I’ve been so focused on my university graduation in two weeks / life transition stuff that I failed to connect the passage of time to “Oh, I should write a post by today,” so since it’s now 10 pm at the time I’m drafting this as opposed to days in advance, I’m gonna go with a personal story. The other day, I was looking for the story of how I found out I’m ace, and apparently I only wrote the aro story, so I’m fixing that now.
I was discussing with some friends the other day how we all figured out our sexuality, and a pattern resurfaced that I’ve seen in a lot of people’s stories: if you grow up Christian as an ace, there’s often a delay in finding out due to thinking it’s what you’re supposed to (not) feel, and then if you step away from religious rules, because it’s hard to separate personal feelings from trained inhibitions. Which my own story illustrates.
I don’t know when I learned the term asexual – maybe when I was filling out college applications and had to google what all the words were on the demographic questions I was asked to answer? I always thought I was just a good Christian for not caring about sex – while I wasn’t exposed to the worst of purity culture, I definitely picked up the stuff about how you’re not supposed to want sex before marriage, not supposed to date unless it has the potential to be serious, etc. So while I recognized that I had less interest in sex or dating than a lot of people, I genuinely thought I was the “normal” one by most standards and everyone else was just really bad at following the rules for being horny, getting into relationships as teenagers, etc.
Then I deconverted in my first year of college. By that point I was picking up that I was the odd one out in terms of interest, but it still didn’t occur to me that I could simply be not interested at all, so when a friend explained the word “demisexual” (needing to establish an emotional bond before being attracted) to me, I claimed that label for a while.
At 18 I started dating my best friend (a longer story, the overall relationship aspects of which are better covered in How I Figured Out I’m Aromantic). By that point I thought the concept of sex was pretty gross and wasn’t particularly excited about it, but I had heard that a lot of people who deconverted had to deconstruct toxic attitudes about sex, so I thought it was due to ingrained moral inhibitions that I just needed to get over.
So when I visited for a summer, we tried having sex, and it didn’t live up to the hype. For one thing, it turns out I have vaginismus, but that’s a bit of a tangent. More importantly, I honestly just didn’t enjoy it, although I had wanted to try it for the experience. I thought maybe I was greysexual actually – only experiencing attraction rarely. Tried a few more activities, because my partner wanted to and also I am rather oblivious about myself in some ways without actually trying things, and starting disliking the whole thing more and more. It was at that point that I FINALLY realized I was a sex-repulsed ace.
While of course the specific details are different, and I’m different than a lot of people in that I feel like I needed to try sex and a romantic relationship to have actual data to be sure I wasn’t interested, the overall experience of a Christian upbringing delaying self-discovery seems to be a common narrative for that subset of the ace community, based on the number of conversations I’ve had about it with other people. When you’re taught that you should avoid being interested in those things, being ace isn’t remarkable – you’re “just being good.” (Until you grow up and now it’s a huge problem because men are supposed to struggle with lust, and women are expected to please their husbands, so now all the expectations have done a 180 and you’re in hot water.) So people aren’t as likely to realize something’s up for a while.
And if you’re like me and either deconvert or otherwise step away from purity culture expectations, then you’re likely to be told by secular circles that everyone enjoys sex (unless you’re old, or disabled, or the like, in which case people tend to automatically assume lack of sexual interest, which issue is its own discussion.) You might think, as I did, that you’re just inexperienced or afraid of it because of your upbringing, and it’ll be fine if you just practice anyway and retrain your feelings. So now you still don’t know you’re ace because you already have an explanation for your feelings.
Both sides have a control problem – as someone who’s been on both sides of that line, the issue isn’t actually either the repression of natural sexual desires, or the narrative that everyone has and should act on them. The real problem is that people are trying to impose a single narrative of “how people are or should be” in the first place, regardless of the precise details of that narrative.
But because asexuality is in opposition to allonormativity (the fancy term for the societal assumption that everyone experiences sexual attraction and enjoys sex), it can be more obvious for people in a secular context. If you’re raised with purity culture, it can make things messier in terms of self-discovery because ace feelings and behaviors are encouraged while you’re younger, and then it gets tangled up with your beliefs and how they might have influenced your development in addition to allonormativity, in a way that others don’t necessarily experience.
Anyway. I don’t have a particular argument I’m making here. The goal of this post is for visibility – to share my experience for those who might find it relatable, and make people more aware of one of the facets of ace experiences they might not know about otherwise. (Also note that while what I described has been an observable trend, I certainly don’t speak for every individual’s experience, nor about all Christians / denominations / such groups.)
Alright, 11:45 pm. If you read all 1,100 words of that, thanks, and hopefully it wasn’t too clunky to read. As always, feel free to leave a comment!
I got all 1100 words! 🙂 Personal stories are great for the general dialog. It’s not judgmental, but it is one way things can go, and others can relate and find themselves in good company. Thanks for sharing!
Thanks for sharing- I’m always happy to see a Christian ace story. A lot of this is very relateable- especially the part about how we were taught that it’s a sin to have sex/ want sex, so aces don’t really notice anything unusual about the fact that we don’t want sex, so then it takes longer to realize “something’s up.”
I also went through the “am I asexual or just really repressed?” phase. (Fun times!) For me, I kind of concluded I’m just asexual (instead of being heterosexual if I could just unlearn the repression) because I was always “fighting” against romantic desires when I was in purity culture, but didn’t have to fight against sexual desires at all. Like I have a ton of romantic attraction and I was working so hard all the time to repress it, but none of it was sexual.
(Acknowledgement that I do technically have an ace blog but I’m contemplating its future so I’m not logging in to comment so I don’t link back to it here)
I always thought I was just a good Christian for not caring about sex – while I wasn’t exposed to the worst of purity culture, I definitely picked up the stuff about how you’re not supposed to want sex before marriage, not supposed to date unless it has the potential to be serious, etc. So while I recognized that I had less interest in sex or dating than a lot of people, I genuinely thought I was the “normal” one by most standards and everyone else was just really bad at following the rules for being horny, getting into relationships as teenagers, etc.
Then I deconverted in my first year of college. By that point I was picking up that I was the odd one out in terms of interest, but it still didn’t occur to me that I could simply be not interested at all, so when a friend explained the word “demisexual” (needing to establish an emotional bond before being attracted) to me, I claimed that label for a while.
This is a lot like how it happened with me too. I was homeschooled in a very Christian environment though I feel the need to make it clear that as conservative Christian homeschool upbringings go I got extremely lucky (my parents are actually more religious now than they were when I was a kid for reasons that are beyond the scope of this comment). I was taught that I shouldn’t have sex until marriage and that I should focus on school over dating (the latter of which is actually a really weird stance for people who expected you to someday give up your career to raise children to take). I believed that my lack of interest in sex or dating was because I’d been given a better upbringing than the traditionally schooled kids had (if you’re getting the impressions that I was an asshole as a teenager, you’re 100% correct). I did not realize that people genuinely liked sex and wanted to have it for reasons other than fitting in or whatever.
In college around my sophomore year I started to get the vague impression that there was something going on on the sex and romance front amongst my friends that I wasn’t aware of, though I couldn’t have said what. I heard about asexuality for the first time from a friend who was ace. She was also extremely sex-repulsed and in the entire time we were friends I don’t think I ever heard her talk about her asexuality in a way that wasn’t firmly centered in her sex-repulsion.
I am not sex-repulsed. My feelings on sex tend to veer more decidedly averse these days but I think that’s more a result of some other long-term issues I have than any kind of reflection of my actual sexuality. When I was about 19 (when this stuff was happening) my feelings on sex were a kind of bemused curiosity. I didn’t understand why this sex thing was such a big deal and it seemed unlikely that it actually was the totally amazing great gift from God that my mother had explained it was during the small amount of sex education she’d given me, but I was hypothetically willing to give it a shot someday to see what all the fuss was about.
I should make it clear that the ace friend in question was a great person, we were very close at this point in our lives (I’ve thought of our relationship as a proto-QPR) but the issue with a sex-indifferent ace learning about asexuality from such a staunchly sex-repulsed one is that you run the risk of the sex-indifferent ace not realizing asexual is a word that could describe them too. That’s exactly what happened. I assumed that asexual was another way of saying sex-repulsed and since I wasn’t sex-repulsed I couldn’t be ace. I was aware that there were similarities between this friend’s sexuality and mine but I didn’t realize that was because we had the same sexual orientation. I thought as myself as being able to pass as asexual despite not actually being asexual (which I keep mentioning now because I think it’s hilarious). I think I might have mentioned it to her at one point (or maybe mentioned it to another one of our friends? I know I mentioned it to someone but I can’t recall who) but I didn’t make my misunderstanding of what asexuality was clear so obviously no one corrected me.
Then I realized I might like girls. That’s actually a topic beyond the scope of this comment as well, but suffice to say that one of the results of this was that I stumbled across posts on Tumblr that explained that sexual attraction exists and described what it was like to be ace in ways that I did relate to. I’d say the rest is history but its me and I’ve never been that lucky with sexuality stuff. That’s also a topic beyond this comment, though.
All that said, I didn’t actually start deconverting (I guess, my relationship to religion is complicated) until after I started identifying as ace. That’s either a strike against me in “are you ace or just repressed?” court or a point in my favor because the reason I started moving away from Christianity at that point was because asexuality is queer and I knew what the Catholic Church’s stance on queerness is. Either way, the “are you ace or just repressed?” question is a longstanding and very fraught one for me. Whatever else you say about me, though, I haven’t considered myself straight since I started identifying as ace, even though that was before I realized I was nonbinary or became comfortable calling myself bi. That’s got to count for something.
More broadly, I do agree that being raised in a Christian environment can cause a delay in realizing you’re asexual. Realizing you’re ace really young seems to require some kind of nascent sex-positivity in your environment or at least a baseline understanding that people want sex. If you’re brought up in a sex-negative environment like Christianity you run the risk of your asexuality being framed as a moral act instead of your actual sexual orientation. Since kids in very Christian environments are already encouraged to think of themselves as better and more moral than kids in more secular ones, this explanation fits in with the young ace’s worldview and they have no reason to explore alternate explanations until they leave the Christian environment.
“I believed that my lack of interest in sex or dating was because I’d been given a better upbringing than the traditionally schooled kids had (if you’re getting the impressions that I was an asshole as a teenager, you’re 100% correct).”
Honestly, same probably in some ways. I literally didn’t even know what all the words meant when asked to fill out the sexuality/gender questions on the demographic section of forms going into college, and so was kind of a jerk to some people my freshman year simply out of ignorance, looking back. Would not want to introduce myself from 4 years ago to my friends now.