Wondering if my partner is asexual, here for thoughts and advice.

[sasab]

Hi everyone,

 

I'm not asexual, but the person I love might be, so I am kindly seeking insight and relationship advice from people who could be similar to him. (I'm a 27yo woman, he's a 30yo man.)  I love my boyfriend so much but our sex life has never felt right or very passionate, and as I've been trying to bring up this topic more, we keep almost breaking up and I really want to try to understand him and save the relationship if I can. I have noticed that I always have to try to initiate sex, and half the time he rejects it, and also I realized he's never looked at me with desire in his eyes the way that other men do. I finally spoke deeply about this with him and found out that he hasn't felt any desire for sex since his early twenties, and every time we've had sex he would've easily done something else instead--he's never really wanted it. And he said that once we're doing it it does feel good but he doesn't feel the urge to seek it out. But he said he did used to seek out sex in college with his girlfriend then. Is it possible for him to have become asexual when he wasn't before? Does this sound to you like asexuality or like something else would be causing his zero desire for the last few years? And does anyone have advice on how to make a relationship work when I have high sexual desire and he has very low, even though he will have sex with me and sort of enjoy it sometimes?

 

Thank you so much for your thoughts.

[Sarah-Sylvia]

Hey @sasab

My experience has been that I was more interested in sex in the past, and then It lost its importance to me, I think part of it is because I realized it seemed better in my mind than in actuality. I can still occasionally have some interest but it's not important to me and I don't really think I desire people that way, it's kind of a separate thing from romance as well. Anyway, I use the graysexual label. Someone can change too so it is possible, even if most people  don't (besides the obvious like before puberty or if someone loses their libido). 

 

If he doesn't think it'll change for him, you'll have to decide how much sex is important to you.  There's no way for it to change to be perfect, but besides compromise, one option is to open up the relationship and seek it outside of it. That doesn't work for a lot of people because it's also part of how they feel romantically, while for people like us it's not.

 

I don't recommend schedules, personally, but some people do that to try to have more constancy in their sex lives. For me it would just not be something I could be ok with. Everyone's different. I think you have to find out what's important to you.

And then communication is always important.

[Olallieberry]

That sure sounds asexual to me. Including the part about how what he's like now doesn't match what he says he was like in college.

 

But more important than whether the label works, whether your partner would identify as asexual himself, more important than that is to just recognize the incompatibility, no matter what he calls himself.

 

2 hours ago, sasab said:

does anyone have advice on how to make a relationship work when I have high sexual desire and he has very low, even though he will have sex with me and sort of enjoy it sometimes?

The way you describe that, it sounds like it could work. Why wouldn't it?

 

Well, I'm in that situation, myself, and, yeah, it wouldn't work. In fact I told my asexual spouse that I don't want it, even though she has some amount of willingness to have some level of sexual activity with me at some small frequency.

 

In other words, we're still so sexually incompatible, even though she's got some willingness and is capable of some amount of enjoyment some of the time, despite that, we're still SO sexually incompatible that I would just rather not. It is too one-sided, empty, performative, non-mutual, and unsexy and unthrilling and not fun and not pleasurable for me to know, to feel, that she's just performing for my sake and isn't into it herself, so, I just said No after we tried it that way for a while.

 

So now we don't have sex with each other at all.

 

So how do we make that work?

 

Option 3.

 

It's not for everybody but that's how it works for us.

 

Everyone has to figure out which of the 4 options will be the resolution of their own incompatibility.

 

Welcome to AVEN, you might be interested in the section of the site For Sexual Partners, Friends and Allies, where many people in similar mis-matched relationships have shared their experiences.