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.

When I attended the Asexy Dirty Weekend in Bath, I did not really feel there was anything special about being among asexual people. We did not really talk all that much about asexuality; we talked about AVEN, about other meetups, about visibility projects, but not really about asexuality itself, about how it is like for us to be asexual. As I wrote later, “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 did not think this was disappointing, in fact I liked it better this way, as talking nearly exclusively about asexuality would certainly have been rather boring; but this also meant that spending time with other asexuals did not seem different from spending time with other people, no matter what their orientation is.

When the second Asexy Dirty Weekend was announced, I was very eager to attend it – and I wondered about that. True, I had had fun in Bath, and I had met nice people that I wanted to see again and who (well, some of them, anyway) would be attending the new event – but it did not seem to be enough to justify my spending half a month’s food budget on a Eurostar round-trip ticket to England for only a weekend. There was something special about these people that made me really want to spend more time with them – something more than how nice they had been to me or how much fun I had had with them.

And then I realized what it was: with them, I felt – safe. Not because being with non-asexual people is dangerous or makes me feel worried about my physical safety or psychological well-being, no, but because with asexy people, I knew that my orientations were not in danger of being questioned and doubted. Everyone knew (or at least assumed) that I was asexual, and even if they might not know I was also aromantic, at least there was a good chance that they were aware of the possibility. No-one would think me weird for not having a boyfriend or try to comfort me for being single. There was no need to actually talk about asexuality, or about my orientations, for me to know I was safe, to know that if we did talk about it everyone would be open and understanding – and not as people who see asexuality from the outside, but as people who know what it feels like to be asexual, who are asexual themselves.

When I am among asexy people, I can be certain that no-one is assuming me to be heterosexual – something I strongly dislike and never know how to react to when it is made indirectly clear by something someone says. For a few hours, I am among my own kind – among people who do not assume that I must be interested in sex and dating, among people who may never think about sex or dating unless the outside world reminds them that such things exist and matter to some people. For a few hours, it is as if I were back on my long-lost home planet – that place where asexuality is the natural state and where no-one has ever heard of or thought about sex, and where friendships are the closest, strongest, most meaningful relationships people can build (all right, so maybe not all asexual people are from that specific aromantic planet, but they’re from a planet very close by). There is no need to talk about asexuality, because it is everywhere – while we are together, we can forget that asexuality is not the mainstream sexual orientation in the wider world, because it is the mainstream orientation in our little group, at least.

This, in turn, led me to finally understand why people who belong to “minorities” tend to want to meet other people like themselves and get together. It is not at all because they feel they can only relate to people who are like them, or because they distrust people who are not like them, or because they hope that this common point will make it easier to become friends with people who are like them. No, it is because it is exhausting to live in a society which does not always recognize us, in which we are always assumed to be something we are not, and where, very often, we cannot correct those mistaken assumptions – and from time to time, we need to be among our own kind, among people who understand what we are and who see the world the way we do. We cannot go back to our home planet – but we can build a safe haven with our own kind, and for a while, we can forget how far from home we are.

Now I only wish I did not have to go so far from my Earth home to find this, and could meet with asexy people nearer the place where I live, without months going by between two meetings. But AVENfr is not an option for me, and I have not yet found another way.