Have I discovered my true self or am just I going through a phase?

[taeja]

Hello everyone,

I am recently joined in hopes to find an answer by borrowing your knoweldge and experience.

You see, I have been going through a pretty hectic time in my university.

I am in an engineering program and it is a game of who can survive the program by stomping the inferiors (or at least that is how I see it).

With such mind-numbing competition going on everyday between students, I started to distant myself from everyone; knowing that only I can take care of myself and that trusting someone could lead to a painful backstab.

I couldn't care less if I was not invited to parties, or had girlfriend or friends to hang out with, I found watching anime alone 100x more enjoyable than I ever did with hanging out with a person.

Eventually, I started to wonder if I am an asexual (or even asocial). The thing that bother me the most is, while I never had a sexual relationship, I did experience an sexual attraction toward women during high school. In retrospect, I see myself as being too simple and foolish, and now I couldn't care less if I never have a girlfriend.

This jumbled-up mess of a story boils down to a question,

Do you guys think I am an asexual regardless of having an sexual attraction in the past? Could someone's sexual orientation change during their life-time or am I going through a phase due to such hard time in my school?

Thank you for your time reading this post.

[Star Bit]

How do you define the sexual attraction you felt in high school?

And yes, sexual orientation can change. Though it changing to asexual has the possibility of being something medical; just a precaution; be hormonal or a tumor.

[Member54880]

Welcome! That is a difficult situation you're in, and I understand why you'd want to distance yourself from your peers. For some people, their sexual orientation may be fluid, and shift over time. That may be a possibility; I've seen a few members say that their orientation shifted to asexual.

[Qwerty]

I thought I experienced sexual attraction in the past. But now that I know a whole lot more about the subject, I don't think that it actually was sexual attraction.

It is very hard to collect statistics on orientation changes. There's thousands of people who have joined AVEN, made one or two posts and then wandered off. Did they experience an "asexual phase" and then something else after? I personally doubt it because we get very very few posts from people saying "I'm cured! I'm not asexual any more!" I can only think of one example in 10 years of reading AVEN on a weekly basis.