asexual2019 - Tumblr blog

[asexual2019]

A Story of Asexuality and Recovery from Resentment

After reading other stories, I felt a strong desire to contribute a narrative about my own experience with asexuality, partly just for self-expression and partly to aid in the visibility of different types of asexuality and the different social and psychological effects people can experience from it.

My Sexual Orientation

My own asexuality is not absolute and not apparently the most common kind, as far as I can tell.  I would probably identify as something like 95% or 98% asexual.  While predominantly I experience no physical attraction to others, I think in a very weak way I’m capable of experiencing it—just extremely rarely.  I mean this in a few ways.  First, and most simply, I’ve been attracted to extremely few people in my life; genuine physical attraction of any kind, beyond a fleeting feeling of being impressed by someone’s objective attractiveness, has happened to me only a handful of times in my entire life.  Second, there have been only a few periods in my life where I experience any sort of physical attraction at all; it seems to come in waves.  To make this concrete, there have been only three or four periods of more than a month in my life where I could consistently feel any sort of attraction to people; I have no idea what caused those three or four periods to be any different from the rest of my life, but I experience it as a weak kind of sexual-orientation fluidity. My attractions have not ordinarily been consistent or durable enough for me to act on them.  (This part of my experience could possibly sound like a medical issue, but partly out of curiosity and partly to address an unrelated minor medical concern, I’ve ruled out that it’s anything that modern medical science understands—for example, with hormonal testing at the Mayo Clinic.)  Third—and the hardest thing for me to figure out and for others to understand when I explain it, mainly because simple vocabulary in English is not clear on this point—I don’t believe the scattered physical attractions I’ve experienced are “sexual.”  Though they can lead to arousal or fantasies, they don’t result in a desire for me, personally, to have sex with the person that I’ve experienced the attraction toward.  (Some have called this aegosexuality, anegosexuality, or autochorissexuality—three terms for the same distinction, so far as I can tell, between conceptual arousal and the desire to have sex with the person who inspires the arousal.)  The best way to explain it is that I can (rarely) be drawn in some weak but nonnegligible way toward the idea of sex, but not toward sex itself.  

To people who haven’t experienced it, this last characteristic may be hard to understand, but it appears not to be uncommon in the asexual community.  And I have a pet theory, based on reports from people I know, that it’s actually not that uncommon even among conventionally sexual people and that a fair number of people seem to have sex more because of social (or other) pressures than because of an internal desire for sex.

Anyway, that’s how I perceive my sexual orientation.  I’ll talk about any possible romantic desires later.

Social and Psychological Effects

I’ve recently gotten interested in exploring the effects of social pressures on asexual people, possible to increase empathy among the different parts of the LGBTQ+ community and partly just out of curiosity.  So I thought describing the problems that it’s caused for me socially and psychologically might be interesting or maybe even helpful to others who face various types of pressure.  As background, I should say that in pretty much every other way, I’m extremely privileged. I’m a cisgender, white man.  I have an exceptionally good professional career, in a supportive and positive environment, in which I’ve been very successful and have been able to help many people.  (Because of how personal some of this narrative is, I don’t want to disclose too much about the specifics of my professional life, but you can picture me as something like the head of a good think-tank.)  I’m rich; I’m in something like the top 0.1% by wealth.  I’m respected in my local and national professional communities, and while in most groups I haven’t come out publicly as asexual in any explicit way, it’s not a secret to my friends and colleagues.  It’s important to point out that I don’t say any of this specifically to emphasize career or money; I don’t think either is as important as most people seem to. But I do think it’s important to add to visibility about how significant discrimination and pressures against LGBTQ+ people can be, in emotional and personal terms, even when those people are extremely privileged in other ways.  It’s very nearly accurate to say that the only big problems in my life so far have stemmed from asexuality in one way or another. I realize how lucky I am for that while at the same time recognizing how significant those problems have been.

There are basically two problems that I’ve worked through over the years and understand far better today than I did in the past.  First, most basically, my sexual and romantic orientation makes an affectionate, companionate personal relationship extremely difficult and unlikely for me.  Much of the time, this doesn’t bother me; I’m busy and pretty independent (and the nature of my career is very social in the sense that it involves working with a lot of other people, so I’m rarely isolated), and in those periods I don’t perceive anything missing from my life.  In fact, in some conventional sense, particularly for large periods of my life, I very easily identify as “aromantic”:  I don’t flirt and never learned how to do it, don’t have the impulse or experience to do conventionally romantic things, don’t usually desire a conventionally romantic relationship, and so on.  But I love human interactions and certainly have the capacity to feel lonely on a personal level.  And particularly in some periods in my life, I have craved companionship and closeness but have never seen any way to have a lasting “relationship.”  To elaborate on that, with attractions and a desire for companionship that are never durable (that is, stable over time), I don’t see it as even fair to another person to begin what’s supposed to be an ordinary relationship, even in the periods of my life where I crave it and where I wouldn’t mind the sex.  That drive to companionship, and that tolerance for sex, have always ended abruptly for me, in a way that I can’t control—usually within a few weeks, and even in the longest cases in less than a year.  You can think of this almost like an extreme, intrinsic aversion to commitment in a relationship, but’s not the commitment itself I’m afraid of; instead, it feels like a straight man marrying a women knowing that, while he’s at least within the (distant) realm of being straight at the time of marriage, he’s likely to become gay within a few weeks (or vice versa).  That’s how fluid I am between (weak) attraction and the complete absence of it, with the complete absence being far more common throughout my life.

So at times that’s a pretty big disappointment, because I feel like I’m missing out on something that I could understand and grow with if I had the opportunity.  I’m 42 but have had maybe a total of four adult years, scattered throughout my adult life, where I had a strong desire for companionship. But with attractions (and romantic desires) that are never durable and without a drive toward sexual interaction, I don’t see how a meaningful relationship could work.  I’ve more or less learned to accept that as simply bad luck.  Maybe I just really want very close friends, but the world doesn’t feel like it’s set up well for the closeness I want without romantic attachment.

The second major problem resulted from my first attempt to come out as asexual when I was 21 or 22. The first time I consciously realized I was asexual was shortly after college.  Before then, sex wasn’t even really something I thought about in any way that applied to myself.  Through high school, I imagined it was perhaps something that would become more important to me as I got older, much as I did when I was a child; the people I knew who had sex at younger ages were unlike me in other ways (for example, most of them were also drawn to illegal drugs and to less-safe sex), so I didn’t feel any meaningful pressure to be sexual in high school.  I don’t mean that as a judgment of those other people, just that I saw it as “That’s what they like to do, and I like other things and am different in other ways.”  In college, I processed it as simply not being attracted to anyone; of the handful of lifetime attractions I’ve had, no more than one or two were people I knew in college, and those attractions were particularly fleeting and led to no hint of desire for sex.  (The best way I can explain that is that they might feel similar to a sort of very passing interest that an open-minded straight man might have for a man, or that an open-minded gay man would have for a woman.  They didn’t cause me to want to act on them, distress me, or make much of an impact in any way.)

But when I was 21 or 22, I realized consciously that I was different. The initial recognition caused me a little concern, but it was nothing distressing or urgent.  I had always been pretty resilient, curious, and even-tempered, and I processed it the way I would deal with anything else. The concern wasn’t even particularly about sex; I accepted my own lack of sexual desire and experience of sexual attraction rather easily at first.  Instead, my main concern was about the pressures from others that I was beginning to feel—essentially just a growing fear of exclusion and disrespect. To address these and seek a positive recognition of what I had just started to think of and understand as an identity, I turned to a close friend who had presented himself, in general, as very open-minded about sexuality and had claimed to support gay and lesbian friends in the past.  I think that in planning to “come out” as asexual to this friend, I was looking for reassurance and respect.  I was a little older than him and had been helpful to him educationally and professionally, and that plus his claimed open-mindedness made it feel like a safe environment.  I think I was also especially looking for close friendship at that time, perhaps more than I had usually done on purpose earlier in my life, because I had come to realize that that was probably the only sort of close personal human interaction that I was wired for.

Instead, I was met with the most surprising and hurtful scorn and exclusion in my life. My friend’s reaction to just my initial revelation that I hadn’t ever dated and had never had sex at age 22 was itself so negative that I didn’t even have the emotional courage to progress beyond it toward a discussion of what I perceived as my innate asexuality in the first place.  In other words, I had planned to “come out” but, because of the harsh reaction to even the buildup to it, failed to get that far.  The scorn came in three different ways, all of which were more painful than anything else I’d ever experienced.  First, there was just outright shock, disrespect, and the inability to empathize; my friend claimed that my lack of history of dating through college, on its own, was “bizarre,” that I was “repressed,” and that it all would be a significant barrier to my ever being happy. Second, there was a kind of social exclusion; this wasn’t immediate, but as I sought further reassurances from this friend shortly afterwards, he told me that I’d never understand him because of my lack of dating and sexual history, and that we could never be “absolute” friends (his word) in the future because of it.  Third, there was almost a sort of comparative or competitive belittlement; my friend started drawing distinctions between us on a variety of dimensions, all of which played himself up (mainly sexually and physically) and diminished me.  I felt as if I’d become a joke to him.

My reaction to this is hard to explain rationally, or even in terms of healthy mental functioning. A decent reaction would have been to consider my friend hurtful but immature and to ignore his views.  An understandable harsher reaction would have been to cut him off entirely.  For some reason, I was unable to do either.  Instead, my reaction was uncharacteristically harmful and led me to behave very badly toward this friend and toward myself.  Today, I consider my reaction not to be a mentally healthy one; it led to a sort of resentful obsession for an inexplicably long period (10 or 11 years end to end, with only intermittent effects—but still!).  It also led me, as I describe below, to deny my asexuality for just as long, including to myself.

German psychologist Michael Linden discovered about 20 years ago that reactions like this—longer-term than they should be and obsessive in nature, characterized by feelings of injustice but also weakness and helplessness in response to a personally traumatic social event, and focused on that specific harmful event and the person who caused the harm—are actually quite common (affecting 2-3% of the population).  He called it “post-traumatic embitterment disorder” in English (you can find his academic articles under that name, and there’s a mediocre Wikipedia page about it), but a more explanatory English name for it might have been “social post-traumatic focused-resentment syndrome.” He’s had remarkable success in defining and treating it in the last 15 years. I don’t know if I suffered from “PTED” literally and clinically or not, but I definitely had some echo of it or some similar reaction, and it caused me to react very badly in a variety of ways. 

As a partial explanation for this unusual fragility, at the time I tried to come out to my friend, I was in a time of transition myself, having just graduated from college, and had just realized I was “different” in terms of sexual and romantic orientation and interest.  I had come specifically to value friendship as the closest interaction I thought I could have. I had, as I described earlier, considerable success and self-respect in other areas, and perhaps because of that I had little experience with being sharply scorned or disrespected.  My friend’s reaction was shattering to me.  As I said, I couldn’t even complete my attempt to come out.  What followed was an almost obsessive and extremely unhealthy attempt to regain the friend’s respect by forcing myself to try to be more sexual.  I mostly did this because I didn’t feel I could “admit” to him or others, after his initial reaction, that I was asexual, and because of my reaction to this rejection I stopped even admitting it to myself.  I also perceived a very heavy social stigma against it, magnified perhaps beyond the actual stigma.  And when in a moment of strength I tried tentatively to come out as asexual again, a few months later—along the lines of “Well, maybe I just don’t date because I have other priorities and don’t need it as much as you” and “Why couldn’t I just desire it less than other people?”—he told me I’d “snap” one day if I wasn’t sexual.  It all led me to a very unhealthy and destructive anger and resentment, along with feelings of injustice, envy (at the simplicity I imagined he experienced in his straight male life), and helplessness, focused specifically on this friend.

It’s hard in retrospect to see how it could take me a decade to get over this.  Possible partial explanations are that I didn’t know what it was and didn’t know how to seek treatment or to address it properly.  I had never experienced anything like it before.  Also, because of the stigma I perceived toward asexuality (some of which is of course real), I wasn’t clear on avenues to get help.  And certain things my friend had said undermined other people’s more helpful advice; he had hammered in, and for some reason I believed him, that he was being more honest than other friends who were actually being supportive to me.  According to him, only he was telling me the harsh truth; only he was sufficiently emotionally aware to give good advice; he was the only one who cared.  That I accepted all this and let it affect me for so long is, again, hard to explain in retrospect, particularly for someone who ordinarily isn’t naive or self-destructive.

As a result of all this, my friend became partly evil in my eyes. It was mainly the belittlement and exclusion I dwelt on:  "We can't be complete friends because there are things I'll never want to talk you about, given that you have no history of dating.  That's bizarre and you should realize how much of a problem it is and that nobody in my whole social circle knows anyone even slightly like that.  You will 'snap' one day if you don't become more sexual.  You are insecure and repressed, and if you don't believe that then you're lying to yourself.  Your friends who are telling you you're okay don't care about you and would just as soon let it drop rather than help you."  I couldn't let go of his physical/sexual comparisons between us either, along lines like, "I suppose I have much more of what women want than you do, so I can't exactly relate. I've always had 'fan clubs' of girls. It's going to be much harder for you, and you have a very late start too."  As I started to deny my asexuality again, those comparisons (which today I interpret just as routine young-male bravado) started to sting. Even though I understand today that his original reaction to my attempt to describe myself as asexual was mainly immature and ignorant—probably reckless in its arrogance and belittlement and insensitivity, but not malicious—it felt so inexplicably spiteful and hurtful at the time that I acted out against him in ways I regret now, and I treated him worse in the following decade than I’ve ever treated anyone.  I hounded him with endless discussions asking for advice on dating and romance that I didn’t even really want, internally, because it seemed like the only way to get him to understand the pain he caused by his belittlement and exclusion (and also, at the same time, the only way to deny my asexuality to get him to respect me). I occasionally tried to turn others against him.  I belittled him when I could in other ways (on intellectual matters that arose or what not); I bragged to him too much of my successes in non-romantic domains, expressing an out-of-character intentional smugness as a way to feel like I was building myself back up.  I even violated his privacy once or twice because of my unhealthy need to learn what he was saying about me, given that my sensitivity to his earlier treatment of me still lingered. I tried to make him feel bad about my relationship prospects as the straight person I was purporting (probably even to myself!) to be, rather than about my genuine concerns of loneliness as an asexual person. Overall, I was unhealthily eager to make him see the pain his scorn had caused me, and I couldn’t let go of it for an extremely long time.  All this was out of character for me, and there’s nothing that remotely resembles it in my personal history.   I do still think that it’s objectively understandable why the things he said were traumatic for me, when I was vulnerable and just looking for friendship and understanding for being different -- but I have a hard time explaining why it all stuck with me for so long and why I held a grudge about it for years afterwards.  I don't think there's any justification for that.  It exposed a side of myself that is unfamiliar to me and that I don't like:  one that's willing to act intentionally to hurt someone.

It was only around a decade after the initial interaction that I started to understand it and let go of the resentment toward this friend.  To be clear, my reaction wasn’t continuous; for most of my life I was happy and unaffected by it except perhaps in small, latent ways, but particularly during the intermittent periods of my life when I craved companionship, it flared up and hurt both me and my friend (who I continued interacting with frequently because I still felt like I needed his attention and approval during those periods, as if to claw my way out of a hole in his view of me).  So it wasn’t 10 years of a continuous reaction, but from beginning to end it lasted at least that long.  Obviously that extreme length has more to do with my own problematic psychological reaction than my friend’s original rejection of my attempt to come out, and the length of my reaction (versus the harshness of what I was reacting to) clearly was my own responsibility rather than my friend’s.  Once I realized the pattern, I felt pretty guilty about it and clearly saw my own role in failing to correct my own behavior—something that I couldn’t see earlier.  It helped me treat myself compassionately when I realized that “PTED” is, according to data, actually a fairly common type of reaction to something that’s perceived as a traumatic social event.  I wonder if “PTED” researchers would benefit from focusing some attention on the LGBTQ+ community, as I’m certain this community has a higher pool of potential social trauma than the general population.

The upside for me is that my reaction (as is typically the case for “PTED”) are fairly targeted; for me, it harmed me and my friend, but it fortunately didn’t cause me to harm others.  Many people with social trauma can’t cope with ordinary life stresses, but I never found that to be a problem; my reaction was extremely focused.  The downside is that, at least within this focus, the reaction was long-lasting (though intermittent) and caused me to act very badly to this friend in ways I now regret.  At least as an adult, and probably further back, I can’t recall ever purposely harming another human being in any significant way or even really acting particularly badly to others; I’d like to think that most people who know me would regard me as a notably helpful, honest, and positive person. My interactions with this one friend have been an exception to that and amount to the most significant mental-health problem that I’ve ever faced.

Sex

People often ask if being asexual means I’ve never had sex.  I didn’t until I was 26, during a period when I wanted companionship.  I don’t think the “relationship” was particularly (or really even slightly) companionate rather than just sexual, but I was still under the spell of the reaction I was describing and was looking for ways to be more “normal” and deny my asexuality.  I actually had a variety of sexual experiences, some of which were the sort of thing that some sexual people very much enjoy—small intimate groups, or having a partner’s roommate watch me and the partner have sex.

I didn’t appreciate it the way others would, though.  As an almost silly but possibly helpful analogy, imagine that lots of other people are extremely interested in tickling gerbils.  You don’t see why this would be enjoyable for you to participate in, though it can occasionally be fun for you to watch.  You’re not disgusted by the idea of tickling a gerbil now and then—perhaps sometimes you are, but sometimes it doesn’t seem so bad—so you’re willing to try it as a way of feeling more normal.  I like this analogy, apart from the frivolousness of it, because most people wouldn’t get any sexual excitement from tickling a gerbil, but they could picture doing it and sometimes (but only sometimes) not being repelled by it. Also, if you feel compelled to participate in tickling a gerbil because of social pressure, you can treat it as almost something like a fun, interesting puzzle:   you see that the gerbil enjoys it, so you start to think, “How can I tickle this gerbil really well?”  Sex for me, when I was willing to engage in it, became a sort of problem-solving effort about how to give others pleasure, which itself isn’t so bad because it’s producing pleasure and feels like the development of expertise in a skill. But I couldn’t particularly experience pleasure in the same way myself, and I’m not drawn to those interactions. It wasn’t “loving” or even affectionate in conventional terms, and I realize I was more or less training myself how to be an expert human sex toy.  The best way to explain it would be to compare it to an open-minded gay man having sex with a woman he saw as objectively attractive.  All of it was really just to try to adapt myself to social pressures, under the spell of my unhealthy mental state at the time.  I think my goal was to deny my asexual orientation and to try to induce a sexual one, but obviously that doesn't work.

But while I could have sex, I couldn’t really emulate the more traditional romantic things like flirting and dating, even in the periods in my life where I craved companionship. It felt too artificial and dishonest to me, and I had no experience with it.  As a different analogy here, it would be like feigning an extended interest in ballet if you aren’t at all moved by or interested in ballet; without a significant effort that felt dishonest, flirting or conventional dating weren’t natural things for me to do.  I could perhaps have learned how to do them as a classical actor might, but that felt like it would be manipulative (or at least impersonal) and largely pointless. For a while I became very sensitive to the perception among others that I was asexual and went out of my way to deny it.  I suspect at least some of this pattern is familiar, in different ways, to many LGBTQ+ people, particularly those who grow up in intolerant communities.

The Present

Then, as always seems to happen in my case, all the desire for companionship went away, and I focused for years on other things.  I had a ten-year period without a hint of desire for a relationship or for sex.  During that period, basically since I was 32 or 33 until today (I’m 42 now), I finally grew to admit again—first to myself, then to friends and coworkers—that I was asexual.  The only real problem that remains for me is what I should do when the strong desire for companionship comes back, as strangely it has recently—again, for no reason I can discern, and not as if it’s under my control.  Of course, it has never lasted very long in the past, so we’ll see what happens now.