When I first learned of asexuality around 2009, the anxiety I’d had about potentially being gay - and about all the complications that that might bring to my life - turned to open despair.
It’s not really the reaction you see in a lot of “discovering asexuality/aromanticism” comics. They tend to have a few specific beats, some of which I do relate to, to be fair - like wondering why you're different from your peers, and how things fall into place when you finally discover a-spec identities.
But another common theme is the feeling of relief. And that is not something I experienced, at all.
Here's the thing: I don't know if anything is pushed as hard as a universal life goal as being in an intimate relationship. Throughout my childhood, it was the ultimate happy ending, with those who "couldn’t love" painted as tragic or evil, or straight up inhuman. (It's gotten better, but not by much, and more out of a realisation that women should get to be in stories without being a love interest, than an awareness of a-spec people.)
Thinking I might not be straight was scary, but even being gay could be parsed within the traditional ‘happy end’ of committed monogamy. Realising I might not feel sexual attraction ever? That was terrifying. That was the Bad End. That was being alone, isolated, forever.
I came to learn more about asexuality in the following months, and my outlook didn't stay quite so bleak. But even after working through my initial upset, and doing a great deal of reading about ace experiences - the different labels, the separation of sexuality and romantic orientation, the idea of queerplatonic life partners - I still struggled to parse my feelings. The desire for companionship - the wish to have a life partner, someone to share your daily joys and hardships with - isn’t something that’s exclusive to allo people. I had a few bad experiences trying to figure it all out, probably familiar to many people who share my orientation: I tried dating briefly, and got interrogated and psychoanalysed when I decided the process didn’t work for me; my attempt at a queerplatonic relationship ended up changing into something other, in a way that took me a long time to characterise as coercive.
And after all that, I still couldn't figure out how romantic attraction was meant to work, for someone who wasn't ace. How do you separate it from other types of love, when for so many people, the deciding factor seems to be sexual attraction? How do I put words to how I feel when part of the puzzle seems to be missing?
It took me a while to ask myself: does it matter?
If I feel my mood lift when someone walks into the room, does it matter how I choose to label that feeling?
If we’re both happy and secure in the levels of physical intimacy we can offer one another, does it matter if I don’t experience sexual desire in the same ways they do?
If we both want to commit our lives to one another, what value does it bring for me to over-analyse our feelings and fret over whether they’re a perfect match?
It's not an easy thing to internalise. Even if you manage, trying to find someone who will accept and respect your orientation, and accept and respect your needs and boundaries, feels fraught. It's so easy to feel guilt, it's so tempting to smother your discomfort, it's so hard to resist the voice that says you ought to be different to how you are.
How do you navigate that? I still don't know, because frankly, I lucked out. I feel so grateful that my partner arrived in my life when she did, messaging me on tumblr to ask about my OCs; that our initial hangouts made it so easy for me to get to know her in a framework I was comfortable with (‘antisocial pokemon hangouts’, indeed); that she waited for me to take the lead on intimacy even when I couldn't properly articulate that that was what I needed, even to myself.
I wish I had advice to give a-spec people who are still looking for a relationship, romantic or otherwise. All I can say is that it's not hopeless, and capitulating on your boundaries is not inevitable, and you deserve a relationship where you feel entirely secure and guilt-free about what you do and don't do with your partner.
It’s wonderful, once you find it.