#last time my mom met one of my sisters partners she nearly disowned her because she disliked the vibe

[talonpaw]

my family is meeting my partner this weekend which is very exciting but also The Terror!

[swampgallows]

Hey I am an ace as well and I was just wondering how you deal with friends wondering why you don’t date/ or feel sexual attraction to people.... like it just doesn’t cross my mind but I’m bad at explaining

i’m lucky in that most of my close friends are accepting of my asexuality and it isn’t an issue. like any of my other boundaries, they are respected. it’s really my family, and people who aren’t very close to me, who don’t understand. I’ve only brought it up with my family once or twice and they’ve been very dismissive of it, so I’m not exactly open with them about it. i wasn’t planning to tell them at all, but my mom confronted me in the car and forced me to come out to her. i tried bringing it up with my sister and brother, and my sister said “you just need to find the right man”. i told her, “well maybe you’re bi and you just need to find the right woman.” then she went onto some tangent about how she thought she was “broken” until she met her boyfriend at the time, who was allegedly very good at oral sex. so, yknow, more of the same bullshit we always get.

my parents make comments about “when” I “find a man” or “start a family”, then stammer “—i-if you want to, I mean, if that’s what you want to do—” as an aside. they continually ask if i “met anyone”, or, when I do meet new people (usually men) if I am “interested”. my ex girlfriend flew out to see me and spent a week at my house (i live with my parents) but my family is still fairly ignorant of my bi identity, and I don’t really have the constitution to care to remind them. (or, it becomes an issue of “well youre not even dating anyone so what does it matter?” as if everyone’s orientations are of no import if they’re single.)

my main mode of coping is deflection; I’ll focus instead on the attributes the people around me are attracted to and agree on just an aesthetic principle. like there was a time where a new guy started working at the coffee cart at my old job, and all of my coworkers were fawning over how hot he was. i asked them to point him out to me sometime (which made them think i was interested), as i didnt really see anyone of particular attractiveness enter the ranks. when i finally ran into him, i agreed that he looked like a pleasant guy, then made a joke about how he “looks like he coaches a youth swimming team”. my coworkers all found it hilarious, and it wasn’t any insult to the guy at all, AND it deflected them from asking my opinion on his ‘hotness’. it was ambiguous enough that they could still assume i was straight. 

it’s very rare that anyone asks me about my personal preferences, but if they do i usually cop out with traits i find aesthetically pleasing. or i deflect by turning it into a joke, or being self-deprecating, or both. (”i’m pushing 30 and still get acne; who wants to date that?” which then becomes a still-awkward but less vulnerable conversation full of well-intentioned but misguided attempts at skincare advice, like “just use soap and water :)”.)

sometimes i am in a situation where i can be open about my ace identity and there are many who bristle against it, but i try to stand my ground. i have lost people who i previously considered friends because i said that regardless of my partner’s gender, i was still asexual. they were of the opinion that “aces are lgbt except cishet aces”, which to me is as dumb as excluding cis bi people if theyre in a het relationship (which is something people actually do, lol. biphobia is still alive and well). because, as i had told them, i was still pretty blatantly ace even when i had boyfriends as when i had a girlfriend. i knew i was ace as young as 12 years old when i went around telling people i had “ithyphallophobia”, or the fear of an erect penis [which, if i’m being real, i kind of actually have]. me having boyfriends didn’t invalidate my ace identity, in the same way many people can go nearly their entire lives in het relationships and later come out as gay. the “gold star” standard is harmful to all. 

i am lucky to live in a pretty progressive, metropolitan area and belong to a fairly open subculture where love is interpreted in many different ways. but i still yearn for representation and acceptance regardless, as many fundamentals of asexuality are misunderstood.

i think often about musician and poet Patti Smith and her relationship with photographer and artist Robert Mapplethorpe. the two of them were a couple, intimate beyond measure, for many years. as mapplethorpe learned more about himself and his interests, the two eventually separated as a couple, and Mapplethorpe identified as gay. he had many partners and a very close and intimate relationship with his curator and mentor, Sam Wagstaff, for well over a decade. but he still maintained a very close relationship with Patti Smith. granted, this was the 70s and 80s, so the cultural climate was a bit different; wagstaff and mapplethorpe couldn’t be too open about their relationship, but that isn’t why patti smith was still in the picture. she wasn’t just a “best friend”; she was a life partner for him, truly. she visited Mapplethorpe in the hospital as he was fighting AIDS, and was one of the last people he spoke with before his death. she was a close and inseparable part of his life. patti smith writes in her book “Just Kids” that she woke up the next morning and instantly knew that he had passed. 

i mention this because people love to ridicule the concepts of quasi- or queerplatonic relationships (also called zucchinis in the ace community) specifically because they’re considered applicable only to aces. but for all intents and purposes, patti smith and robert mapplethorpe were zucchinis. they were life partners in a way that was not as simply cut and dry as just “friends” or “partners”; both mapplethorpe and patti smith had other intimate, romantic, and sexual relationships in addition to the relationship they had with one another, independent of any kind of “polyamorous” context. they had a unique bond that endured until mapplethorpe’s death. 

the isn’t to say that mapplethorpe or patti smith would have identified as zucchinis or anything like that. their relationship already existed as it was, regardless of whether or not they had a name for it, but to deny communities the new vocabulary to talk about these unique experiences is to erase their significance and magnitude. there are many experiences of the ace community and the rest of the lgbtqia community that overlap, and to disown new ideas and concepts just because they are primarily targeted as being ‘asexual’ hurts the rest of the community, as well as the rest of society. dismissing patti smith’s role in mapplethorpe’s life—and his role in hers—purely on the basis of their declared identities and their applicable roles is disingenuous to both parties and narrows our perception of the vastness of human connection. 

part of acknowledging asexuality is acknowledging the diversity and strata of human relationships, yet this seems like a conversation that a lot of people seem averse to having. hopefully once these ideas become more commonplace, we wont be stuck having to explain or hide ourselves so much.