Gray relationships

[Member33070]

Okay, people who have been grays longer than me...

How has your grayness helped or hindered your relationships?

How do you explain your "boundaries"? How did your partner take it?

Are you willing to compromise? Did things change?

Stories.

[Siggy]

I believe how a relationship works out is very sensitive to the details of grayness.

For example, I've never had a problem with sex per se, and my own gray-Aness manifests in a complete absence of limerence and near-absence of visual attraction, sexual or otherwise. This completely changes the ways I can possibly meet people. To find someone I sorta just have to take the dive, go out with someone who seems like a compatible person, and hope some more serious feelings follow. Or... well I'm not exactly sure how I did it. I was drunk when it happened, haha. Perhaps one day I will tell this story to the internet.

But within a relationship, it's not actually all that important. My boyfriend has to be satisfied with the fact that I absolutely cannot find him "hot", and with the fact that I will never "crush" on him, the fact that I don't experience jealousy, the fact that I subconsciously devalue sex. Oh yes, it's subconscious. If we don't have sex for a period of time, I don't even think about it, but he definitely notices. Some of my previous partners had instinctive feelings of inadequacy from the fact that I didn't find them visually attractive. My current partner doesn't seem to care too much.

[MadRat]

My grayness is so rare that it has no effect on my relationships. I could label myself simply as asexual.

I can´t imagine being in a relationship with sexual. I can´t imagine being in typical 24/7 relationship, which is drainig for me because I need a lot of time only for myself. I would prefer something like very close friendship with cuddling benefits :D and sharing some hobbies. No living together in the same house, no marriage, no children. Everything what is beyond the phase of dating is just too much for me.

[kochouran]

I didn't really learn about asexuality and greyness until after I entered my current (and only) relationship. It caused a lot of confusion between me and my boyfriend in the beginning because I was unconsciously sending him mixed signals. For example, I sat in his lap one time because I knew all the seats in the room were taken and I didn't want to sit on the floor. He interpreted that as a flirtatious (if not sexual) gesture. I probably missed out on a lot of potential relationships and was viewed as a tease because I never fathomed having sex with any of my crushes and I didn't think anybody wanted to have sex with me.

Before we actually had sex, my boyfriend always had to make the first move and he had to be okay with me not reciprocating anything. He would pester me about trying stuff, but when it came to intercourse, he let me take my time to decide whether I wanted it.

I've also told him that while I am attracted to guys, looking at them doesn't turn me on. Even now I still think naked guys look weird. The irony is that he doesn't seem to mind me saying that, but I get jealous very easily because I feel insecure when he notices another girl's hips or legs (according to what everybody has told me, that's what heterosexual guys do apparently).

After I decided to have sex with him, I found out that I enjoyed it on some level. It always hurts in the beginning so he has to go slow, and we can't do marathon sessions because my body will suddenly decide to quit and make things painful. He also has gotten used to the fact that I will stop in the middle of sex to do something unrelated, like check the time or go the bathroom (that used to frustrated him so much in the beginning).

[Great Thief Yatagarasu]

I just roll with it, really. I've never actually HAD a relationship due to my gracefulness - it makes me NOT go into a relationship for things like how attractive the other person is, and it's made me misjudge my own feelings before. But I think, if I were to get into a relationship (which, and I hope I'm not getting my hopes up, might be soon ), it wouldn't be that different to a lot of sexual relationships. A more chaste sexual relationship, I admit, but hey, sexuals can be chaste - my sister and her boyfriend are perfect examples of that. I just listen to what my heart tells me, and I go with that.

I suppose that, when it comes to boundaries, I have very strong ones. If I like someone, then I'll be almost overly affectionate - loads of hugs, pet names (my DM and sometimes crush has earned the nickname "Bensikins", because he's so awesome), etc. If I'm not interested in a person, or I don't like them, then ANY kind of physical contact makes me squirm and panic. Sexual talk with people I don't like is also out of bounds, and trust me, I let these people know it.

[eee]

I am a greyish Demi if that makes sense to you. My husband is the same and we met on Aven. There is definitely sexual attraction between us but we can take it or leave it. It does not interrupt our relationship but it can also serve as a bonus. There is no pressure, no compromise, but just our consent. Sex can be good, but cuddle is better!

[Niemand]

I'm gray(-ish) and I've been dating the same guy for the past 3 years. (I say '-ish' because I fluctuate between calling myself grey, asexual, sexual, and throwing my hands up in the air and saying "I don't care about labels anymore." Grey is sort of the average of all of those, though, so it's the best one-word description I can think of on AVEN. ...even though I just spent about three sentences explaining it. Bah, anyways.)

I haven't come out to my partner as grey-A, mainly because I feel it's not necessary to have a label for what I do and don't like doing. If there are things I don't like doing then it's simple as that, and I almost worry that if I use the label grey to explain why I don't like doing them it'll...almost illegitimize it in others' eyes, for lack of a better word. There's variation among individuals, after all, and I'm ultimately an individual--if I don't want to do something, then I don't want to do it regardless of whatever label I use. That being said, I do compromise to some extent with my partner about what we do, because there's stuff which I may not like doing (e.g. kissing), but since my partner likes it I'm perfectly happy to do it if it makes him happy. I also find it irrelevant if I'm sexually attracted to him or not, but I understand there's a self-esteem aspect of worrying you're unattractive, so my potential lack of attraction isn't exactly the type of thing I bring up in conversation. Although, there are also some specific contexts of my relationship that probably contribute to the making this work, namely that I don't believe in pre-marital sex anyway, and it's a long-distance relationship.

Bah, I don't know if this post is coherent or not; maybe I shouldn't be posting at 5 AM.

[YetzerHara]

In a lot of ways I'm still trying to figure out my demi-ness, so it's hard to say exactly what effect it's had on relationships. I'm pretty sure it wasn't the cause of my relationship dying (that was distance/growing apart/her having other priorities), but generally when my girlfriend had anything to complain about in our relationship, it was physical stuff. At one point (maybe a year into college?) she felt like our relationship hadn't really matured at all since high school, and she complained a few times about how she was always the one initiating things, or how I was "naive". My response to the initiating thing was that basically my comfort zone was a subset of hers, so while I felt bad that she always had to initiate things it wasn't really likely to change... (By initiating things I think she basically meant adding types of physical contact to our relationship, like how she had to kiss me a few times before I sort of got the idea. There were also things like not initially being comfortable staying in her room when I visited her at her school which wasn't exactly related to demi-ness, but more to my worrying about what would be expected/assumed/implied by that happening.)

I never exactly explained my boundaries besides what I mentioned above, but she'd known me for a long time before we started dating so I guess she had some idea of what she was getting into. I think our having been friends for a while first made it easier, because as a continuation of that it made sense to take things gradually - her family kind of jokingly said when we started dating something like "So, it's the same as it was already".

I'm still figuring out what my boundaries are, and I'd like to think I would be willing to compromise. I never really did anything in my last relationship that I wasn't comfortable with, but I'm not sure how much I would have minded if we'd just stuck to cuddling and hand holding either. I always kind of saw sexual stuff as a thing which would happen eventually, but wasn't exactly in a rush to get there. By the time we broke up we'd gone all the way to

making out

and while I enjoyed it at the time and would probably see myself enjoying it eventually in another relationship, I haven't really missed it. That's how I think I'd feel about other stuff too - with enough time in a relationship I imagine I'd be comfortable doing just about anything with my partner and would probably even enjoy it, but I don't know that I'd seek it out or miss it if it were gone.

I also apologize if this is incoherent; it's only 1 AM but I'm apparently really tired already.

[newgirl]

I'm not going to lie,it's hard being in a gray asexual/sexual relationship. My boyfriend doesn't understand okay you're horny but you want limited sex (outercourse ) but no oral sex or intercourse.