aeosdiary

[aeosdiary]

found this on my dash

What? Really!? Nooooo... science is amazing, I mean... I had no idea anxiety could make reading emotions hard... this is so enlightening!

[aeosdiary]

Asexuality and Me

I would like to tell a story about my life. I was born and raised in a conservative Christian household. Immediately, you might be thinking, “oh you poor, tortured soul.” But I don’t feel that way. There are a lot of beautiful things about my religion and upbringing that gave me a firm foundation for how I see the world. I was first introduced to my system of morality through my religion. I learned that it is bad to hurt other people. It is bad to hate. It is good to sacrifice your own needs for the needs of someone else. I was taught that God loves all His children, and that he created humans and saw that they were good. I learned that people still have the power to make bad decisions, because they were given the ability to make choices. Choosing to do the right thing is why humans are special. And I love my religion for the God that decided to become human, and die for the love of humanity. That is beautiful to me.  But I also learned, based on what appears to be rather explicit Biblical passages, that the ‘sexually divergent’ will not inherit the kingdom of God. And for a long time in my life, I just accepted it. Until I began to wonder. When a man loves a man, is he hurting anybody? Is he causing hatred or pain? When I start wondering if something got lost in translation, or that maybe we have been misinterpreting those Biblical passages all along, I always got the same answer: “it’s pretty explicit, God says so right here.” If I say, “but what about an alternative interpretation, based on the original Greek passages?” I am told, “scripture is flawless, we are definitely reading it right, doubt your doubts.”  Something just doesn’t add up to me. A man can’t love a man because God said so? But that gay guy is not hurting anybody! What if we’ve been completely misinterpreting that passage? Anybody and everybody can take Scripture out of context. How do we know we’re not doing it, and haven’t been doing it this whole time? 

I also had to sit down and examine myself.  I am married, and I do not want to have sex. I do not have a sex drive. When I look at his body, I feel nothing. When I look at anybody’s body, I feel nothing. I have a clinical appreciation of the human form, nothing more. When I realized I might be asexual, it gave me a rush of fear and anxiety. Because throughout my life, I have been told that sex is a gift from God, that I owe it to my spouse if I want a happy marriage, that men are biologically wired to want sex, and if I do not give him pleasure whenever I can then I am selfish. I have been told that if I don’t want sex, then maybe I don’t actually love him.  How dare somebody say I don’t actually love the man I married? When I think about love and romance and sexuality, I wonder why we are told that God will punish those that don’t fit the biological norm. The same God that apparently forgives the sins of the repentant and loves His children.  When I die and stand before God and look Him in the eyes, all I will be able to do is spread out my arms and say “I really tried. I just wanted to love people in the way I love them. If I did it wrong, please forgive me.” And what kind of God- what kind of Father- would look at me and say, “you didn’t try hard enough?”  If that’s what God is going to do to every gay, lesbian, bisexual, pansexual, transexual, non-binary, asexual, agendered and any other type of person that walks up to the ‘pearly gates’, I’m not sure it’s a God worth worshiping anymore. And that scares me.