Asexual and Happy – from New York Times
This is a very long article. I will only copy a part of it to my blog.
(Link): Asexual and Happy – from New York Times
- By
- July 2, 2015
- …But my therapist’s view is easy to champion. Movies, books and television shows routinely glorify sex as some be-all-end-all, the main indicator that a romantic relationship is serious and that love is present.
- …Along the way, we [students] heard plenty of assurances that it’s perfectly O.K. to not have sex. But nowhere in that lesson did I hear the words, “It’s O.K. to not want sex.”
- … But during interactions with friends, I saw the real-world results of all that class time spent looking at drawings of reproductive systems. A close friend from high school texted me the morning after she and her boyfriend first had sex. She recounted feeling strange, somehow changed.
- …Yet in a journal entry from the previous year, I had written, “I don’t seem to be attracted to anyone and I don’t understand why.” I remember lying on the floor in my parents’ living room, listening to the Smiths and thinking something was horribly wrong with me.
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My friends oohed and aahed over pictures of shirtless male celebrities that I shrugged at. They dreamed about making out with various classmates. My dreams were all about failing classes or zombie apocalypses.
- ….That distinction, between the sexual and the romantic, between the physical and the emotional, is something I end up explaining each time I come out to someone. Asexuality, I tell people, is not necessarily about a lack of desire for relationships.
- It’s not celibacy, and it’s not a choice. It’s simply a lack of sexual attraction.
- …Understanding and embracing this can open the door for more diverse experiences of love. It gives us permission to say, “Yes, some people want to have sex, and that’s cool, but I don’t feel that kind of attraction to other people.”
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And we don’t have to believe it’s some kind of pathology for us to be this way. It gives people who want to experience only nonsexual, platonic love a community in which others understand and don’t say, “You probably haven’t met the right person yet.”
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Related Posts
(Link): So Long, Compulsory Sex! See Ya, Viagra! Asexuality is Here – by B. DePaulo
(Link): Young, Attractive, and Totally Not Into Having Sex by K McGowan
(Link): Asexuality and Asexuals
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