I know I said I'd be posting my stories again, but I'm in an ASL interpreting internship, and preparing to interpret a musical, and all my time is eaten up by all that. I graduate at the end of the summer, so I'll definitely be back by then. I just wanted to come on here to say something that's been heavy on my heart. And it has nothing to do with writing, but whatever. I just didn't know where else to put this.
TW: discussion of sex
I'm asexual, or ace. That's important to this story. If you don't know what that means, it means I don't experience sexual attraction. There are many aces who still want to have sex. I am not one of them.
I worked at a church camp for a couple summers and I made a guy friend. First summer, he said he liked me, but I wasn't interested. Second summer, he said he still liked me. I was a little more open, but not fully. We started doing this thing we called pushing the boundaries of our friendship. We'd ask each other questions and had to answer truthfully. Started out as a way to know each other better, but we both knew where it was headed.
Eventually, we started asking about future spouses. I had to work up my courage, but I asked him what he would think if his future spouse didn't want to have sex. This was back before I knew exactly how I felt or what asexuality was, but I was pretty certain I just didn't want sex. Period.
He assumed I meant I (because we were obviously talking about ourselves with these questions) was saying I was nervous about having sex. He said he was nervous too, because he had never done it before either. And he didn't want sex right away, of course.... but he did expect sex to be an important part of the relationship.
That answer was where our romance ended.
However, I wasn't completely sure how I felt about sex at the time, so I thought, "Maybe I am just nervous." I didn't want to ruin anything because of that. So when he asked me to be his girlfriend, I said yes. We lasted a month before I broke up with him.
The entire time we were together, I couldn't keep myself from thinking about our impending sexual adventures. I wanted to talk to him about it, but I had already tried. He had made it pretty clear that he expected sex at some point. And the fact that he hadn't taken my words literally when I said "don't want sex" just showed that he believed everyone has this intrinsic sexual desire. Who wouldn't want sex at all, right?
So that entire month, I was stressing. And now, I can't help but wonder if things would've been different if I had already known about asexuality, if I had been able to tell him straight up that sex was not an option.
I'd like to talk to him about it now, but it's been a few years since then. Plus, after we split, he stopped being my friend. That made me feel like he hadn't been interested in me as a friend back when we were friends. He only ever wanted to date me, and now that that was over, he wanted nothing to do with me. He had built up this idea of who I was and who we would be together, and when that didn't stick, he just dropped me. We did message a bit a while later, but I'm just not good with any kind of text relationships, friendship or otherwise. So we let it die off.
Would he even care, at this point? Does it even matter if he cares, because obviously, this is something I need to address, or I wouldn't be here ranting to the tumblr world.
I just don't know.
If you made it this far, any advice? Even if not, thanks for stopping by.
