No problem, anon! The Ace Experience can be hard to pin down, and it’s not always easy to figure out that you’re ace, because you’re looking for something that might not be there.
I thought I was bisexual all throughout high school and the first few years of college, because I felt equally attracted to men and women. In hindsight, I wasn’t wrong, it’s just that the amount of attraction I felt was zero.
I think that, for ace people more than for other identities, hearing about the existence of asexuality as A Thing is an important part of our journeys. If you’re a guy attracted to guys, you can figure out that you’re attracted to guys without knowing the word ‘gay’. But with ace people it’s like, am I attracted to them? Is this what sexual attraction is? If I’m not turned on, do I just not love them enough? Am I just distracted? ??? It’s easy to trick yourself into thinking you’re experiencing sexual attraction, when what’s really going on is you’re not asking yourself “do I want to have sex with them”, you’re asking “would I be willing to have sex with them”.
When I heard that asexuality was a thing, it was like “ooooh, maybe it’s NOT just me.” The big confirming moment for me was coming across a post about autochorissexuality, which is a specific sub-label of ace (ace covers a lot of experiences- some aces are sex-repulsed, some like having sex, for instance). Reading the post, I related to every single thing in it. It was like someone had described exactly the way I experience sexuality, in ways I wouldn’t have been able to describe it myself. So I wasn’t really sure of IDing as ace until I saw someone else describe exactly what I felt and label it ‘ace’.
So for me, I do have a libido, but it can be satisfied by masturbating just as easily as with sex (in fact, more easily than with sex, because sex is work and mess and I just get bogged down in the mechanics). I get turned on, but never by sexual situations or fantasies involving myself. Smutty fanfic featuring two guys? Yes, that’s a turn-on. Featuring two women? Maaaaybe. Featuring a woman and a man? Can be, but harder if the PoV character is a woman. Because I am a woman, and if I imagine myself in the place of one of the characters, it just feels weird and odd and like, nope, not doing it for me. So it’s easier for me to get turned on by imagining sexual situations involving people Utterly Different from myself.
When I have sexual fantasies, there is a “pov character” in a sense, but it’s NEVER me. And i would never have thought to make it me, either. In fact, I didn’t realize that other people had fantasies involving themselves (or, like my sister put it, in first person) until I started reading about other people’s fantasies. Imagining sexual situations involving myself is foreign to me.
My last sexual relationship was before I knew what ace was. Looking back though it’s pretty obvious, lol. I had a really hard time getting turned on when we had sex, even if it felt good, even if I wanted to be intimate with my boyfriend. I would try fantasizing about having sex with him, but it just didn’t work. Sometimes, I’d try fantasizing about something that I knew turned me on (e.g. thinking about the last smutty fanfic I read), but I would feel guilty about it, because, like, thinking about other people having sex while having sex with your boyfriend is not a Thing that is Done.
When I look at people, I do get aesthetic attraction, but it’s not sexual. Like, “they look good” or “yes that is what people define as sexy”. I DO experience attraction to people. I think the best way to put it is, when I experience attraction, i’m not desiring sex, i’m desiring intimacy. I don’t mind sex and it can be fun (even though it’s a bit of work lol) so if the intimacy takes the form of sex, that’s fine by me. But I’d be more down to cuddle or something, because that’s the intimacy I want, but without all the mess and work of sex.
ok here’s a thing I just thought of- have you ever gotten a random sexual attraction to someone entirely inappropriate? Like a much older man or your boss or something? Where you note the attraction but go “ew brain no why”?Because I experienced something similar the other day (random unwanted attraction) to a guy WAAAAAY older than me but the image in my head wasn’t having sex with him it was kissing him on the cheek and having his arm around me lol
