Breakthrough!

[nektarin]

Hey peeps!

Nice to meet you! 

 

26 year old female here and I just recently had a breakthrough in terms of my sexuality and romantic attraction, which lead me to this forum, which lead me to create this post! 

I'm gonna ramble about mysef for a bit now, so feel free to skip to the tl;dr section down below. 

 

I feel like I'm pretty old to figure this out now, but on the other hand my selfidentification have always been evolving so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

My romantic attraction started out straight as I didn't know there were other options, and then I started to identify as bi in junior high when I realized nothing was stopping me from being "attracted" to girls as well. I can tell now that what I thought was romantic attraction was a squish, not a crush on a girl. But this allowed me to develop my identity to panromantic in high school when I figured out there were more genders than two. I think I have had romantic crushes on people but it's kind of hard to tell which were real, and which were forced because I felt left out when everyone else was falling in love and not me. 

 

As for sexual attraction I knew I was different pretty much from puberty. I still remember taking one of those quizes online with my friends - what animal are you in bed - this was way before any of us had debuted sexually but anyway... Their results were animals like dolphin because "you like to have fun in bed" while I got swan because "you care about feelings". I remember them kinda scoffing at me because it was so boring, but all I could think was "why would you even want to have sex with someone you don't love". So yeah, I realized pretty quickly that my expectations from sex were pretty much different from my peers. When I came across the term demisexual in high school I took that label as well. I had never been sexually attracted to anyone, but would probably happen if I just met the right person. And then everything was fine and dandy until a few days ago.

 

I have never had a realtionship and it never bothered me much personally. I've just felt a bit pressured by society so I have been dating around for a few years. In relation to that I have had a few casual sexual encounters (alcohol has always been involved). It's not something I've really enjoyed, but I wanted to try to see if it was. I also have a high aversion of kissing, but since I've never been sober when people have kissed me I have blamed it on the alcohol.  

 

Anyway everything changed when I had sex sober for the first time (damn this makes me sound like an alcoholic ). Dated this dude for a few weeks and we were proceeding along the becoming-a-couple-trajectory, and it was time to do the deed. It was... awful. I already knew that my sexual attraction was really low, but I expected it to be better since I kind of had a bond with this person. Kissing was way worse than I remember it being. All in all a pretty spectacular failure. I left as soon at it was over with some bullshit emergency excuse. And then I went for a four hour soul searching walk. 

 

I won't go into too many details, but yeah. I am gray-ace. I do think I can experience sexual attraction once in a blue moon but it's not something I'll ever feel the urge to act on. 

I also realized that my quest for a romantic relationship is based on society's expectations and not my own desires. I do want a relationship, but I don't want it to be romantic. I think I've been romantically attracted to people in the past, but that's not neccecary want to build a relationship on. So gray-aro also seems fitting. What I truly want is a queerplatonic relationship. 

 

Realizing this has been so extreemly liberating and I am so happy right now  It's amazing to finally know what I really want in life, and not just go along with what's expected. 

 

TL;DR: gray-ace-aro finally realizes some obvious stuff and can't stop talking about herself.

If you read it all, congratulations?? I look forward to talking with all of you! 

 

Also if there's anyone from Norway here holla at me! 

[chair jockey]

You give an interesting insight into a sexually progressive culture's general social attitudes and the problems they pose for asexuals. Instead of being expected to abstain from sex and then pressured to marry and have kids, as happens in some cultures, you came under pressure to be more sexual and more romantic than you are. Alas, with the large proportion of Westerners on AVEN, that is a sadly common experience among the membership. We do get people who are happy not to want sex just as their culture prescribes, and have no end of distress about family and friends pressuring them to get married and have kids, but far more often it's complaints about friends and even the asexual members themselves thinking that it's "weird" or "different' not to want sex or romance. Either way, you'll find acceptance and mostly comfort here, as we old-timers are highly familiar with the sort of thing you describe, not only from personal experience but from talking to newcomers.

 

Welcome to AVEN and enjoy your time here.

[nektarin]

1 minute ago, chair jockey said:

You give an interesting insight into a sexually progressive culture's general social attitudes and the problems they pose for asexuals. Instead of being expected to abstain from sex and then pressured to marry and have kids, as happens in some cultures, you came under pressure to be more sexual and more romantic than you are. Alas, with the large proportion of Westerners on AVEN, that is a sadly common experience among the membership. We do get people who are happy not to want sex just as their culture prescribes, and have no end of distress about family and friends pressuring them to get married and have kids, but far more often it's complaints about friends and even the asexual members themselves thinking that it's "weird" or "different' not to want sex or romance. Either way, you'll find acceptance and mostly comfort here, as we old-timers are highly familiar with the sort of thing you describe, not only from personal experience but from talking to newcomers.

 

Welcome to AVEN and enjoy your time here.

Thank you!

So far I haven't told any of my friends or my family. It's stil pretty new for me. I guess there is no knowing exacty how they will react, but I can't really see why they would be opposed. True, it's not the most common sexual or romantic orientation, but it doesn't affect anyone else but me. Like you said, the pressure I felt have been internal and what I precieved society wanted me to do. It's great to finally be able to see through that. 

[chair jockey]

3 minutes ago, nektarin said:

Thank you!

So far I haven't told any of my friends or my family. It's stil pretty new for me. I guess there is no knowing exacty how they will react, but I can't really see why they would be opposed. True, it's not the most common sexual or romantic orientation, but it doesn't affect anyone else but me. Like you said, the pressure I felt have been internal and what I precieved society wanted me to do. It's great to finally be able to see through that. 

The pressure often is internal! It's not really our adolescent friend exerting peer pressure on us to conform, or the expectations of family that we will be just like our parents were in the course of our lives, that really bedevils us. It's what we pick up from our social environment by osmosis, the standards of experience and behaviour that makes us feel like it's wrong to be true to ourselves, and can lead to disastrous efforts to make ourselves something that we're not. I went through that for decades before discovering the concept of asexuality and AVEN at age 44. Every time somebody tells me they did so decades earlier than I did, i can't help being happy for them and a little pissed off that I was born in too early a year. Which is not something I hold against you, or anyone else here.

 

Best of success to you.

[nektarin]

6 minutes ago, chair jockey said:

The pressure often is internal! It's not really our adolescent friend exerting peer pressure on us to conform, or the expectations of family that we will be just like our parents were in the course of our lives, that really bedevils us. It's what we pick up from our social environment by osmosis, the standards of experience and behaviour that makes us feel like it's wrong to be true to ourselves, and can lead to disastrous efforts to make ourselves something that we're not. I went through that for decades before discovering the concept of asexuality and AVEN at age 44. Every time somebody tells me they did so decades earlier than I did, i can't help being happy for them and a little pissed off that I was born in too early a year. Which is not something I hold against you, or anyone else here.

 

Best of success to you.

Yes, and the most annoying thing, for me at least, is that I am aware of the bad choices I can make because of internal pressure and what I think people want me to do. When I started my university education I first started out with studying math because that was something I thought was the only logical option for me because I was good at math, and I thought that was what my parents expected me to do. I had a hell-ish year studying before I realized that I don't like math and after having a conversation with my parents, figured out that they just wanted me to do what would make me happy  But for some reason I never applied this knowledge to sexuality and romance before now. 

 

At least we both figured it out, right? No use crying over spilt milk etc. 

[chair jockey]

Just now, nektarin said:

Yes, and the most annoying thing, for me at least, is that I am aware of the bad choices I can make because of internal pressure and what I think people want me to do. When I started my university education I first started out with studying math because that was something I thought was the only logical option for me because I was good at math, and I thought that was what my parents expected me to do. I had a hell-ish year studying before I realized that I don't like math and after having a conversation with my parents, figured out that they just wanted me to do what would make me happy  But for some reason I never applied this knowledge to sexuality and romance before now. 

 

At least we both figured it out, right? No use crying over spilt milk etc. 

True enough. Honestly, my sexual orientation hasn't been an issue for many years. The only time I've even discussed it has been on AVEN and when asked about it during the intake process at a psych clinic. And I've got a lot more other shit to deal with right now, which needs to be dealt with a lot more.

 

I've got a book-length story I could tell you about my mistakes with regard to post-secondary education, but those are more than 30 years in the past and a dead issue now. But I'm curious what you did to pick up the pieces after you had wasted time studying math at university. Are you prepared to share that story?

[nektarin]

1 minute ago, chair jockey said:

True enough. Honestly, my sexual orientation hasn't been an issue for many years. The only time I've even discussed it has been on AVEN and when asked about it during the intake process at a psych clinic. And I've got a lot more other shit to deal with right now, which needs to be dealt with a lot more.

 

I've got a book-length story I could tell you about my mistakes with regard to post-secondary education, but those are more than 30 years in the past and a dead issue now. But I'm curious what you did to pick up the pieces after you had wasted time studying math at university. Are you prepared to share that story?

I am one of the lucky ones. In Norway higher education is mostly free - so it's not really an economic issue skipping between educations. I spent the last months during my math study trying to figure out what I wanted to do. And I landed on economics. Which is still some math, but practical math, and suits me way better  As I actually had thought through my reasons for studying this time, finishing my bachelor's degree was no problem  Currently I work part time, and I'm on lookout for something more permanent. 

 

Do you want to share one of your stories?

[chair jockey]

This is a long story I've told in other posts, although not from beginning to end. Grab some popcorn and enjoy.

 

I grew up in Toronto, Canada and still live there. When I was 16 years old back in 1981, other boys were quitting high school on their sixteenth birthdays to find unionized factory jobs. They were widely perceived as scum, but in fact they were smart. The jobs they were finding paid twice as much as their bosses' jobs did, and significantly more than most office jobs requiring a Bachelor's--and this was back when only 20% of high school graduates even applied for university, so a Bachelor's meant a premium job. Those boys put up with being regarded as the dregs of society and laughed at the rest of us as they quietly, behind the scenes, lived upper-middle-class lives. Sure, their jobs were physical, and they did have to put up with generally stupider work environments than office workers with Bachelor's degrees did, but they were still living well. Yet our parents' generation had this prejudice that a university degree was the Holy Grail because it leads to "a higher station in life" and "a good job," with the implication that those well-paid unionized factory jobs were "bad jobs." Educators had an interest in making sure that students found places in society that matched the students' capabilities, and the capabilities needed to be an architect were seen as being greater than the capabilities to be a construction carpenter, even though they're really at the same level and just different. Also, educators had an interest in making sure that students stayed in school as long as possible because that maximized the number of current and near-future students and increased the job security and social power of educators in general. Plus something people still don't discuss much was happening back then same as it is today: forty-year-olds in the workforce saw those sixteen-year-olds in school as competittion, because even a kid's own parents ultimately see him as competition on a very deep level. That's just the social and economic system, which is based on who gets how much of what limited-availability resource.Just as today's fifty-year-olds are keeping their jobs at the cost of university graduates who need them, adults have always gotten ahead at the cost of kids. Don't be fooled that, deep down where the most basic human motivations are, any adult truly "wants what's best for kids." The adult wants to have a competitive advantage over the kids. It's not theoretical physics that a boy who quits school at 16 and looks for a job is a lot more of a competitive threat to a working adult than a boy who stays in school for another six or more years.

 

Anyway, I learned to read and write when I was four years old, so big things were expected on me. I got far too much flattery, which piled narcissistic personality disorder on top of my pre-existing borderline personality disorder, and made the first five decades of my life an atrocity I committed against myself and others. It should have been apparent right in first grade of elementary school that the borderline made me the worst possible academic material, but educators honestly liked me as a person because I really was likeable despite laying waste to everything around me. They did their best, but back then their tools were limited, as the states of the art in education and health care were kind of Medieval. I should never have graduated from seventh grade of elementary school, but I did keep graduating through educators essential cooking their evaluations to ensure that I did graduate. Having me fail a grade would have been highly embarrassing for them, as I had been streamed into a special program for bright and gifted students, and no one thought to suggest that I bust down to just an advanced education program. I got my high school diploma as a gift I absolutely did not earn because the optics of not giving it to me would have been bad and the educators who gave me that diploma thought I was a nice kid.

 

My decision to study journalism was comical. Around age 10, I had discovered the work of a science fiction writer who is largely forgotten today but was very highly regarded in science fiction back then. (Larry Niven, if you want to google him.) Back then science fiction was kind of pathetic, as it was marginalized as a juvenile interest for kids, and there was a kiind of dogma in the science fiction world that science and technology must always be portrayed in a positive light and as always improving human life and never damaging it. The breakthrough of "dark" science fiction actually occurred with Neuromancer, but even that sugar-coated the reality of science to a large extent. Anyway, reading this book of short stories ("Neutron Star," published in the 1860s) that I had found in the library by happenstance led me to think that I could write like that too, so I became obsessed with becoming a writer. I scribbled in notebooks and ended up with a typewriter at an early age. My writing was just awful shit until about 1996, when it began progressing toward readable and ended up not half bad before I finally turned away from it as not leading anywhere and no longer even giving me satisfaction from the act of writing itself. But I happened to be riding in the back of an English teacher's car because she was giving me a lift for some legitimate purpose or other, when I said, "What's a good career for somebody who likes to write?" She paused and then said, "You mean journalism?" A lightbulb went off in my head and I became fixated on studying journaism and working in the news business. I applied for what was then the best undergraduate journalism program anywhere near where I lived and got in thanks to inflated final grades in the last year of high school.

 

I spent two-plus years in journalism school being wilfully blind to the reality. The news business has very, very little to do with how well you write. it has to do with your social skils, the ability to get along with sources and make yourself known to them, to get sources to say things to you that you can use in your stories, to network with other news people and random professionals in social situations so that you'd have some clue as to what's going on, and ot fit in with the other people in your newsroom, who are still largely such egomaniacs that they can seem stupid and blind to reality. My daily life as a journalism student ws a desperate struggle to "get quotes." I struggled along on the basis of my writing ability until one day in November 1987, early in my third year, when I just collapsed inside, trudged home, slept for 20 hours, and then walked back to the university to unregister from my courses,

 

I did return to university part-time in 1988, but at a different university as a philosophy major. I was also compleely unsuitable for philosphy, so I pissed around taking and dropping courses until I finally entered the workforce for good in early 1991. That actually ahppened because I saw an ad for a WordPerfect 5.1 "course" at what we'd today call an internet cafe, bu was back then a "school" because so few people had home computers, and the primitive word rpocessing software cost as much as much professional software does today. So I was sat down at a desk and given a manual that I went through myself in a couple of hours, and then issues a "diploma." As I was leaving, I saw a handwritten note on the corkboard saying some business was paying 25 cents a page for typing on WP 5.1, so I phoned the guy up. He was running a small busines out of his condo apartment. It's pointless to get into the details because it's like describing the life of a Martian. But I aced his practical typing test, he paid me $2 extra for the work I had done, and thus my career as a typist was launched until I went on disability in 2006.

 

Thanks for having the patience to read all that with all the typos. There are too many for me to fix, sorry.

[nektarin]

Thank you for sharing.

The notion that having higher education is the key to a better life annoys me so much. I am quite pleased with what I do for a living, but honestly, if I could go back I probably would have become an electrician or something  Truth is that most of what you learn in college/university is pretty useless when it comes to the actual job you're supposed to do (ok fine it depends on the profession). Using myself as an example: I could have managed to do the job I do now just fine without a degree in economics. The training I got when I started would have been good enough, and you learn a lot as you go. But I never would have gotten my job without my degree.  

 

Journalism sounds fun - in theory. The way you present in though... I was actually concidering journalism as the way to go after my math-failure. Now I am extremely glad I didn't. 

 

Did you like being a typist?

[kelico]

Welcome to AVEN! Thank you for joining and sharing your story!! You'll find a lot of friendly and supportive people that can relate to you here. : ) I'm glad that you've discovered this about yourself! Although, yes, it can take some difficult bumps along the way...some experiences that might not be ideal! But you're on the right path. I'm happy you're happy about it, too!! Take your time exploring, and I hope you enjoy being a member~

 

Now, for some more helpful information about the site, in addition to my welcome (and cake):

 

Spoiler

As part of my welcome to you, I'd like to point out some important threads that might be helpful in your first few days here.  The Terms of Service is here. We recommend you read it over, and if you have any questions please don't hesitate to send either myself or any other administrator or moderator (the "admod" team, as we're called) a message.  Also, there's a handy forum called Site Info, which has some useful information including a thread outlining who moderates which forum. If you ever need something done in or have questions about a specific forum, please message the mod of that forum. And if you have problems with the site in general, or any single member, please message any admod. 

The following are also nifty links to take a look at:  Welcome Lounge Mini Manual | Welcoming 101 | Quick Guide to the Forums | Asexuality FAQ's

 

[chair jockey]

16 hours ago, nektarin said:

Thank you for sharing.

The notion that having higher education is the key to a better life annoys me so much. I am quite pleased with what I do for a living, but honestly, if I could go back I probably would have become an electrician or something  Truth is that most of what you learn in college/university is pretty useless when it comes to the actual job you're supposed to do (ok fine it depends on the profession). Using myself as an example: I could have managed to do the job I do now just fine without a degree in economics. The training I got when I started would have been good enough, and you learn a lot as you go. But I never would have gotten my job without my degree.  

 

Journalism sounds fun - in theory. The way you present in though... I was actually concidering journalism as the way to go after my math-failure. Now I am extremely glad I didn't. 

 

Did you like being a typist?

It takes knowledge for a person to know what they're doing and what they're talking about, but credentials are not necessarily knowledge, yet we are evaluated on the basis of our credentials. That arises from natal aristocracy, which has always been how almost every country has been run. Being born into the "right" family matters a lot more than people are willing to admit.

 

One potential difference between where I live and where you live is that Canadians have always had an excessive social focus. People in my country obsess so much on social things that they can forget technical things have any value at all. Accordingly, it takes a lot of social skill to be successful here, and the top jobs in even the sciences are social rather than scientific. I've always been harmed by seeming to wear a Kick Me sign on my back AND on my front.

[Vuuns]

Holla @nektarin

 

This is my first post on this forum, I pretty much typed "Norway" in the search field and figured this is as good as place as any to start

 

Not unlike yourself(at the time of your post), I'm a "newly" self-discovered a-sexual. I really haven't come to a final conclusion on what branch, but luckily for me the different terms within this area seems to be open for margin of error. All tho, gun to my head I guess I would cry out, in fear, gray-ace. For clarification, the fear would be off being shot, not fear of my confession regarding sexuality 

Anyways just wanted to say; I found out/made peace with it a few weeks ago, and I'm 28  

 

. I wish my self-realization could be like:

On 5/26/2017 at 7:39 PM, nektarin said:

Realizing this has been so extreemly liberating and I am so happy right now

But to be honest it was more like: " - Well, that's one less thing to think about.". The ""  came sneaking up on me a bit later. 

 

I'm considering if I should start rambling on about my apifiny or just cut it short. And my lazy side seems to be winning....

 

Sooo, thank you for making a post that matched my search, think I mainly had to do write something for myself to make it official