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.

In the end, it turned out that a weekend event was probably the best kind of meetup I could choose to attend. I met some people on Saturday and some on Sunday, so the first good thing is that I did not meet everyone at once. The other good thing is that I had more time to get to know the other people (well, those who had arrived on Saturday like me, anyway) so by Sunday afternoon I felt rather comfortable with most of the people I had met on Saturday. A one-day event would have been too short for that, I think. Another thing that helped is that I helped cooking dinner on Saturday night, so by working in the kitchen with some other people I got to talk to them and get to know them a little, more easily than I got to know the other people the next day while just walking with them in Bath or sitting on the boat.

As I expected, there was little talk about asexuality – someone said at one point “I have never been in a room with so many asexuals!” and another person replied that they never really thought about that – about the fact that the other people were asexual too. So it does seem that meetups are really about meeting other people, and asexuality does not really matter – the people attending happen to be asexual or related to asexuality in some way simply because the meetups are organized via AVEN, but asexuality is not the focus of meetups. I expected that, and I think it makes sense; our sexual orientation is important to us (or at least, it is to me), but it is not the main focus of our lives. Still, even though asexuality was rarely discussed, there were several moments when it was mentioned or when what someone said clearly indicated they were asexual, and that certainly fulfilled my expectations about reassurance.

I definitely had a great time, met very nice and interesting people (some I had never really noticed on the AVEN boards – how could I, since I nearly never go there? – and others I had noticed in the thread dedicated to the Asexy Dirty Weekend and was looking forward to meeting) and felt sad to leave them. I hope I will be able to go back to the UK and attend another meetup – maybe one of the London ones, since I enjoyed my stay in London and want to go back there.