Discovery

[Isam]

I'm sure that a lot of people have written similar things to this, but I need to get it off my chest and share my feeling of relief.

Knowing I'm not broken.

Knowing that what I am, what I feel, is normal.

And of course the simultaneous re-evaluation of my life and world.

I am a 36-yr old married mother of one. I love my husband deeply, and I love my son deeply.

I also have next to no libido. Brief flickers of attraction for other intellectuals, and when we first began dating (he's my only sexual partner bar one very dear friend with whom we consensually experimented) we had sex I suspect mostly because it was something new to me and I wanted to understand it.

I have always been driven by a need to understand.

I always knew something was odd about how I viewed sex, even once I began having it. It never did much for my body. I enjoyed stimulating my partner and seeing how much pleasure I could give him. 

Was I just a control freak?

Was I a domme?

I looked into various options but nothing felt RIGHT. Was I two-spirited? I found it liberating to write erotic scenes online, but again, the pleasure was entirely mental and I felt no physical interest or arousal. It was easier to write from a male point of view because the fun for me was in crafting the narrative. Was I trans?

I can go years without sex and feel nothing at all amiss except a sense of guilt that my partner very likely does not share my total disinterest. I don't masturbate. I never found it of any interest. 

I found myself constantly trying to understand WHY I was so different from everyone else. I'd had a serious ovarian cyst. Maybe my hormones were out of whack. Maybe the pain of that was inhibiting me. 

We agreed to try for a child, and it took four years to conceive our son. We had sex once a month, at the most probable time, which I accepted from a very logical place as being necessary. After the birth, I recovered. I couldn't comprehend it when my sister in law mentioned as an aside that she was SO glad when the 6 weeks of enforced healing abstinence was over for her. 
Maybe my birth experience traumatized me?

Again and again, I wondered what was different. What was wrong with me. How is it that I feel no physical interest in sex of any kind, with anyone? I can have brief mental fantasies, but the thought of actualizing them leaves me repulsed. I can have sex with my husband, but I do it because I love him; it reinforces my sense of conventional attractiveness and it makes him feel good and desired.

I knew assexuality existed, but only recently in another dive into self-exploration did I find this site, and start reading. 

And everything fit. Everything made sense. 

For the first time in my whole life I felt as if I knew who and why I was as I was.

I have begun the process of explaining to my beloved partner what and who I am, and I suspect that we will have many conversations as we navigate the fact that I am sex-indifferent if not sex-repulsed, hetero-romantic, and wholly committed to him. That it's not some other man I desire, but nothing at all. That he HAS to tell me when he's feeling horny, because I will frankly never think of it on my own. I'd rather listen to a symphony or do work.

I've never felt this way in my life. I'm afraid to come out to anyone else but my husband, but then again, I don't think anyone else in my personal circle of friends needs to know this. I don't think they'd grasp what exactly it means to experience no interest in sex and not be perturbed by that fact. 

So thank you for existing, and for being a place where people like me who appear to have the perfect cis- and hetero-normal relationship can find the words to describe who and what we truly are.

[Guest Jetsun Milarepa]

What a lovely thing to say about the site, I hope you manage to negotiate through this time of change with an even more secure relationship with both husband and son.

[Isam]

Thanks so much! So far it's... not as easy as I'd hoped. My husband listened, and is processing, but still attempted during an intimate moment to try and please me... which.... I get that he was trying to be a good lover by his standards. But it's just not something I care about. Which is really hard to explain or articulate or frame in a way that continues to make him feel good about himself as a sexual being.. who happens to be married to someone who is not a sexual being.

It IS still crazy liberating to be coming to grips with who I am and WHY I am.

(Why I always used to argue that using the loo during a long arduous road trip was in my estimation vastly more relieving than sex. FINALLY I can look back and see how and why I felt that, and feel that.)