People who know they are ace 100%

[GingerRose]

If you know you are ace now, did you know since you were young or was there a period in life when you where just about confused out of your mind on your sexuality?

[Rhyn Corinn]

I didn't hear the term 'asexual' until last summer. But, I'm pretty sure I've technically known I was ace since 14 for sure, possibly 13, in that I knew I wasn't at all interested in sex.

[SithLord]

Didn't learn about asexuality (or the fun caveats and grey-areas) until around 19 years old? It was also shortly after that I started identifying as such. So before I assumed I was normal, then confused why others were more interested in sex/relationships than I was, then wondering if I was bi and identified as such until I discovered asexuality. And yeah, there was a time I wasn't sure it fit me perfectly since it took a bit of talking on AVEN to figure out what was and wasn't asexuality (even though it's still debated to this day :P)

[BlakeTheNightowl~]

I knew I was ace my whole life but didn't know the term since 2 yrs ago 

[R_1]

I wasn't ace my whole life, and there was no confusion about then and certainly not now either.

[LeChat]

44 minutes ago, GingerRose said:

If you know you are ace now, did you know since you were young or was there a period in life when you where just about confused out of your mind on your sexuality?

Hmm...I guess both: even though I didn't know about the term, "asexuality," as a kid, when I first learned about sex and puberty during mandatory lessons, I just knew it didn't feel right for me and wasn't something I could imagine ever wanting in my life; I felt extremely repulsed by all of it.

 

However, when I became a teen, that's when I really started worrying and feeling confused about being different from others, worrying that something might be wrong with me (feeling pressure from others, whether friends or classmates that would talk about dating; or just seeing student couples hugging, holding hands, laughing and talking, etc.) and that, perhaps, I was mistaken about my gender, sexual orientation, etc.

[Snao Cone]

My whole teens and 20s I assumed I was sexual but the reason I wasn't having sex was because I was either too ugly or too lazy.

[Gifted With Singleness]

I think some part of me knew that I was ace, even though I didn't have the words to describe it. I just assumed everyone else was also ace, even in the face of glaring evidence to the contrary. Realizing that sexual desire is an actual thing is what confused me.

[obstaclez]

i was confused cause i didn't know the attraction i felt to people wasn't the same attraction others felt.

now don't get me wrong, the romantic attraction was probably the same, but i just couldn't get past the fact that people made things sex related. i honestly thought it was due to me swearing off sex due to religious reasons and that i was stubborn enough to "resist temptation" but like, it became a little muddy once i started hanging with my current roommate who during this pandemic has talked about missing sex and mentioned fantasizing about guys she's been with. and like for the longest time i thought people like this were just weak i guess? which of course is awful of me once i realize that i don't feel the way they do about sex. i also considered that maybe it's due to other factors (the one person i was with sexually had pressured me over time to have sex with him and it wasn't overall enjoyable for me). but as i took clues from other parts of my life, it kinda just clicked? i had considered maybe i was asexual a couple of years ago, but due to other factors at the time i brushed it off. but yeah i basically didn't realize that i was asexual until like a couple weeks ago and i'm 28 so 🙃

[SiegeDragonfly]

Honesty, I was confused during the first 20 years of my life.  While I have a wide range of aesthetic attraction.  And I always assumed that aesthetic attraction WAS sexual attraction.  So then I started thinking I was bi or something like that because my feelings toward girls were the same as my feelings toward guys (so binary, sorry).  I won't go through my life story here, but after I tried relationships with both I just decided that I wasn't gonna get involved in anything that made me uncomfortable.  Twenty more years went by and I found the term asexuality.  Once I actually did the research, I claimed it as my orientation.  Took me till the age of 40, but I finally know what my "deal" (as stated by the people around me) is.

[DarkStormyKnight]

I probably should have picked up on it earlier, but I had no idea that asexuality was a thing until I was 20 and I basically instantly knew that I was ace. Haven't questioned that aspect of my identity much since then, it just always made sense.

[AceMissBehaving]

If I’d known about asexuality when I was a teen I probably would have embraced it early on. 
 

Because I didn’t I just thought for years I was doing sex wrong since I never seemed to want it. 
 

[N8ty L3asT]

I’ve known I was different since I was maybe 10 but I’ve only discovered asexuality in the last 2 years. So I’ve gone through life as a sexual for most of it.

[N8ty L3asT]

15 hours ago, Snao Cone (me) said:

My whole teens and 20s I assumed I was sexual but the reason I wasn't having sex was because I was either too ugly

 
 

15 hours ago, Snao Cone (me) said:

or too lazy.

 

 

[Guest]

I assumed I was like everyone else, but I thought everyone else was more like me than they are. I used to have a libido and I thought people had sex either only for the sole purpose of strengthening their relationship by doing something that would bring them closer emotionally or just that they preferred being with another person to being alone. I'm a very solitary kind of person who doesn't enjoy physical touch so it just made sense to me that I wouldn't need another person. I was unaware of people wanting to pounce on eachother, I didn't get that they were actually attracted to other people beyond aesthetic attraction.

[thanksbutno]

i knew i was not straight, i always thought "i reject labels, i'm nothing" until i found out about being ace

[binary suns]

I thought I was straight for a long time then when I learned about asexuality I was confused for several years. Didn’t know if I was grey maybe. But now I believe I’m ace, tho I’m not 100% sure.

[Snao Cone]

9 hours ago, N8LV3y said:

 

I"m not sad about it but thanks for the pandas anyway.  

[Janus the Fox]

I can say I knew while young, though the word for it did not exist but also I never thought about or did anything sexuality wise, this was the biggest clue as also I had an uneventful puberty and the mind was on something else.  Everything sexual flew by me for my entire teens.

[Ortac]

Yes, I’d say there was a period where I was confused out of my mind.

 

Really young kids don’t usually talk about sex and are not interested in relationships, and in the earlier years, my peers and I were alike in that respect. Around the ages of 13 or 14, most of my peers suddenly were into pairing off and having boyfriends and girlfriends, and they talked and gossiped about sex in a rather immature way.

 

I didn’t know I was ace at that time. I didn’t feel the need to give much consideration to my orientation at that point because as far as I was concerned, I hadn’t changed, everyone else had. I thought everyone else has suddenly gone all silly and were behaving immaturely. I was the same as I always was, and if you are the same as you have always been and you are living your life quite happily in the same way as you have for years, you don’t generally feel the need to question that or wonder if there might be anything wrong with that.

 

It was only a few years after that when it dawned on me that I was very much the odd one out and that was when I went through the period that I was confused about it.

 

It didn’t help that at that time, it seemed as far as mainstream culture was concerned there were three sexualities which were heterosexual, homosexual and bisexual. But even then, it was obvious to me that asexuality must be a thing even if I didn’t have a word for it.

 

I used the simple analogy in my mind of having two switches both with an on position and an off position, where one switch represented attraction to people of the same sex, and the other represented attraction to people of the opposite sex.

 

It frustrated me that society at large acknowledged that you could have one switch on and the other off, some people had the other one on instead, some people had both on, yet nobody could see what was blatantly obvious to me and what I thought should be obvious to everyone which was that you could also have both switches off.  

 

If it had been the thing in society that there were four basic sexual orientations instead of three, I would have identified with asexuality early on and it would hav avoided that horrible period of being confused and frustrated about it.

 

[Philip027]

I knew from the moment I learned what sex was that I was disinterested.

 

Had I learned earlier that demiromanticism was also a thing, I would have been adopting that label even before I ever experienced a crush, too.

[Ella Joy]

Haha nope

 

I spent about a year throwing bisexual around (not super seriously, I just noticed that girls were cute alkdjf;aljds;f), then I adopted it officially and ditched it after a day. So I was very confused in general. 

 

I don't think I ever really connected the dots between relationships and sex, if I had I probably would have realized that I wasn't interested sooner. 

[Brittany_1]

I definitely didn't know all my life. I was raised in a Christian household and growing up, I thought I was "supposed to" marry a guy, have children, yada yada yada. Even though I didn't know what it meant, I thought I liked guys. It wasn't until I was 17 that I realized that I don't. At All. I knew I didn't like girls either. 

 

So I just went to good ol' google and typed in what I was feeling. I came across the term asexual and it was like a lightbulb went off.

[catpower]

I figured it out fairly early, The first girl I dated bought me a copy of From A to B and back again by Warhol and said you’ll relate to this. I probably only kissed her about 3 times in the 4 months we dated and I hated it. I had a problem with any physical contact even holding hands. I’ve just never looked at anyone and had any desire to jump their bones.

[Low End Things]

I've always felt this way, for as long as I can remember. But I never truly accepted it until a few years ago. I just assumed I was straight but with no interest in sex or relationships.

[Aquatic Paradox]

I've never experienced sexual attraction. Before finding out I was asexual, I was confused about how to describe myself, rather than conflicted emotionally.

[Kelwyne]

We didn't have the designation when I was a kid, but I knew, I just thought of myself as "different", "non-masculine", "broken".

 

I would say I always knew, but was not able to articulate it. 

[Theacechemist]

    I did not know my whole life. I didn't even know that being asexual was an option. My earliest memory of asexuality was watching the news one night and the reporter was explaining the LGBTQIA+ acronym and they said asexual and I was super confused because I was a young teen and had no experience with non-heteronormative ideas.

    Years went by and I was in my only relationship to date and things of course "got serious" and my girlfriend at the time made a big deal about having sex and it was very important to her, I try to be a very respectful person so I obliged and looking back on what happened after breaking up with her I realized that I acted like she did to seem normal. That's when I started to think that I might not be "normal" and I found the term asexual again and started to identify with it a little.

    I did a lot of introspection and realized that I have been asexual my entire life but like many people have said I acted like everyone else because I thought I was just behind. Then after a year of having only a small connection to the term asexual I saw a pride flag on Instagram and I felt so: seen, recognized, and not broken that I cried in the middle of my dorm room while I was supposed to be doing homework.  

 

As far as being confused goes I'm no longer confused about my asexuality but when I discovered asexuality the third time I found out about romantic identities and oh boy I'm still confused about that one. lol 

 

I hope this was helpful or at least interesting. 

 

TL;DR I didn't always know but I am able to confidently look back at my past and say that I have always been 100% asexual.