The Closest to Our Home Planet as We Can Get

I think I have found the answer to my question about meetups – or, more specifically, about why we have them.

It is because spending time with other asexual people is the closest to our home planet as we can get.

I have written before that I feel that I must be from another planet, and it appears that some other asexual people feel the same. In fact, I have felt that way all my life, not only because of my orientations – since I was not always aware of them – but because I could feel I was different from other people I knew (especially people my age) in various ways: I did not have the same interests, use the same slang, care about the same things. Because of that, I found it very difficult to relate to my classmates; it seemed to me that we could not be from the same world at all. Now, of course, it is because I am asexual and aromantic (and aware of those orientations) that I often find it difficult to relate to others – and in a way, it is maybe worse than when I was growing up, because back then I still could relate to my family and feel that they, at least, were from the same planet as I. But it is not the case anymore; my parents are very understanding of my asexuality and my aromanticism, but still, they are not asexual or aromantic, and even though they try very hard to see things from my point of view, and succeed most of the time, that does not make them asexual or aromantic. They try to understand how I feel about things, but of course they do not feel the same. When I am with them, I feel I am in a safe place, among friendly natives – but they are not from my home planet.

Until very recently, I did not think I actually needed to be among my own kind. I have never really minded being alone (this is actually my natural state of being; I am always glad to spend time with my friends, but I do not need other people around to be happy), so feeling I was from another planet did not mean that I felt isolated on this one. I daydream sometimes about what my metaphorical home planet would be like, but I do not long for it. Or so I thought.

Sexual Desire From an Outsider’s Point of View

I suppose that, since I started this series with sexual attraction, it would be logical to follow with sexual desire.

Just like sexual attraction, sexual desire is a concept I cannot relate to and which I cannot easily define. I assume that experiencing sexual desire for someone means to want to have sex with them; while sexual attraction, to me, would more something like “hmm, this is someone I could imagine having sex with”, sexual desire would be something much stronger, like “I need to have sex with that person, there is nothing else in the world I want more” or something along those lines. I understand sexual attraction to be the awareness of a possiblity (that someone is the kind of person one might want to have sex with) and sexual desire to be much more specific and intense; obviously, since I have experienced neither, I may be totally wrong.

Sexual Attraction From an Outsider’s Point of View

(Edited August 6 to correct a mistake)

This was not necessarily the topic I had initially envisioned to launch this new series of posts, but very recently a few comments about sexual attraction on one of my older posts reminded me that this is quite certainly one of the things that make the less sense to me about the non-asexual world – and since becoming aware of this is what led me to first consider the possibility that I might be asexual, maybe it is, actually, the most fitting start for this new series.

I realized that I had no idea what “sexual attraction” meant about three years ago, when I became aware that my feelings for a woman I knew were much stronger than mere admiration and that maybe I was not heterosexual at all. I looked up resources about bisexuality on the Web to find more information about this orientation and see if it fitted me or not, but the definitions I found confused me, because they all more or less summed everything up to “you are bisexual if you are sexually attracted to both men and women” and I did not understand what “sexually attracted” meant. It was not a concept I had ever thought about. I identified as heterosexual more by default than certainty (I was a girl, so by default I had to like guys, unless I had good reasons to think otherwise – and until that moment I had never thought I had any reasons to question my orientation); I had crushes on guys and not on girls (or so I thought, anyway) so clearly I had to be heterosexual. When I realized I could also have crushes on women, I supposed it meant I was bisexual – but suddenly these definitions reminded me that these were sexual orientations I was thinking about, and that they were not just about crushes, but about sex – and sex was not something I had ever seriously thought about.

I decided to interpret “sexual attraction” as “wanting to have sex with the person one feel attracted to” and while this was a concept I could understand, it was not one I could relate to; understanding this eventually led me to identify as asexual.

Questioning the Obvious

I recently wrote a piece for AVEN’s Asexual Perspectives section, in which I chose to focus on the most important thing (at least, I think) that my discovery of my asexuality brought me: the awareness that I should not take anything for granted, and that I should question even things that seem obvious to everyone (and that, indeed, maybe for that very reason these are the things I should question first of all).

No More Passing

As Ily wrote in a blog post over a year ago, it is easy for asexual people to “pass”, since asexuality is not expressed in a conspicuous way that could indicate at first glance that we are different. I suppose it is true of most sexual and romantic orientations; people may choose to wear some symbols to make their orientation clear to anyone who cares to interpret the signs (like wearing “Mars” or “Venus” jewelry, for instance, to indicate that one is interested in one’s own gender), but if they do not make such efforts, it is not really possible to tell at first glance what their sexual and romantic orientations can be, and even those signs do not necessarily make sense to everyone, far from it. Still, at least the existence of most other sexual and romantic orientations is known by most people, which is not true of asexuality; some people try not to be heteronormative and to avoid assuming that everyone they meet is straight, for instance – but it is quite unlikely that even they are ready to consider asexuality a possibility, not because they are not open-minded enough, but simply because they may not have heard of it yet.

My First Meetup

Before I start telling you about my first meetup, I would like to apologize for not writing/posting this sooner. I have had to deal with computer problems and health issues; I am happy to say that the computer and I are now perfectly fine, so I should be able to follow the intended schedule from now on.

I was aware, when I decided to attend it, that the Asexy Dirty Weekend was not a typical meetup, since it spread over a weekend instead of being a one-day event. In a way, it bothered me a little that this would be my first meetup, since whatever happened there would probably not be representative of what goes on at meetups in general:if I enjoyed it, I might be disappointed when attending one-day meetups in the future; if I did not, I might be put off attending meetups of any kind, even though whatever I disliked about the Asexy Dirty Weekend might be due to the fact that it was a weekend event. But I also wanted to be part of such a unique event – in fact, I think it was its uniqueness that made me want to attend it, while I had never really been tempted to attend a meetup before (I had thought about it, thought it would be nice, but never really tried to do it; I thought about meetups in general, but never actually considered attending a specific one). I happened to have planned to be in London around that date, so traveilling to Bath was not really much trouble; I might not have done it just for one day, though, but for a weekend, it certainly seemed worth it – and it seemed I simply could not miss such an occasion.

Why Meetups?

I am aware that this is a very strange question to ask, a few hours before attending a meetup for the first time… But I have been wondering, lately, why exactly I was going to that “Asexy Dirty Weekend”, why I was so excited and nervous about it, and what the point of meetups is in the first place.

Now, I am aware that meetups are a huge thing in the asexual community – there is a whole section of the AVEN boards dedicated to them, after all. People dedicate a lot of energy to organizing them – finding a place and something to do, trying to decide on a date, advertising the event, trying to solve issues and dealing with last-minute problems or complicated people – and I admire and respect them for all that work.

But at the same time, I cannot help wondering why they do it – why they think it is so important that meetups take place at all.

Three Years Already

Last year, I chose June 4 to celebrate the anniversary of my discovery of my asexuality – or, more accurately, the anniversary of the day I first realized I was not heterosexual, and started the process that led me to identify as (at the time) bi-asexual.

I could not write a celebratory post on June 4 this year, because I was too busy with other things – the same other things that have prevented me from updating every other week as I should have – but anyway June 11 is just as important a day in my personal history, since it was the day that first phase of self-discovery came to an end – the day I triumphantly wrote in my private self-analysis blog “I am bi-asexual” and felt that these label did fit me.

Many things have changed since then. I do not identify as bi-asexual anymore, but as asexual and aromantic. I now define myself as celibate as well – or at least, this is how I would describe myself to others if there was a word in French for it; since there is not, and since I am not comfortable with the word “single” (it is too often interpreted as “single for now” or “single and looking”, which is not my case), I try to avoid using labels (unless I am filling an official form of some kind) and to simply convey that I am living alone, travelling alone, doing most things alone, and quite enjoying it. I have gone through another questioning phase since that first one (I did not mention it here, for many reasons, but it happened a few months ago) and I have come out of it more confident than ever that I am indeed asexual, and that becoming aware of it is one of the best things that ever happened to me. I have finally found a black (well, hematite) ring to wear on my ring middle finger, and bought my first AVEN shirts. And in a little over a week, I will be attending my first ever asexual meet-up – the Asexy Dirty Weekend in Bath. I am a bit nervous about meeting so many new people at the same time, but also very excited.

Oh, and now that all these things that have kept me away for the past few weeks are over, I am going to be able to update more frequently. I have been considering changing my schedule to update every ten days (on the 5th, the 15th and the 25th of each month) and I am going to try to do that; I have my half-written drafts waiting to be picked up again, completed and polished, so it should not be very difficult.

The Story of my (Second) Life in Seven Rings

I never really wore rings, or wanted to, until I started identifying as (at the time) bi-asexual. This change meant so much to me that I wanted to wear symbols of my recently discovered orientations – nothing too obvious or provocative (as my mom would say), but things that I and maybe a few other people could recognize as references to my identities. As the first symbol I read about and considered was the black ring on the right middle finger, somehow I decided that all those symbols should be rings (it was also easier for me to wear them every day as I had many necklaces, pendants and earrings, so I rarely wore the same ones two days in a row, and could not discard them to wear a “symbolic” one in their place, but I did not have any rings).

(In case you were wondering – my “second life” is the one I have been living since I began identifying as asexual. It seemed to me that I was not the same person anymore after that, so I consider that I started a new life on that day.)

And yesterday, nearly three years after I discovered I was asexual, I finally found a hematite ring to wear on my right middle finger – and realized that this was the seventh “symbolic ring” I was getting. Each of these rings came to have a special meaning to me, and to represent, in a way, a part of my life as an asexual girl – so I decided to write about them.

This Is the Way It Should Be – Part 2: The Ideal Coming Out Experience

I recently came out to my dad, and although I had not expected it to be an unpleasant experience, I had not been prepared for it to be such a good one, either.

I have had mostly positive coming out experiences so far; the only really unpleasant ones were my first attempts with my mom, but I have eventually managed to find a way to come out successfully to her and understood that it had been mostly my fault if she had reacted negatively the first times. But none of these positive experiences can come close to what happened when I came out to my dad. It seems to me that it was not only the best coming out experience I had ever had, but it was also the way an ideal coming out experience should be.