Ace

July here,

It's pride month I guess! Honestly, for us, once we allowed ourselves to consider the spectrum of asexuality, it unlocked so much. It felt like the big secret that contextualized everything about ourselves. The most important thing. We hadn't figured out being plural yet, which turns out to matter even more. Still, it's important. It's important that all of us are on different places in that spectrum. I think now that we just have different sexualities internally vs externally. Our real-life attempts in this arena have been motivated mainly by societal pressure and felt bad. Only without that pressure have we been able to have reasonable relationships with other people, with those who can accept us as we are. Internally, things are able to feel good and correct. There's no label for this we've encountered and care to use, but someone might have come up with one somewhere.

There's a lot of frustration we've been feeling lately. Mostly me and Viper. Being the way we are means perpetually being an outsider in every place that's queer-oriented. You are expected to want to engage with these things constantly and you're expected to put the desire to engage with them above everything else. If there is media being discussed, anything other than the amount of romance it has is considered immaterial. Nobody will pressure you, but it will be flatly assumed of you without asking. It's not just about sex, but at the same time, there is something of a pedestal that sex is put on. That is to say, it seems to generally be true that the addition or subtraction of sex to a relationship between people is a fundamentally altering thing, while for us it would seem more like an activity that may or may not figure in, at most resembling an option you might pick when buying a new car. Basically, I find the intimacy of strangers to be very offputting conceptually, but this is not really considered an acceptable feeling as long as actual penetration isn't involved.

And being around other asexual people isn't any better, because asexuals can still have kinks, and you are expected to have absolutely no problem with hearing all about them. In our case, I'd say we definitely also have them, not that it's any kind of actual requirement, but they don't fall under the "SFW kinks" category so they have to be kept out of polite company while others don't face that obstacle. It's easy to feel like we don't belong most places where baseline identity assumptions feel like the norm, even when nobody is actively intending anything. Is it insecurity on our part? Very much so. But it's felt especially stifling to try and expand our social circles lately when to do so requires a lot of exposure to things that make us uncomfortable, and a lot of disconnect between our viewpoint and that of everyone else.

In the end it feels like one option might be to essentially say we're completely repelled by any kind of sex or intimacy, but that would be a lie, and probably kind of counter-productive besides. It feels a lot more like we need to be "fixed" to be able to get by. Our best friends are people we don't have this problem with, which is kind of a two-pronged thing between them being chill and us getting used to them enough not to be uncomfortable with them. It's not super easy to achieve walking into an unknown room.