sexual partners whose partners don't ID as ace?

[No longer active]

21 hours ago, ryn2 said:

 Once the partner adopts the asexuality label that hope dies.

Not necessarily. In my case it opened the door to compromise. 

[ryn2]

2 hours ago, Cinders said:

Not necessarily. In my case it opened the door to compromise. 

I didn’t mean all hope dies... just the hope that it’s a temporary situation.

[uhtred]

On 9/29/2018 at 5:33 AM, ryn2 said:

One other possibility might be - and I’m not referring to anyone in particular here, just thinking back to some of the reactions I’ve read over time, and to my own reactions to other things - is that they cling to the hope it’s not true and future change may still take place.  Once the partner adopts the asexuality label that hope dies.

Sometimes that is better. Hope is not always a good thing. 

[ryn2]

8 minutes ago, uhtred said:

Sometimes that is better. Hope is not always a good thing. 

Yeah, that’s going to vary from person to person.  In reality it changes nothing... but for some it’s a big mindset difference.  They may also have told themselves “it’s not like it’s x,” because they have always (loudly) maintained that anyone faced with x should split up, and then kind of rationalized themselves into a bind (oops, it is x after all.  Now what?).

[anisotrophic]

On 9/29/2018 at 5:33 AM, ryn2 said:

One other possibility might be - and I’m not referring to anyone in particular here, just thinking back to some of the reactions I’ve read over time, and to my own reactions to other things - is that they cling to the hope it’s not true and future change may still take place.  Once the partner adopts the asexuality label that hope dies.

Yes... I hesitated to touch this one, as it questions the identity - is one truly identifying as "partner of asexual" (rather than "partner experiencing persistent sexual rejection")? But that might be oversimplifying.

It's often more comfortable existing in a quantum superposition of "both maybe true". Like the fear of confessing to someone we like - to cling to a distant hope they might respond with reciprocal feelings, rather than tell them - and have that sliver of hope lost.

Really accepting asexuality was devastating for me. It felt like the world cracked beneath me. There was grief. I still cry sometimes, but it becomes less frequent.

 

On 9/29/2018 at 6:38 AM, Echap02 said:

I think asexuality is a complete full-stop type reason in itself that trumps any others, and still applies when everything is perfect in life land.  I have no interest or motivation or curiosity for sex at all and none of those other factors above apply. 

That's how it is for us. I mean, my partner.
 

And as a bit of a non sequitur aside, @Telecaster68 mentioned expecting someone to understand what asexuality is given LGBT activism. That may have been true for that person, I don't know. But anecdotally, my experience has not been that LGBT folks are more likely to understand - and are perhaps even harder to talk to, because they assume they have more understanding than straight folks. This becomes uncomfortable for me, because my public enby status means they expect me to be part of the queer umbrella, and I'm not comfortable with it.

I say all that because @Echap02's point is what I wish I could drill into their minds. This isn't relationship problems, my partner doesn't have hang-ups or repulsion or trauma or "lower libido", his hormones/health are fine, he's capable of sex and doesn't hate it, he loves me and cares about me and we're perfectly great at communicating. He's just not sexually attracted to me. He can't be. He will never be. If they understood the "full stop"-ness of it maybe they'd realize how big a deal this is for me, how much a part of my own identity it becomes.

 

But I don't think they get asexuality. Purely anecdotal, but the few I tried to talk to about my partner's orientation seemed, if anything, less likely to "get it". More broadly, when queer advocates talk about orientations, I see a lot of ace erasures and I just don't want to be part of it.

 

18 hours ago, Cinders said:

Not necessarily. In my case it opened the door to compromise. 

This is also true.

 

Well, I'm not comfortable with "compromise", I think I would say... "opened up a whole new approach for solving our problems", where before we were periodically struggling and failing to make progress -- based on bad assumptions.

Which is why I probably tend to think it's a good thing to try to "collapse the wavefunction" by discussing asexuality.

 

11 hours ago, uhtred said:

Sometimes that is better. Hope is not always a good thing. 

Yeah. It's hard to give up, but can discourage us from seeking another solution...

[ryn2]

13 minutes ago, anisotropic said:

It's often more comfortable existing in a quantum superposition of "both maybe true". Like the fear of confessing to someone we like - to cling to a distant hope they might respond with reciprocal feelings, rather than tell them - and have that sliver of hope lost.

Exactly.  I was most reminded of “I really want to know my grades but only if I did okay if not I want to live in ignorant not-all-that-much-like-bliss a while longer like forever maybe” (all in one breath, no punctuation), but that will feel ridiculously, if not offensively, trivial to anyone who went through college/uni without a hefty dose of imposter syndrome and anxiety. 

[ryn2]

18 minutes ago, anisotropic said:

And as a bit of a non sequitur aside, @Telecaster68 mentioned expecting someone to understands what asexuality is given LGBT activism. That may have been true in for that person, I don't know. But anecdotally, my experience has not been that LGBT folks are more likely to understand - and are perhaps even harder to talk to, because they assume they have more understanding than straight folks. This becomes uncomfortable for me, because my public enby status means they expect me to be part of the queer umbrella, and I'm not comfortable with it.

I have found this to be true as well.  At least in the area where I live it seems the fight has been to have sex with partners society as a whole does not accept, rather than against “one man, one woman is the only answer.”  Perhaps this is less the case where same-sex relationships have been accepted longer.

 

I have also not found that a personal tradition of activism is always indicative of general open-mindedness.