Okay, let’s get this thing started…

Hello.  I’m asexual.

(I’m also a nerd, but I’m not really here to talk about that.  I’ve already got a place to get my nerd on, a place I didn’t really want to fill up with all of this stuff.)

I discovered the word “asexuality” in April 2011, but I’d known that there was something a bit off for years.  I never had a girlfriend in high school or college.  When I finally did get a girlfriend after graduating, I didn’t exactly dive into the relationship and get swept away.  It took her months to get me agree to go out with her.  That relationship only lasted about nine months and I haven’t had another girlfriend since.

That was almost nine years ago.

I’ve never been interested in sex.  Actually, let me qualify that a bit…  I’ve always been interested in sex, in a subject of scientific curiosity kind of way.  But I’ve never been interested in having sex.  Sure, I wanted to experience it, because everyone said it was so great and amazing, but I never felt an urge to seek it out.

I have had sex.  Twice.  With that girlfriend I mentioned.  It was not great and amazing.  I mean, it wasn’t terrible.  It did feel good, but…  I honestly didn’t see what the big deal was.  It was an okay way to spend part of an evening, but so is watching reruns of ST:TNG.

That was almost nine years ago.  I haven’t had sex since.  I don’t miss it.

I used to think that I was “straight, but not good at it”.  I adopted that label because it seemed like the best option for me at the time.  I had a girlfriend, and there had been other women along the way that I’d had some level of interest in.  Men, however, had never caught my eye.  So I knew I wasn’t gay or bi, therefore I must be straight, because what else was there?  But I “wasn’t very good at it” because I didn’t feel the need to rack up conquests or anything like that.  I never thought, “She’s hot, I’d so hit that”.  (Not even with the girlfriend who was, by many accounts, rather “hot”.) Plus, I’d only had sex twice in the roughly 18 years since the onset of puberty, when it seemed like other guys were averaging sex twice a day over the same time period.

It didn’t really bother me until April of this year.  I was having a conversation about sex with a friend, and it suddenly struck me that I didn’t think about sex in the same way as ANYONE else I’d never known.  It always stuck me as a scientific topic, rather than an emotional one.  After seeing a sex scene in a TV show, I spent more time wondering about how the position the two characters were supposed to be in didn’t make any sense at all, rather than thinking about what they’d been doing just before the camera cut in.

I suddenly had the feeling that I was a puzzle that needed to be solved, and I like solving puzzles, so…

I decided to start by looking up “asexuality”.   Obviously, I thought, that can’t be me.  I’ve had sex.  I masturbate.  I might be something close to that, but I can’t be that.  But still, it’s a starting point.  I’d heard the word before, but didn’t know what it meant.

(Actually, I think I started by looking up “Low Testosterone”, which just gave me a bunch of ads for male enhancement pills.  I <3 INTERNET.)

And so I read descriptions and posts and watched videos and…  OMG THESE PEOPLE ARE ALL TALKING ABOUT MY LIFE.

My life completely rewrote itself in under a week.  It was like the twist at the end of a movie that changes everything you’ve just watched.  Moments in the past suddenly flipped over and started making sense.

I didn’t agonize over it.  I didn’t need a second opinion.  It was just so right.  It was me.

And so here we are now.

I’m mainly here out of a potentially misguided desire to raise visibility.  I mean, I went for all these years not even knowing that I was asexual, and I’ve been around the Internet and thought I was fairly well versed in the various sexual orientations, preferences, practices, variations and deviations, yet somehow, I never managed to catch on to what I was during that whole time.  I’m hoping that by writing a bit on the subject of asexuality, that maybe other people will discover themselves and it won’t take as long as it did for me.  Plus, I’m hoping to raise understanding and awareness among all the potential allies out there.

Aw, who am I kidding?  I’m only here for the cake.