Oh The Breakup Phone Calls. How I Loath Them. I've Received So Many And Talked About So Many Breakups

I’m still getting the hang of this place. I’m nothing fancy. sorry I deleted then remade a different account. I don’t know what I’m doing yet. yeah, sorry

Holy crap I just placed bids for #pascon meet and greets for jensen and jared. I shall now start freaking out for the next 18 hours until the auction closes

squeezy-cheez The greatest factor for me has been the consistency of my experience. I spent years deeply confused about what I was feeling. At first I thought I was a late bloomer. Then I thought I was homosexual, because I think a lot of women are beautiful. Then I thought I was straight, because men are gorgeous. But during conversations about sex I was firmly not interested. I've repeated my disinterest over and over again in conversations and journaling through the years. And this was long before I knew and used the term asexual. I was talking with my cousin over coffee one night. We were discussing her new boyfriend and so forth. I confessed that I was a virgin; she was a little shocked and asked why. I told her I wasn't interested. She said that maybe I was asexual, it was something that had come up in her human sexuality course. I remember the next day I sat down and researched asexuality. I cried. No label has ever given me so much relief. This thing I was internally agonizing over for years had a name. I don't really think about sex on my own, the subject typically has to be brought to my attention. When the conversation does get going I feel so abnormal and uncomfortable. I feel broken almost every time. I struggle all the time with who I am. I worried, like you, that I was making it all up in my head. But the history of my experience is there. And most importantly, when I identified as asexual nothing about my experiencs changed, except that nowadays I am on average happier.

Ahhhhhhhh

Being an Aromantic Asexual is Weird

Being an aromantic asexual is weird. We defy not one, not two, but three societal norms; heteronormativity, compulsory sexuality, and amatonormativity. It gets even weirder when you’re indifferent (even favourable!) when it comes to sex and romance because you think your experience is universal, that everyone feels the way you do. It’s not feeling wrong and broken and out of place. It’s feeling normal, and then realizing that you aren’t.

Thinking (read: assuming) that you’re straight for most of your life and then finding out you’re not is weird. Mostly because once you realize you’re not straight, it dawns on you that you feel the same way about boys that you do about girls and non-binary people. And then you wonder if you’re pansexual because they’re attracted to all genders, and you have to be attracted to someone, right? And then that thought is immediately dismissed because you don’t feel attraction, at all. But it doesn’t stop you from contemplating every other sexuality and romantic orientation, because you’ve been taught that everyone wants sex and romance.

And then you remember: you like sex and romance in fiction. You like seeing your friends in happy, healthy, consenting relationships, and you’d always assumed that one day, you’d be in one too. But you’ve never pursued one. You never had more than a fleeting interest in boys, and lingering but still platonic affection for your female and non-binary friends. Those “crushes” that you had in elementary school? Maybe not crushes after all, because God knows you haven’t had one in nearly eight years. The most powerful feelings you’ve had for another person have been squishes so intense that you had to look back and question if it was actually romantic attraction (spoiler: it wasn’t).

And then there’s that epiphanic moment when things start to fall into place. Why you were always so vehement that soulmates could be platonic too. Why the idea of loving someone more than your best friend is incomprehensible (because romantic love is always shown as being more. Hello amatonormativity). Why when you ship fictional pairings, there are people you want to get together romantically, people you want to be friends so bad, and the ships that you like the most are the ones that could go either way. Why you desire emotional closeness and intimacy with the people in your life, but that had always been conflated with sex and romance so you wondered if what you wanted was more than friendship. Why you want to take the expression “more than friends”and burn it to the ground because there is no vocabulary for friendship that exceeds “best friend” without crossing over into romantic and/or sexual territory.

You realize that your ideal relationship isn’t necessarily romantic. It’s best friends who cohabitate and snuggle and hold hands and go on adventures to the library together. Kissing and sex? Well, that’s more of an afterthought. A “yeah, that’ll probably happen somewhere in there.” An assumption, because you’ve been taught that primary, monogamous relationships are always romantic and sexual. You reflect and see that there are very few things that you see and inherently romantic, and that there is a lot of cross-over between things you consider platonic, sensual, and romantic. A grey area that you can’t define.

Being an aromantic asexual is weird, because while I’ve always said that you don’t need romance and sex to be happy, I now realize that it applies to me too.

______________________

Note from mod fitz: This has to be one of the most moving descriptions of this I have ever read. This exactly describes how I felt coming to the realization that I was not straight, and I think had I read this when I first began questioning it would have made things go a lot smoother for me. Thanks so much for submitting!

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