A C(e)ommunity for All

TW: Some mentions of sexual misconduct, including harassment and assault.

     WebMD defines Asexuality as ” an umbrella term that includes a spectrum of identities such as demisexual, grey-A, queerplatonic, and so on. Asexuality is the lack of sexual attraction to others or a low interest in sexual activity” (What Is Asexual? 2020). As one of the least understood and least represented identities under said LGBTQ “umbrella”, ace people need some recognition for their contributions to queer groups. The limits enforced on this identity in popular culture don’t translate to the wider community because is intersectional; one can be asexual and still identify themselves under any gender. There are many myths and misconceptions that cause this identity to be disregarded, and those play a massive part in why it took so long to identify myself on the ace spectrum.

      I always had a sense that I fell somewhere on the asexual spectrum. I had just never known much about what asexuality was, or even of its existence, until doing personal research into it. I have constantly compared mine to my friend’s feelings, and each experience has left me wondering why I could never feel the same things. I can’t even count how many times I have been told that the right person will come along to “change me”, and sure, in some respects, that’s correct, I haven’t found the right person yet. I mean, Ideally, I would find someone to accept me, and my identity. However, that still doesn’t answer the question of how I came to identify myself on the ace spectrum. This summer, I had an experience that forced me to explore my needs and preferences in order to unveil another part of myself.

       The past two years during the pandemic have been interesting. Patience has been tested, and it feels as if everyone had been forced to isolate. With things opening back up and myself being a fresh graduate moving in to my second round of college, all I can think about is what things could be done differently from the first time around. I feel that I have grown in every aspect of my life except socially. My goal recently has been to push myself out of my comfort zone, and coincidentally, an opportunity presented itself recently in an awful way.

 

      I just so happened to go to brunch with two friends of mine for our monthly “girl’s day.” Our waiter seemed to pay a lot of attention to us, but particularly to me. We thought the waiter seemed cute, and my friends encouraged me to shoot my shot. Although I was very skeptical of doing so, my friend left my phone number on the receipt, and a week or two later he texted me.

    Over text, everything seemed fine, and we agreed to meet up for a date. The beginning of the date went well, but it was the end of the date where things changed. We had spent over four hours just talking, and it was time for us to part ways. Upon leaving the restaurant, I gave him a “goodbye” hug, and once we were in our cars, he called to lengthen our date and talk more. I agreed, and we went to a nearby park to chat. We talked about life for a while and eventually decided that it was time to end the day, but this is when things started to get dicey. He walks me to my car, and again, I say goodbye and give him a hug. As I go to unlock my car, out the corner of my eye, I can see him still standing there waiting to say something.

      Men will never understand the immediate, primal sense of danger women feel when they are hovering around after you’ve said your goodbyes. They will never understand the way our breath hitches in the back of our throats, the rush of paralysis, and the instinct to hide in plain sight. It is an unsettling feeling of “is this one of these moments that countless hours of watching Law and Order SUV and Dateline has prepared me for?”

“Is it my turn now?”

      My eyes flash up quizzically as he proceeds to ask me if he could have a kiss. It was what I had been dreading. I felt my stomach sink and I wanted to disappear. I was unable to comprehend how this could have happened. Did I let this happen? Was this all my fault? My thoughts raced to unearth how this situation would imply that kissing could be appropriate after having only known each other for FOUR hours. A familiar sickening feeling consumed me, and I could feel my anxiety skyrocket. This guy was now standing over me and my mind felt like a frenzied cacophony of jarring alarms.

      Things could go one of two ways if I say no, I told myself. He will either get upset, and I don’t know what this man will do if that happens, or he’ll catch an attitude and ghost me. I felt like I was standing in a space surrounded by static noise, and I had nowhere to turn. I had forgotten that I had been standing there just helplessly staring at him for such a long time as I contemplated. Eventually, I settled on giving him what he wanted.

“Well, if I want my love life to go anywhere, I guess I will just have to suck it up.“, I told myself. So, I agreed to a kiss.

      Words cannot explain the feeling in my stomach as his lips eagerly collided with mine. I felt disgusted. I needed to retch. I was sure that vomiting was the only thing that would make this feeling in my stomach go away. As we parted, he smiled ignorantly, and he finally returned to his car.

        The whole car ride home, tears fell from my eyes like a torrential rainstorm. I continuously wiped at my eyes, trying to ease my blurry vision. At the time, I couldn’t stop wondering why this exact feeling kept happening to me. Things always started fine, we would chat, and then whenever someone would proceed to make a sexual advance towards me, every sense of attraction in my body suddenly dissolved. I always ended up feeling ashamed and disgusted with myself.

       Amid my tumultuous thought-spiral, he texts me to apologize for kissing me so awkwardly and to emphasize that he could have done it better. I guess he could sense that something was off or that in my head, I didn’t want to kiss him. I wanted to hurl my car off the road. Not wanting to kiss him would have been an understatement of the decade. 

            Over the years, I know I have developed a severe phobia surrounding touch, and in the following days, I attempted to tell him in a roundabout way not to touch me anymore. I ended up just playing things off and saying that I was just, “caught off guard”.  After telling him this, he acted as if he understood and promised that he would make sure not to touch me again. 

            Fast-forward to our second date, and again, things started out fine, but the end took a turn for the worst. We were in a tighter space this time because I was dropping him off in my car. We began to say our goodbyes, and I remember thinking he was about to get out, but he didn’t. He sat there patiently like a child waiting for candy. Again, he asked for me to kiss him.

    My body tensed in the same way it had the first time, and I wasn’t sure what to do. I felt pressured to say yes because the look in his eyes told me that if I said no, he would make me feel even worse about it than I felt the first time. 

    Yet again, this could go one of two ways, and in my head, I laid out my options.

     If I say no, this might actually end up like Dateline. “Do I even know how to fight? What could I use to defend myself”? My nails were no help in this because I had nervously bitten them off a couple of days prior. The car was incredibly small, and I was in a situation that looked to have no clear exit unless I gave in. “There is no Agent Hodge or Prentiss to come to save me now.”

      Again, I chose to suck it up and deal with it. All I could think at the time was, “If I just told you that I don’t like people touching me, what would make you think I want someone kissing me?” This time, however, he did something different. He tried to deepen and intensify his kiss as I tried to back away against the car door frame. His hand slithered to cup my face as I pulled away and backed into the tiny space that was left behind me. I wanted to dropkick him out of the vehicle. He tried this same maneuver about three times until he finally got the hint.

      Because I was so overwhelmed, I ended up saying that I wasn’t sure if I was comfortable with any of this. The twisted words just sort of wormed their way out and although I thought I had said it under my breath, he had heard me. He immediately started questioning me, and I ended up apologizing to try to cushion the blow.

      On the car ride home, I cried. I felt so disgusted with myself. I was so vulnerable, and I felt robbed. It was to the point that I was feeling physically sick whenever I moved. This whole experience was a serious red flag for me, and I decided I needed to figure out what was going on before going any further.

      I reflected on all the dates and guys I had met in the past and tried to figure out where things seemed to go wrong. We talk and I feel giddy at first, but at some point, they go to touch me without asking, and the cycle perpetuates. Whether it’s touching my hand, my arm, or wrapping their arm around me, just any form of physical contact freaks me the hell out.

        From there, I decided to look further and think deeply about when it was that I would feel the strongest attractions to others. I felt the most connection to people through talking, activities, or some form of bonding where nothing felt sexual. My feelings would change when the person started to try to establish a sexual relationship. At first, I wasn’t sure if maybe it was just because I had issues with intimacy in general, or if it was possibly a result of a couple of sexual harassment situations in the past that were making me feel this way. However, these feelings weren’t new, and I had felt like this way long before any of those occurrences.

        I realized I had never truly felt like I have been sexually attracted to anyone. Sure, I could acknowledge someone was attractive, but I’d never had butterflies in my stomach or that gut-turning feeling towards someone I found attractive just based on their looks. I had only gotten close to those feelings when spending time with close friends.           

        I decided to google these feelings and research what asexuality was and was not. I immediately connected with what was being said, and watching other people talk about their experiences being on the asexual spectrum made me finally felt like I wasn’t alone. I wasn’t crazy. People joke about being on the ace spectrum, but I had never heard anybody be serious about the topic. For once, I felt heard. It wasn’t just my imagination and all the things I was feeling were valid and real. It wasn’t just in my head.

 

          There are so many misconceptions about people who identify as asexual; that they don’t want love or relationships, that they secretly like sex, and a plethora of other surprisingly bizarre assumptions. Through this independent research, I learned the differences between types of attraction and learned the only difference between people on the ace spectrum and those that experience desire, is that the way we find attraction in others. Our connection to people looks different from the societal standard of how someone is supposed to be attracted to someone else. It takes a little more for us to feel that way and nothing is wrong with us. Our attraction to things just doesn’t follow the traditional standard.

            Once learning and understanding all of that, I felt like a weight had been lifted off my shoulders. I had felt like I was crazy for so long and realized I’d been constantly compromising my feelings and letting my boundaries be crossed, all for the sake of wanting to find love that didn’t even fit my ideal. I think a lot of people are dealing with the same thing and have been gaslit into thinking that love and sexuality are black and white things. As the years go by, people are learning to treat these concepts with a little more nuance and understanding. Despite the world being more open to understanding the LGBTQ+ community, I think that within it, certain sexualities are disregarded which deserve to be dissected just as much as the others. 

            Waiting so long to understand that I was on the ace spectrum caused me a lot of unnecessary trauma, and maybe if I had known about it sooner, perhaps my love life would be different. There are experiences I would not have had to endure if conversations about asexuality had been available early on. College is seen as this time where you explore the world and who you are, and even with just a simple article, I want to draw attention to this neglected topic.

        Sometimes it’s hard to shake the feeling that you are different and that no one will understand you, but Aces are not alone. There is a community for us too, we just have to find each other.