When did you know you were Asexual?

[mikeman7918]

For most of my teen years I was under the impression that the platonic romantic attraction I sometimes felt towards girls was a crush. I always thought that people were just exaggerating or something. It wasn't the only aspect in which I felt different because I have autism, ADD, GAD, and alexithymia and it was only until about February when I came to terms with all that. I assumed that I must be strait by default or something because I wasn't attracted to guys. Being from a Christian family and being Christian myself until a few months ago I thought that maybe I was just doing a really good job at suppressing that, and I also thought that I may just be too young until I got old enough for that excuse to not work. I assumed that maybe if I tried it then I might see why it was so hyped and all, but I still felt repulsed by the idea.

I first became familiar with the term "asexual" while I was coming to terms with my various mental disorders, my first reaction was that it might sorta' describe me but I dismissed it because I experience romantic attraction. Skip to about a week ago, I began to wonder why I am not sexually attracted to girls ever and I suspected that my hormone levers may be a bit out of whack. It was then when I remembered that asexuality is a thing and began to seriously consider of it might describe me. After a day or two of thinking about it I realized that me being asexual would explain a lot and then I came here because I accidentally started autisticly obsessing about the topic and I tend to use forums as my outlet for obsessions like that so I'm not talking about it 24/7.

[Aloki24601]

I didn't quite realize I was asexual into my thirties, a few months ago. I had heard the term, but I thought it just meant someone who had no sexual feelings and for me, that also meant no romantic feelings. So because I do experience romance and I do experience the desire for a romantic relationship, I always thought when the time came the sexual thing would just kick in. But the time never came, and finally I looked into aven and realized that I fit the bill well.

When my mom first told me what sex was, I told her that's really gross. She laughed at me and said, yeah, it's kind of gross, but it feels really good. I was kind of horrified, and that never really changed for me.

Everyone had crushes and I honestly thought they were all just trying to show off which I thought was silly. How could possibly have a crush on someone whom you don't actually know anything about??(celebrities, or even a random person you've seen one in the hallway).

There are many moments where I can look back and see it. Just little conversations, perspectives. I can see those signs going back to 5th grade at the earliest earliest, but many prominent memories after 14.

[AceInDaBlackHole]

I think I first "knew" when I was around 11 but without having a frame of reference (or any books about sex) I didn't have a clue what was "knowing" only that something was different and I didn't like it. I pushed it from my mind though over the years have often referred to myself as asexual and not in passing but on topics about sex.

It wasn't until just before joining this on-line community that I was able to connect most of the dots in the way I see things, feel about myself, my general (and also specific) way of dealing with sex and the way I've been treated by others about asexuality and was like "yes! this _is_ me!" It scared the sh-- out of me but that was an improvement over the overwhelming grief I was feeling because of that obscure "it" hanging over me and actually seeing some light at the end of the tunnel that maybe this time, I can now figure it out because I have more than enough "evidence" to know and be aware of it.

I'm finding, though, that the things others have felt about it are internalized to an extent (ie - "you're immature", "you don't care about a partner to say that!", etc., etc. with all the ignorance and doubts no one deserves). Just years of it makes it a tough internal soundtrack to break but, feeling much better since finding this community and knowing I'm not the only one who's ever had a prob with this.

Knowing it in a way I haven't been able to shove it back down and pretend though, is very recent.

[Éadweard]

I realized I wasn't attracted to anyone after years of trying to force myself to be. But I still don't know if I'm asexual because what it means certainly seems to change regularly. (Yes, that's criticism.)

[Tholomyes]

I first realized some of the tell-tale signs when I was in maybe 8th grade or so (so 12-13 years old), in that I wasn't really interested in sex, nor did I really get what friends or classmates were talking about when they called people 'hot'. Sure I found people attractive based on physical appearance, but it was different; super sexualized poses, makeup or what have you, which friends saw as "Hot" I saw as detracting from the attractiveness of the person. I never really took much of a deeper look into it at that time, since I knew I was attracted to women (at that time I didn't make any distinction between romantic and sexual attraction, so the fact that I didn't feel the latter didn't really make me question things much at all), I figured I was straight, and that was that.

I first started questioning my sexuality when I was 17 or so. I met up with a group of friends I hadn't seen in a while and while we were talking and such, one of them came to casually mention that he was asexual. I felt that on multiple levels we were very similar people, and some of the stuff he described about asexuality were things I felt. However, I was still stuck in a societally-influenced mindset that conflated sexual attraction and romantic attraction (even though I knew this friend was Asexual, but not aromantic), so I decided I must just be straight, and just have a low sex drive.

It's only been very recently (within the past few months) that I have truly known I am asexual, after reading through a couple articles on asexuality which made me think about it again.

[Andiamo]

Now, I can go all the way back to 5th grade and find proof of it. Around the end of that school year, I somehow got it into my head that people started having crushes and relationships after elementary school and I was scared that I would get in a bad relationship. I actually wrote and signed a contract to protect my future self from that. Reading it now, it's kind of hilarious how I basically said "you can have a romantic relationship built on friendship and trust, but don't do anything sexual."

But when I started realizing I was different was when my friends all started having crushes and talking about boys nonstop, especially at sleepovers. They would always ask me who I liked, and I always answered "no one." They never believed me. Eventually, I did have romantic feelings for people (2 people so far, both male), but it wasn't until I was going into my Junior year of high school that a friend asked me to explain why I was so hesitant to call myself heterosexual. After I gave what is pretty much a perfect definition of romantic ace, she started to tell me about asexuality and romantic orientations. That was the first time everything really made sense.

[MacAran]

I was pretty oblivious to sex in high school. If I hadn't been, I might have realized then that something was different. In hindsight, I can see it. At the time, I just never noticed. The first time I realized something was different about me was in college when my girlfriend kept getting frustrated with me for getting bored while we were making out, and then later when things went just a little to far for me and I completely and totally shut down, and even stopped doing things like heavy kissing that I used to be willing to do. I realized I was kinda scared after what happened that one time, and tried to figure out what was going on. I was actually lucky, a couple of my friends had figured out they were Ace themselves, and so I asked them about it. What they said really resonated with me. One of them showed me the documentary David Jay worked on, and directed me here. I really knew for certain when I started poking around here and reading stories from other avenites that sounded so much like my own.

[Yuri Daisuki]

Hmm, I would say 19. I thought I was a lesbian at first, but as I began to see more and more lewd yuri posts or "sexy" photos of women in real life, I got really annoyed. Then I realised I'm the only one. All the other people in my yuri community are super excited about NSFW posts or hentai images. That's when I really try to seek the asexual community and realise I'm a homoromantic asexual. Even though I have crushes (which are very long ago), I have never had the urge to have sex with them (thinking about it makes me feel a little disgusted frankly speaking). Perhaps the reason I realise at such an age is also partly the environment that I grew up in. I came from quite a conservative country which doesn't really talk about sex that often, so I didn't notice there really are people who are super sex-crazed and very horny. I'm glad I found other aces who are just like me :)

[NinetyFive]

It took me forever to figure it out...lol.

I just thought 'hot' meant that you liked somebody for some reason. I absolutely had no idea what sexual attraction was supposed to be. So I just acted wrong...it was really embarassing, actually. I thought if you liked a girl (or boy, or anyone) romantically then you were supposed to want to have sex with them, when really it was never on my mind.

When a friend of mine pointed out what asexuality was, and I had to look up sexual attraction, that's when I knew for sure at 21.

It's embarassing because a lot of signs were there when I was a young teen and even before. Now that I know about ace stuff, past girlfriends have said "yeah, I figured you were", like wow, as if it were obvious to everyone but me. x_x

[Yinlotus93]

I kind of knew all my life, never developing that whole initial attraction to the opposite sex and all. But didn't know there was a term for what I am and the kind of attraction I do experience until I earlier this year when I found AVEN and the wikia.

[kel naismith]

Honestly, I probably should have figured it out a lot sooner than I actually did (the signs were there all along), but what happened was I was reading a book (Cold Days in the Dresden Files), where the main character is being distracted by someone wearing diamonds (and nothing else). I just couldn't understand why he was focusing on her instead of the other important things in the life or death situation he was in.

"Well",goes my brain, "That's because its a girl. What if it was a guy wearing practically nothing? That'd be distracting for you, right?"

"No, actually, I don't think so either...oh. Oh."

I stared into space for a good two minutes as everything fell into place, and then decided to save the existential crisis/minor freak out for later and went back to my book.

Over the next few months I thought about it a lot more, confirmed that yes, I was pretty sure I was ace, and that I was actually pretty fine with that.

[Larkaloke]

I didn't properly realise it until I was about twenty-four. I probably ought to have at least by the time I was eighteen, if not sooner, but it didn't much occur to me until I was twenty-two or so (I just thought everybody else was pretty weird). Then I spent a couple of years thinking that it was too statistically improbable for both my brother and I to be ace, but I got over that once I realised that it was pretty obviously true. Never having even a remote interest in sex should probably have been a tip-off, but for a long time I just assumed that either nobody actually cared about that and it was mostly a strange societal ruse or that I'd suddenly start caring at some arbitrary age.

Part of what muddied it up for me was that I took the whole "like" euphemism too literally, and assumed that sexuality was in fact a question of whether one liked men or women (or both, or what have you). I concluded that since I really didn't care at all about that, I was probably bisexual, and just left it at that. Not that I ever mentioned anything about it or even considered acting on it, mind; when I was a teenager, I just assumed that nobody else did either unless they had simply decided that they were going to do so for some reason or other, and I didn't see any reason to decide to do so. Unfortunately, this did lead to my further assumption that most people were both terribly foolish and had no self control, and I ended up looking down on some people I knew for -- as I saw it then -- making silly decisions instead of doing more useful or interesting stuff, but I've got past that by now. Luckily, I didn't talk to people enough that anybody really knew that, so it's all (kind of) good.

So yeah. For me, it was mostly a question of when I fully realised and accepted that other people were different than me rather than the other way around. I tend to uninentionally use my own feelings and behaviour as a baseline, although it has become increasingly clear that I really shouldn't. It's a bad model for how most people think, apparently.

[StrandedX02]

So yeah. For me, it was mostly a question of when I fully realised and accepted that other people were different than me rather than the other way around. I tend to uninentionally use my own feelings and behaviour as a baseline, although it has become increasingly clear that I really shouldn't. It's a bad model for how most people think, apparently.

This seemed like a good place for a first post...

Totally agreed with the quoted bit here. I should have realized I was ace when I was with my first girlfriend back at 17/18 (I'm almost 32 now), when she asked me a couple of times if I wanted to have sex and I was like "eh, not really." It's only been recently that it's actually clicked how unusual that is without any particular religious inclination toward celibacy - and for non-aces who are trying to keep celibate, how much of a struggle it would be.

What happened is that I moved to a new city last year, and in the course of meeting people, those who were single were almost invariably pretty active in seeking out partners. They'd be on Tinder. They'd be on multiple online dating sites. And when they'd encourage me to do the same and I said I wasn't particularly interested, they were a little perplexed.

I also lurk and sometimes post on a relationship-oriented message board, and the amount of value a lot of posters placed on sex within a relationship or in hookups/one-night stands felt kind of weird. I always viewed sex as just one of many elements of a relationship (even if it wasn't an element of my relationships), but the majority of people thought of it as the overriding aspect. As an example, there were people who were wondering if they should leave their sick spouses because the spouse couldn't have sex anymore as a result of the illness, and the premise (and how many people, both men and women, agreed with it) seemed kind of bizarre to me. But then I stumbled into learning about asexuality and reading some of the resources on AVEN, and the disconnects between myself and my peers in these matters made a lot more sense.

[Guest]

i figured it out during the beginning of my senior year then joined aven 2 months later

[rose~]

I didn't exactly "know" for quite a long time, it was pretty recently, actually. I mean, throughout all of middle school and high school and even as young as 9 or 10 I realized something was different about the other kids and most of my friends compared to me, but I didn't have that "Aha!" moment of realization and understanding until I was 18. Up until then, I was just very confused, lol.

Looking back, I remember being so uncomfortable and lost many times because I just couldn't figure out what I was "doing wrong". I went through many different thought processes. I thought it was maybe just a "fluke" with my mental makeup and way of thinking. I thought it was just that that was in my personality because I had always been quite shy and more of a loner type. I even thought for a while that maybe I was just into girls or something of the sort. Whatever it was that I couldn't quite put my finger on, I knew it was different. When I got into high school and onto the internet more frequently, I started learning more about the different sexualities and orientations, but aside from some brief looking around that was it. My "differentness" possibly being its own orientation didn't even occur to me in the slightest. Going off of what I knew, I thought maybe I just hadn't found what was right for me yet and that I was Demi. It wasn't until late Junior or early Senior year of high school that my Ace friend (who's way into psychology, as am I) told me about this online sexuality test and urged me to take it. And this wasn't like just one of those silly surface-level Buzzfeed quizzes, like, this thing was extremely in-depth and written from a very psychological standpoint, almost like those Myers-Briggs personality tests. At the end, my result was something like "Non Sexual", to which my friend exclaimed, "Hey, same as me!". After that moment, it was almost like everything clicked into place for me for some reason. I learned about Asexuality, and that it was a real thing. I realized how closely it matched all of the feelings (or lack thereof) I'd had all my life. That was my magical moment of realization.

[Danny_Smith]

59

[Galactic Turtle]

The term wasn't introduced to me until my senior year of college. I'd considered myself to be a prude for most of my life but thought things like "well if I experience X then I will feel Y." I didn't think it was terribly outside the norm to not masturbate, watch porn, want to have sex, kiss, hug, or have a crush on anyone. It was after forcing myself into an unfortunate situation that I really took a step back and realized that I'd been trying to feel something that others feel naturally. That's when my thoughts changed from being "possibly broken" to "definitely broken." Luckily it wasn't terribly long after that that I was introduced to the term asexuality and I was like BOOMSHAKALAKA I THINK THAT'S ME!

[Nea Rose Symphony]

Don't remember but I started outright calling myself asexual just like last year. Growing up as a preteen, I didn't understand why I was different. Someone had said I just needed to blossom or something like that. Then in high school idk if it was me forcing myself to chase after guys because I thought that was what I was supposed to do or because of being romantically horny, but that's when I developed a few crushes that never went anywhere. It took my current, and only, romantic partner to make me realize I'm different and it's just who I am

[Tanzanite]

I first noticed it when I was 15, but I didn't know there was a name until 4 years later when I saw this website and did some research. I knew I didn't feel the same things that the other kid did. No make-out sessions near the staircases at school, no short term relationships like some people, nothing. I'd say it because I was (and still am) a nerd, but I nothing I did was THAT time consuming. In fact, I often got bored because of the time I had leftover. I couldn't see myself that way with girls or boys, so I just shrugged it off. It only bothered me because I didn't know the name of what I felt I was.

[UncommonNonsense]

I think I kind of always knew.

Hear me out.

As a little kid, you know nothing about sex, but you do see the relationships adults have and know what typical adult relationships look like. In my case, in Canada in the 80s, this was marriage. I knew even as a very small child (under the age of 5) that I didn't ever want to get married.

My parents started telling me about sex when I was 8 or 9. I remember accusing Mum of lying to me about it because I thought it was far too disgusting to be real. When Dad got home, I cornered him and skewered him with questions before the poor man even managed to get in the door! Dad was quite conservative and 'old school', and wasn't prepared for his preteen daughter to be belting out sex questions at him before he even took his boots off! When he backed up what Mum said, I refused to listen by clamping my hands over my ears and running to my room, slamming the door after me. I realize a lot of kids think the mechanics of sex are gross when it is first explained to them, but they end up changing their tune when puberty scrambles their brains, but that never happened for me. I just continued to think it gross and feel truly confused by friends who seemed to be suddenly constantly seeking something I thought was disgusting.

I always knew I didn't want what everyone else wanted. I just didn't realize that there were other people like me and that there was a word to describe us! It wasn't until the late 2000s, after David Jay's efforts to gain visibility for asexuality made the newspaper that I found the right word to describe myself. I always knew. I just didn't have the vocabulary to describe myself accurately to others until that point.

[if-indeed]

I was looking for queer history books at my library and I saw the book "Understanding Asexuality" by Anthony Bogaert, and I felt drawn to it somehow. I read the whole thing multiple times, and it resonated with me. Interestingly enough, I only identified with aromanticism at first. I didn't think I could be asexual because I didn't hate having sex. I also think I found it intimidating to identify as ace, moreso than to identify as aro. I was scared of being asexual, and what it would mean about me if I really was ace. I already felt "out of the loop" enough just because I wasn't straight. It wasn't until I poked around ace circles on the internet more that I realized I wouldn't be wrong to identify as asexual.