (say fic) it's quite different and I am multi fandom person never one fandom with its characters is never enough. Anyway. Finally kissed someone for the first time and all I could think was how strange it was. Can't tell if it's just weird because I've never experienced it before or if I just could do without humans in this sense.

Only you can answer whether you are or are not asexual; it means different things to different people. As far as your first kiss goes, well, it was your first kiss and first kisses often suck so it’s hard to gage anything based on just that.

I think people experience things differently. I am ace, but both sex or first kiss were just "ok this is interesting moving on" for me. And a lot of allos find kissing a bit strange. The main thing is attraction. If you don't feel attraction or feel it with a lot of buts you are probably ace. But it's for you to decide.

I've routinely gone back and forth on identifying myself as either ace or queer. I agree with the upthread comments that it's up to you on whether or not you think you are Ace. IMO the only right answer is what you feel is foe you. It's a lifelong journey, I hope you don't feel like you have to know your queerness levels in absolutes.

I never had strong attraction towards people outside of high school where I developed schoolgirl crushes on a couple guys. As an adult looking back, I think it was the idea of "all the girls/women in my life find a guy they like and work towards getting him to ask her out" so that I would find a guy I thought was cute and talked to me rather easily and convince myself, "I want this guy to like me enough to ask me out on a date." But you know, honestly, I never really cared deeply about them nor if they thought about me with romantic lenses. I think I just did what I thought was supposed to be what girls do.

After high school, I just....never wanted to date. When my friends would find dates/new partners all I got out of it was "I'm going to see less of this friend, and our time together is shared now with their partner."
I never thought, "I want a partner in my life." "Why does no one find me attractive?" "How come I can't get anyone to flirt with me?"

Like, I was never too bothered about "putting myself out there". When I ask myself if I want to date I generally think, "I'd rather do something else."

Sexual attraction to people IRL has never really been a thing. The closest I ever got was wondering what it would feel like to kiss a guy I had a crush on when I was 17.
But in recent years (last 2~ yrs), I've been able to push past some personal stuff (long story) and I'm able to watch people and find beauty in the human body. My thing with men was a fear of men and the patriarchy at large, women was shame from my own body/general shame of being a woman in a patriarchal world.
But it's very much controlled situations for me. Porn videos/movies, erotica novels/fanfics, audio erotica/porn, movies with a lot of romance and/or nudity. An actual human in the flesh with or without touch is way too intense and gross for me.

So I know there are still a lot of things I have to work on before I "know" if I'm Ace or a queer person working through their shit.

You're fine as you are, keep asking yourself questions and be as honest as possible. Not knowing is a part of the journey. Best wishes OP.

Oh... feels like I could've typed this. I am not as concerned about my "identity label" though, what really concerns me at this point in my life is how unpractical and inconvenient the single-ace-woman-past-30 life is. No one to share the bills with. No one to rely on a hospital night. No one to travel with. No one to share the chores with. No one to give me a car ride (my wettest dream).

Really I wouldn't "fight" for the ace identity. If I didn't feel strongly, I wouldn't be eager to use it because... yeah. It's not that good.

Kisses are often awkward, first kisses even more so. But being aro =/= being ace so do check that out.
Some ace people enjoy fics and erotica while others don't.
If you don't feel much sexual attraction, you could be gray- or demi-a too.
Gotta agree with the above anon and say, take your time.

Basically just seconding what everyone else is saying. Nobody else can (or has any business) telling you whether you're ace or not. It's one of those things where it's entirely up to you and your understanding of yourself, and what you want to identify as, and what feels right. And there's no rush to figure it out. Also, it's not like you're stuck with a label forever once you use it, you know? Like, I think there's a really strong desire to avoid changing our chosen labels, because nobody wants to seem like they're validating the "it's just a phase/you're just confused" rhetoric that we still hear so much of. But the bottom line is, fuck that rhetoric, identify however feels best for you at the time and revise it if you need to. It's totally normal for one's own understanding of these things to change and develop over time.

I've identified as asexual since I was fifteen--back when there was almost zero public information about asexuality and 95% of people probably thought it was something I was making up for funsies. But despite having felt strongly that I was ace from a young age, there was a couple of years in my early twenties where I actually stopped identifying as asexual, because I didn't understand how I could be asexual when I loved smut so much. Then an entire book about asexuality was published (possibly the first of its kind), and in it the author coined the term "autochorissexuality" which described people like me who felt no desire to personally engage in sexual activities with others, but who enjoyed things like smut and/or pornography where we could vicariously experience sexuality through the characters without having to project ourselves into it in any way. I was like, "Wow that's me exactly," and immediately went back to identifying as asexual, because I'd been shown that there were other ace people whose asexuality was like mine, and it didn't make us not asexual. (In recent years the ace community has largely switched to using the term "aegosexual" in place of the original "autochorissexual", just FYI, in case any of this clicks with you and you feel like looking into it more.)

As for having crushes as an asexual, that's super complicated, because like, some ace people are also aromantic but others aren't. So one could have a romantic crush on someone but still not be sexually attracted to them. And if you're a romantic asexual who isn't sex-repulsed, then it's possible that you might even want to have sex with your crush, simply because you want to give them pleasure because you like them romantically. It's also quite common for young ace people to have a difficult time differentiating between what they genuinely want, and what they want to want because society tells them it's what they should want.

I'm aro and also somewhat sex-repulsed, so I'm not at all a good source of insight on what it's like to be romantic ace or sex-neutral ace, but I definitely spent a lot of my teen years feeling conflicted because even though I actively identified as asexual, it didn't feel like a valid sexual identity, and I was constantly trying to find some attraction in myself for somebody, so that I could just have a crush and be "normal." There are a couple of guys who, to this day, I genuinely don't know whether I had a little bit of a crush on them, or if I'd just worked myself up to believing that I did because they were the best candidates and I wanted so badly to be feeling and doing the same things everybody else was.

(Another ace anon) wow, this was so detailed and well-explained.

AYRT's question made me think back on it, and I definitely had (very passionate) crushes growing up but I just feel like the nature of it wasn't quite the same as an allo's. If asked whether I would like to date them or not, I would be like "if they want to, that's nice!". Because I was happy to be liked by whom I liked but it really wasn't the end-all for me, far from it. And if they only wanted sex because they found me attractive, even though I should probably be flattered, I would have been sad or even "offended" not because they're calling me a whore or whatever but because that's not what I wanted at all so I would feel misunderstood. To put it shortly I wouldn't feel "offended" by being friendzoned, for instance. And I definitely experienced intense squishes too.

So, not at all incapable of feeling... anything for other people (if anything, I feel too much) but it was never romantic or sexual in essence, though it's hard to describe how I know it, like, telling my friends about my crushes they'd be like "and then what?" but it's the end of the story and it was as good as any to me .. That, and being legitimately uninterested in other people's stories of sexual encounters unlike the rest of your same-aged friends (both at school and online, which made me realize "wait... something is off and maybe I am not just Super Slow").

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[ SECRET POST #5788 ]

Any ace people out here?

Re: Any ace people out here?

Re: Any ace people out here?

Re: Any ace people out here?

NAYRT

Re: Any ace people out here?

Re: Any ace people out here?

Re: Any ace people out here?