A lot of people don’t understand how difficult it can be to know you are asexual for sure, and to be confident that the label is true on you. You spend years asking yourself, “How can I know if I feel sexual attraction or not?”
Trying to prove you DON’T experience something is actually ridiculously hard especially when you are nowhere close to understanding what it is you’re trying to disprove.
It’s a lot like playing a game of Where’s Waldo, but you have no idea what Waldo looks like and you rely entirely on the partial description of him you get from other people.
Take this image, and find “Jeremy” in it:
At first you’re like, “Who tf is Jeremy? That’s a thing?”
And then from discrete descriptions you hear in the hallways, you find out Jeremy has a red shirt.
And so you point to everyone on that picture who has a red shirt like, “Hey hey, red, THIS could be him. Certainly one of these is him!”
But, alas, you’ve gotten it confused with someone similar, but not him at all. This happens when you mistake romantic attraction or aesthetic attraction for sexual attraction or, if you’re aro, platonic attraction for romantic attraction. You’ve misidentified him because he was wearing the same color shirt and looked somewhat like what others were talking about.
You go online and ask for more descriptions of Jeremy, and you may gleam a few details. People are like, “Oh no, Jeremy has stripes on his shirt, and a funky…I don’t know, over the shoulder scarf thingy. Look, it’s really hard to explain. Trust me, if you have seen Jeremy, you would KNOW him.” Which is like ??? confusing, although it is true.
If only you could prove Jeremy isn’t on your board you would know you’re ace//aro, but it’s hard to ever be 100% certain he isn’t there when you have no clue what he looks like.
Which is why it is important for aces//aros to just, forget about trying to be 100% certain and just identify anyways. That’s what helped me the most, knowing that I didn’t have to prove something, I could just assume, “Yeah, if I had felt sexual attraction, I would know. I don’t have to prove without a doubt I don’t in order to use the word.” It’s okay, you give yourself your own validation.
(@acephobia-is-real for your question)
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