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What did you think was "wrong" with you before you knew the word asexual?


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I've always known I was ace, but had no word for it. All the signs were there looking back now (never had a porn collection, never have been to a strip club) there was just no interest. I always figured it was some kind of chemical imbalance, some biological defect that just made me want to have sex. An actual orientation never occurred to me. What did other people think about their asexuality before you knew the word, not so much in what did you call it, but what did you think was the cause of your lack of desire?

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I've always had a libido. But back in high school I never really wanted sex. I thought it was because of stuff that happened to me. Who knows, maybe I am demisexual and demiromantic because of my life experiences. Doesn't really matter why. I am what I am. For me I didn't feel broken in the same sense as other aces. I felt broken because of my earlier, younger life.

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Carbon Monoxide

I thought it was normal. Apparently, it's not.

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Nothing. People are people and they come in many different shapes and sizes.

This may sound odd, but I have my own way about me. It's different. It's always been different, but people gravitate towards me nonetheless. In high school, I only interacted with people who would interact with me back. Because of this, I dominated most of my social groups, meaning the conversations I had were never really about sex or physical pleasures. In fact, I didn't know people even cared about that kind of stuff until college and by then, I had already accepted I was abnormal. Adding asexuality to the list of quirks was no big deal.

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I was always a bit 'different' than my peers in school, and I sometimes had trouble relating to them on certain things. I thought it was just one of those things I had a 'quirk' about, or that I was just so much of a hopeless romantic (in my own way) that I just wasn't drawn to many others. I had never realized that my friends and cousins were feeling things that I wasn't! So I never really felt broken, just a bit different.

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Where do I start? Lol. I never saw guys the same way my friends did. Yes, I can think someone's cute, but then I think "ok...now what?" I don't get any sexual feeling by looking at a cute guy. It's boring to me just to look at someone and think "hmmm...one of these days, this is going to be my husband or boyfriend. Really? From first sight? Everyone wants a close bond; that's where we're all the same. I almost never mention that I like someone or say 'damn, that person's hot. Let me hit that." This is where I get mistaken for being gay. As much as I would like to claim that I am, because it seems things would be easier that way, I still see myself with a guy. I have tried getting to the mindset of my friends, but it's still confusing to me what they see and feel and vice versa. If someone seems nice enough to know, then I just want to know them. It takes me a while to like someone, sometimes it doesn't even get to the point where there's a crush developed.

Overall, everyone is neutral to me in a sexual sense. I also never understood the concept of sexual chemistry or any type of chemisty from an initial meet. Is anyone really THAT magnetic that a person automatically feels love at first sight? I think it's desperation on both ends. Sometimes two people convince themselves that it's love at first sight because they're tired of being single. It could also be because the two people feel horny due to libido and not any particular attraction toward the other person. I don't know. I'm almost always single and I'm not really sure what I'm supposed to feel when I look at a guy cute or just a regular/average guy. However, I do envision a nice foot massage from time to time, while they're asking me about my day. That's got to account for something. I need a conversation, I need something of substance. Compassion, patience, taking the time to get to know me without a hidden agenda is EXTREMELY important to me. When all of my needs are met, then I can finally say "damn, this person is looking good to me. They have what I need to meet my emotional needs. I want a relationship. I think I might even want sex...or not. Let's wait and see." Based on those factors, a person becomes attractive. Basically, everything is backwards for me.

I consider myself demisexual with some variations on the grey-A spectrum. I'm still learning about myself and sometimes I feel that I do lean more on the asexual side with some exceptions. An even more accurate title would be antisexual, procuddler. Never really saw myself as a sexual person, even though I do have a normal libido and feel an urge, at times, in a biological sense. I do have a great relationship with my celibacy and would choose it over a guy any day. The more years I've been celibate, the less I see sex in my future. I don't think I'll ever want it again. Truth be told, I have anxieties about it due to a previous bad experience. When I did have sex, it was all for that biological need...curiosity, really. That's when I felt weird, because no matter what I tried to do,I just didn't feel any sexual attraction toward that person. I was just there for the act. Sad to say, but it's true. As time passed, it nauseated me that I didn't feel a close, emotional bond with that person. The thought of having sex with them was something I tried to avoid after a while. Everything went downhill and to the point where I didn't even want that person to touch me. Just felt disgusting to me. I pulled further away as time progressed, to the point where that person just couldn't get through to me and was understandably fed up. A lot of frustration and misunderstandings on both ends. Sexual guys and I just don't see eye to eye. I realized that even though I was in a relationship with this person, it still felt casual to me. Not sure how to explain that logic. I thought some kind of attraction would grow over time, but it didn't. Sex alone does not help develop a close bond. Unfortunately, I didn't like the person in an emotional sense or romantic sense. It was an experiment that pretty much blew in my face. Definitely didn't mean to hurt anyone, and I never thought I'd have sex just to have sex. Long story short, because there was no attraction at any level, it was not very enjoyable. I did try though. So when that happened to me, I knew something was off. Even though sex is not a bad thing, the actual act for me was very nauseating and uncomfortable. I never want to go through that again and I'm glad I learned my lesson.

Whether I'm just dating someone and in one case where I was in love with someone, as soon as they mentioned sex, I just feel nauseated, helpless, sad, hopeless, alone, misunderstood, and isolated. So yeah, definitely felt something was wrong before I realized that people can relate to me on some level.

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Well, in my case it was kind of a jumble of things.

There were a good number of negative experiences and events in my past that really did turn me off from the subject of sex in my early years. These events, in combination with a few other things, led me to develop what I considered to be erotophobia. Because sex grossed me out, made me uncomfortable, and the thought of engaging in it made me very stressed out. Engaging in even light intimacy made me feel nauseous (still does sometimes), being hit on or receiving obvious advances from strangers would send me into a fit of panic (still does), and I had little to no interest in pornographic content beyond the childhood stage of curiousity. Stumbling across a pornographic image or gif on the internet could be very triggering for me (and still can be). Attempts to have intimate relations with people I knew were poor, and I often felt nothing or experienced very little response during them. For a long time I just figured that my lack of interest in sex was a direct extension of being erotophobic. Even when I discovered the term asexual, I thought it, in turn, was a product of my erotophobia, which was a product of my life experiences. And it could probably be argued that it was. I can't say I'm entirely positive though.


What's made me question it all was in this past year, where I've tried to take some serious steps to work through parts of my erotophobia (improving my understanding and perceptions of intimacy, of romantic/intimate/sexual(or in my case, quasi-sexual) partners/relationships, and learning what a romantic/intimate/sexual(quasi-sexual) relationship can actually mean (read as: learning that having sex does not equal not being appreciated, not being loved, being used, etc), and letting myself kind of relax with the idea that I'm not a horrible person for participating in these things either). As I began working through these things and coming to a better understanding however, my desire for sex did not improve or increase. I became more comfortable with the subject, but there was no ~*magical*~ awakening within me that perhaps part of me had hoped for. So while I think I'm still erotophobic in many ways (primarily in the shape of esodophobia) I don't think my asexuality is dependent on my erotophobia.

TLDR;
I'm erotophobic and experience a lot of intimacy related anxiety, and before I grew to understand them all as separate components of a single part of me, I thought my asexuality was just an extension of these things, or a side effect of them you could say.

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IceHurricane

Honestly, I knew I was different, and I thought the rest of the people in the world world were stupid for letting sex control their lives. :lol:

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Originally I thought I was normal and that my peers were choosing to be needlessly obsessive over each other.

Over time I was constantly told that other people's behaviour was actually normal, and I received a lot of "prude" "frigid" "repressed" "overly religious" slurs.

So in good faith I tried to fix that with the help of an internet friend who wanted me to be their lover. (We never met in person.) I wanted to give it a fair go so I spent four and a half years trying to fix my so-called repression and learn how to be attracted to someone & want sexual/romantic intimacy.

It didn't work. I eventually learned about asexuality after a few years and my "partner" fought the idea and made me try harder (he also disbelieved the official autism diagnosis I have), but in the end, no dice. I'm still asexual, still aromantic, still sex-repulsed. I made a Herculean effort to break down my psychological barriers but here I am still not able to engage in the activities most other people consider "normal, healthy, necessary to live happily."

I still feel kinda broken, but I've also got a lot of other issues to deal with (autism, gender dysphoria) so a lot of people tend to see me as a "freak who needs to be turned normal" :/

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I remember girls in high school basically fighthing to get into the pants of the same guy and me being weirded out by that. This girl I knew was telling me about all her sexual escapades and expected me to give her advice when I haven't been to the first base yet. I never felt I was weird but it was just that people trying to mature sexually at very young ages came different to me.

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I hadn't cared about this by the time of my studies. I notced girls talking about their boyfriends and so. I started to consider myself as lesbian because boys didn't look attractive to me but trying to date girls was completly the same!

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Honestly I thought I was different, but my ego and self esteem refused to believe there was something wrong with me..just everyone else had different interests and obsessions. I didn't feel the need to search for asexuality to seek answers or belonging, it was more stumbled upon. As such, I read posts in the welcome lounge of people happy to find out they are not broken or happy to find people who get them..but I did not feel such relief. I do appreciate aven and like the community but I am still an outcast in my own way, not that I am unhappy about it.

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I knew people were different from me but I always thought it to be natural differences in people. Nothing to worry about. That worked until I was about 18 because by then most others started to be interested in relationships and dating. I never did but I knew at some point stupid comments about me being single and a virgin would emerge. I would like to say I stood up against that but instead I started to believe them and what society generally assumes about people like that. That in turn lead to a couple of things I began to suspect about myself, like that I might be frigid or socially incompetent, a closeted gay, picky, not trying hard enough, or just such an unlikable person nobody would want to be with.

It's not like this ruined my life completely but ever so often these thoughts would pop up and make me feel miserable.

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RainbowGalaxy

In high school I thought I was just more mature than everyone else. Which wasn't entirely a lie in other respects, I was fairly quiet, I did well in class and the teachers liked me, so I figured that was the explanation for the rest of it as well. I thought everyone else's obsession with sex was just an attempt to be grown-up and edgy like the way people smoked and drank etc. I felt good for having no part of it. I saw love as a pretty sexless entity and thought that was a 'higher' way of viewing it.

Then I went to university, where I met a whole group of people that were incredibly smart and mature in their way of thinking... but were still obsessed with sex. This was the first time I truly began to realize I was really a bit of an oddball. I'd met all these people 'like me' and still couldn't connect with them on this issue. So I started putting it just down to preference. "I don't look at people that way." "My taste in men is weird." "I don't know, my brain just works differently." "Of course I'm heterosexual though, it's just I experience it differently to you."

Then I got into a relationship, with the more wonderful guy imaginable and someone I was irrevocably in love with and more attracted to than anyone else I'd ever met. I was so excited to lose my virginity and finally join the club. I did it under the best possible circumstances...and I felt nothing. Pain, discomfort, and no urge to do it again. I figured it was just a bad first time, but the more we did it the less I enjoyed it.

That's when the issues really started. My disinterest began to cause huge problems in my relationship and neither of us had any idea why it was happening. The most obvious answer seemed that it was a problem with him, but that made no sense at all because I was head-over-heels in love with him and there was no one in earth I would rather have done it with. He asked if I was sexually attracted to him, and even then I knew I wasn't really (not literally) I said "yes." Because to answer "no" would imply that there was some deficiency in my feeling for him, someone else out there I did feel sexually attracted to, and there just wasn't..He kept asking me 'what's wrong' and I just didn't have an answer. I put it down to all kinds of things. Exhaustion, anxiety, depression, self-confidence, intimacy issues, diet problems, etc... I attempted to hypothesize all kinds of conditions I might have that were causing it, but none of them felt right. Other than this issue, I felt completely fine. But obviously something is wrong if you don't like sex with someone you love, right? You must have some deeply ingrained issues, somewhere. I'd felt totally happy and content in my relationship before we started having sex, than this Pandora's Box of negative emotion had just erupted and spoiled everything. I ended up just wishing we'd never started.

Finding out about asexuality was such a relief. All my fear and distress just melted away when I realised that it was okay to feel this way and not have some horrific medical problem or emotional trauma causing it. I just had such peace reading AVEN and being like "it's okay...this is fine....I don't need to worry about it," instead of feeling like this completely messed-up, failure of a girlfriend.

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I didn't really think something was wrong with me, I just always had been different. And since my group of friends were the group of people who were the oddballs, we all were accepting of each other's different-ness. And our group being friendly and accepting, was on decent terms with most of the other cliques. Also, in our group, there was (and still is) another asexual guy, so, I wasn't alone either, which makes acceptance easier.

It's also nice to have someone who can join you in laughing at the stupid stuff teenagers do to try to get laid.

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There was nothing wrong with me, I didn't (and still don't) want sex and everyone just has to accept it.

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Even before I discovered asexuality, I knew I was wired differently from other people, I just couldn't figure out the why or the how, and I thought I was the only one. I also thought it was something I could fix. It was a very confusing time in my life.

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bookwormgirl

Oh gosh, a few things.

I was really good at not permitting myself to think about this because it scared me, but in the back of my mind I knew something was off. I wondered a few times if I was a lesbian before I forced the thought away (I use to be more narrow-minded, to my disappointment and regret) but now I know that if I had been one, I would have been sexually attracted to other women whether I wanted to think about it or not.

I also thought that instead of there being something "wrong", that I wouldn't be interested in anyone until I met the right person. Apparently the world doesn’t work like that. Like I said, I was very good at keeping myself from thinking about this.

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TheWalkingEevee

I didn't think about my orientation until this past year. I assumed that I was heterosexual because that's primarily what my family is ( and not all of my family is particularly affable to those of other orientations), and in spite of my interactions with various genders, I didn't have a particular interest in any of them. I didn't linger on the fact that I didn't seem to feel the same things that my peers did about sex, and when I did I just attributed it to my being a virgin and my focus on furthering my education. My classmates always assumed I was a lesbian because I didn't date ( and I questioned if I was because I didn't particularly feel a draw to male-identified people either).

I thought I was a hypocritical anomaly because while I didn't have interest in sex or in dating in general, I still had a self-libido (I don't know if that was the right way to put that lol), and I still made sex jokes because my friends did. For a while I thought I was 'getting better' because I could talk about it in a non-serious way. I still get horrid anxiety whenever it seriously comes up, but I don't think that's related to my ace-ness.

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littleheartsofjoy

I just believed that I was probably a "late bloomer" since I kept being the only one who felt the way that I did.

Also, it's weird because I thought that I was doing the "right" thing by not having sex until marriage. I just assumed that people who said that they wanted not to have sex until marriage, I thought that they were similar to me until I hear that some of those people cave and do it anyway. I didn't understand why they felt the need to cave.

So for me, I guess it's a mix of thinking that I'm a "late bloomer" and doing the "right" thing, which was fed to me by church. Didn't think that there was something wrong with me, I just assumed that I was doing the "right" thing.

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I assumed that's what people were like, and I couldn't wrap my head around why people would have sex in highschool and stuff. Especially with church, I never got why they were preaching to us the sin of sexual immorality (mostly sex outside of marriage) because I figured that was more of an adult problem, like I would understand as I got older. That was a lie, I was just different. Eventually I figured it was me as conversations got more sexualized and personal, and one of my friends dropped asexual in a conversation about orientation (she was big in making sure everyone understood all the different categories and such), and I looked it up : )

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I thought I had a really low sex drive which is what my ex boyfriend used to say too me, but mostly I just thought that with all the other things I had going on in my head that I was just a bit broken really.

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I thought sex was overrated, and that my boyfriend at the time was just bad in bed :P I hadn't ever separated attraction into separate types, and it had never clicked that I was having platonic and romantic attractions to people, but not sexual...

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thatotherguy57

I have a different mentality. Looking back, I'm starting to think that the way I see things may be due to the fact that I'm asexual, and I've never personally known another. I've said before that I took the fact that I'm different and used it as armour, I think I did that to make everyone around me feel as uncomfortable and out of place as I felt. I've never thought or felt I was broken, or something was wrong with me, only that I was different.

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ThePaperRose

I honestly didn't really know that actual sexual attraction was a thing until last summer when I found out what asexuality is. I thought it was just a thing that people did once they got married. It never crossed my mind. I'd never been turned on by anyone but I didn't think much of it. And then one night I just looked up asexuality and I was like "wait, this is a thing? woah." and then everything just made sense. I've never felt broken... but then again I haven't told very many people so I haven't really given anyone the chance to tell me that I am.

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HiddenDemons

My story is probably going to be SO boring compared to other peoples xD I basically thought I was what I am not just in a bit of a different light. When I was younger, looking back, I never had crushes, proper crushes, on people until 7th grade (though I didn't realize it at the time because I didn't know I was gay at the time) and I guess I just thought I was normal. As I got into High School (like a year and a half ago) when people around me talked about having sex (which I thought was weird, and someone did it in my religion class before class started which was not something I wanted to hear tbh...) I never really had the same thoughts to someone except like one person (my current crush) and I always thought, "When I met someone and find the right person," which sort of describes demi in a vague note xD

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I just thought I had a low sex drive and that I was shy. I wasn't exactly popular with girls at school so I just assumed that the second I met a girl I liked that liked me back that I'd then feel all the appropriate feelings...I was wrong.

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I thought everyone was secretly asexual and only faking an interest in sex.

Bit of a shock when I found out otherwise. o_O

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