demisexual – QueerNeuroMathGirl

Reckless Bunch

I carried with me the freshness of riding the L train from Brooklyn to Manhattan alone, the nerves from the unfamiliar responsibility that came with starting a more senior job after barely graduating and moving across the country, the uncertainty that came with the transition phase of staying with my parents in New York as my bed shipped to my studio apartment in Philadelphia, the fondness from a long-delayed catch-up over cauliflower pizza with an old college friend, and the closure that came from journaling for three hours in a coffee shop with a friend of a friend as she studied for her bar exam. Unfiltered, honest journaling honestly helped me accept it in a way nothing else had: anyone I had ever loved before was all the way back in California, a place I could no longer call my home, and I was never meant to be with them anyway – now that I had my degree under my belt, I needed to live my own life, feel new feelings that I so desperately wanted to feel after watching so many queer TikToks. As someone who gets a crush about once every two years only after age twenty-two, I knew I wasn’t going to find love so easily, but at least I could find a good story. Some tea to spill to entertain my friends. Something to giggle about.

I’d always dreamed of being like one of those gay femme girls in Zara Barrie’s stories; the glittery excursions in New York lesbian bars enticed me with their sharp contrast to the lonely, spread-out city of Los Angeles, where not a single lesbian bar survives, and the only gay coffee shop shut down during the pandemic. And here I was, heading to the famous Cubbyhole, about to meet a queer stranger from Hinge who had invited me out for drinks, and with my red polka-dotted dress, gold hoop earrings, and hot pink lipstick, I felt like I was finally crossing something off my bucket list.

When the clock crept closer to eight o’ clock, the cauliflower crust seemed to weigh heavier in the pit of my stomach, and I dreaded leaving the comforting, familiar energy of an old friend to meet a stranger. “Well, I can make you really uncomfortable to convince you to leave,” she offered as I confided this sentiment in her, but it was a three-minute walk from the restaurant and I had zero expectations – I hadn’t even styled my hair, leaving it in its natural, wavy form.

That dread was soon drowned out by the easy-flowing conversations, with an inexplicable familiarity as if she were already a friend or a friend of a friend, as we discovered never-ending fractals of common interests, career goals, favorite media, and opinions, abandoning Cubbyhole to walk to a dessert shop, exclaiming “men are trash” in response to the waiter asking her if she was single as I was returning from the restroom. As we parted with a hug and jumped onto the L train in opposite directions, mine heading to Brooklyn and hers to Jersey, I texted my friends that I felt like I had at least made a potential new friend, daresay we had chemistry, but it was too early to tell, until I received that text confirming that she had a nice time, apologized for the awkward goodbye (I hadn’t noticed) and she wanted to tell me that my eyes were gorgeous. The next day, as I finally moved into my apartment in Philly, she double texted following up about the podcast we’d discussed, Normal Gossip, saying she had caught up on all the episodes I’d cited as my favorites, and thus began over a month of regular correspondence, with increasingly lengthy, increasingly emotionally vulnerable text paragraphs, pulling out of the depths of my brain stories about my childhood, my mother, my tense and painful relationship with my close family friends, things that I had never told any of my friends because no one had ever asked with such patience and deep interest before. I didn’t want to put too much pressure on the connection, but it was impossible not to place this one on a high pedestal over the others, and I had spent so many months, years, not feeling anything and emotionally shielding my deepest layers from friends out of fear of falling for people who might not even be into women. I decided to knowingly assume the risk, canceling all my dates with people who had actually labeled our meetings as “dates” in exchange for the thrill of the uncertainty of these “hangouts” and emotionally charged texts and music and poetry exchanges.

I shared with her my poem about feeling like a moth among butterflies, both due to my body image issues as well as my internalized homophobia and trauma and how intertwined those things were, and she shared with me a similar poem about feeling like a weed among flowers, and how it made her feel alone. Feeling alone was something I was deeply familiar with, and I marveled at my luck of finding someone who was stirring in me the feelings I had been longing for but were so rare for me. I felt a thrill of anticipation of the potential of connecting with someone who could understand all these broken parts of me and still choose to accept me, because those feelings weren’t foreign to her.

The text paragraphs became a part of my new routine in Philadelphia, walking across the river to campus with headphones in my ears listening to her music recommendations and spending my evenings walking around the local square park, grinning ear to ear at her name on my phone screen when her texts came in and listening to nostalgic favorites as I mulled over what she had said and considered my responses. The adrenaline of our almost canceled plans because my car got towed, her moving around her lab schedule to accommodate seeing me, her specific compliments about my coordinated outfit and the way my hair framed my face, the walk through the blaring sun, followed by sudden, pouring rain, followed by sun again and the subsequent rainbow that appeared in our frame of vision as we walked back through the lawns to her apartment that seemed a confirmation of her interest and the universe’s acknowledgement of the specialness of this connection. I thought of her as I made the decision to drive an hour to the YMCA in the suburbs of Pennsylvania, as it was the only one nearby that had a synchronized swimming program, inspired by her commitment to her analogous niche interest, pole dancing, and consulted her before making my own decision about whether to pursue it longer term. I thought about my excitement as I drove through the beautiful windy roads paved through gleaming greenery that was unheard of in California. The leaves seemed to shine in the summer light with a beauty I would have never noticed if I weren’t so intoxicated with dopamine spikes, and all the time I had spent in Los Angeles, driving through the true-to-stereotype horrendous traffic to awkward queer events and boring dates, trying to force feelings that weren’t there and trying not to feel resentment for my friends who were getting married to their best friends…it all suddenly felt worth it, because maybe I didn’t have to feel the pain of that loneliness anymore. Maybe it was the rareness of a connection like this that made it so special.

I wasn’t in love, because I barely knew her, and I wasn’t thinking that far into the future, but she was the first one in a long time to make my heart feel anything, to remind me that I wasn’t broken by my past and that I could still feel deeply. I didn’t find love, but I found the willingness to confront the part of me that wants what doesn’t want me – well, at least not in the same way. She might have wanted me, but not in the way that I wanted her, not as someone to connect to, to share with, to face our pain together and uplift each other through the other parts of life that were hard. She was also in pain, but she didn’t want connection. She wanted control. She wanted to see if she could claim me as another prize in her collection of trophies that made her feel chosen.

She was comfortable in her own skin and body in a way that I could only dream of, comfortable expressing herself through pole dancing – she knew she was attractive, and she wasn’t afraid to express it through her art, her body like a paintbrush and the pole like a canvas. I admired that part about her, but it was more the sentimental texts and poetry that had sparked my interest. There was a shift in our correspondence after she’d sent me some music that she acknowledged was different from the sentimental R&B singer-songwriter favorites that we shared – it had, well, more of a sexually charged vibe. She told me she was curious to know what I would think of this music because it was different. What followed was a question about a book on asexuality she had seen on my Goodreads. She asked how I identified, and I answered honestly, that I identified as on the asexual spectrum, as demisexual, as someone who needed to develop an emotional connection before feeling sexual attraction and preferred to take things slow. My admittance was followed by a two-day silence, a weekend where I tried to distract myself with excursions to the Hindu temple and a uniquely excellent Italian restaurant with new friends in Philly but ended up oversharing my anxiety with them. “If it’s meant to be, he’ll respond,” they tried to soothe me, though their assumption about my sexuality only made me feel more alone. Her late response, a first for our previously steady correspondence, confirmed what I had a nagging suspicion of – she wasn’t the person I was hoping for. She was not ready for the type of connection I wanted. She was still exploring her sexuality, trying to regain control and reclaim her power from past wounds. She was enticed by the idea of having multiple intimate connections while remaining single and free from the possession of any one person. I expressed support for her journey and made a vow to myself to seek the connection I was craving from sources that were more compatible with me.

Our last hangout, initiated by her, accepted by me after two weak attempts to postpone, accepted against the advice of my caring, wiser and more experienced friends, took place in my neighborhood in Philly. Boundaries reconstituted, we met as friends, without the usual greeting and parting hugs, brought takeout mac and cheese flights up to the rooftop of my apartment with a view of the beautiful Philadelphia skyline before hanging out in my studio on the floor next to my bed with my dog, my flashing rainbow fairy lights, and fruity kombucha in wine glasses. To hammer in the boundary of us being friends, I brought to the conversation my dates with other people, overblown, as I knew that I had ended all these connections after the first date due to the lack of a click. During our subsequent excursion to a rooftop bar in the gayborhood of Philly, the drinks were flowing, and we gossiped and giggled as friends – until a pang hit me as she described the many other people she was connecting with in a way that I know never would have affected me with someone who was truly just a friend. I blamed my silence on the alcohol as she opened her Hinge in front of me and asked my opinion on the profiles of women who had liked her, claiming that sometimes she just engaged with people she didn’t care for because she liked the attention. “Like, please tell me I’m pretty,” the drunken admittance pierced me, as I wondered if that’s how she felt when I told her that I noticed the way she had chosen a perfect shade of red eyeshadow that matched her hanging red earrings, or admitted that I’d always been attracted to women with dark eyes (she had dark eyes), in contrast to my own lighter ones, because they felt so deep and mysterious.

Was she looking at me with pity, with smugness in capturing the romantic affection that my heart reserved for so few individuals? Was she aware of the feelings she was stirring in me as she asked, before we parted, “by the way, since we were talking about Hinge back in the bar, I’m curious, are you seeing anyone right now? Wow, I’m turning red.” When I asked her why she wanted to know, she clarified that her curiosity was just for the gossip. Suddenly, I remembered how she’d told me that the flashing rainbow fairy lights in my bedroom were too overstimulating, the same fairy lights that had soothed me through my most stressful moments. How when we discussed my favorite episode of the podcast Normal Gossip, the one about the queer women’s kickball league, we’d identified with characters on complete opposite ends of the spectrum. While I related most to the protagonist, Lucy, because of her feelings of frustration in finding a connection in the small world of queer women, and her unrequited crush on her teammate, Rory (though through the twists and turns of the plot, they ultimately end up together) – well, she had never envisioned herself as Rory, but rather she identified with Mel. Mel, the only girl on the team who was an ultra femme, the one who everyone wanted because she was hot. The one who Rory and her girlfriend Jada opened their relationship for, the one they both fell for – but to Mel, their connection was just casual.

How had I read her so wrong? How did this fit in with the woman she showed me through her poem, the one who pictured herself as a weed among flowers, the one I thought was just like me? The one who feared that she wasn’t beautiful enough to be loved, but found peace in having more to give to others and alleviate their pain, just like I did, but with her pursuit of me, double texts when I didn’t respond, and consistent words and actions and effort to come to see me and move her schedule for me, I hardly expected her to be the one to confirm that fear for me even more deeply.

“Paheli, people who use people like that and mistreat people they’re not interested in are almost always overcompensating for a deep insecurity,” my wise friend had told me over the phone as I relayed the whole story. “Why would people who like themselves ever treat others so poorly?”

A part of me yearns to reach out to her, to try to alleviate her pain, but the other part warns me not to get too close, even as a friend, not to stick around and watch her love other women the way she never loved me, to project onto these unsuspecting women my unfair envy, my unjustified comparisons. My overthinking, childish, racing thoughts about how if only I were as pretty (read: thin) as them, maybe I would be good enough to be one she loved – even though I cognitively know that it is as impersonal as a song that stirs my deepest emotions falling on indifferent ears in my brother. It doesn’t change the inherent worth of the song one bit, and I know I won’t feel like I’m asking for too much from someone whose heart matches mine, who wants the same things as I do. And I’m now wise enough to understand that her pain was never mine to carry.

They say that grief is just love with nowhere to go. I know what I felt for her was never love, because love does not seek to possess someone who doesn’t want to be possessed. But I know it had the potential to grow into love, and since it will never happen, I grieve. I grieve for the girl who only ever wanted to feel understood and loved by someone she could also love, and how that feels so elusive while it looks easy to others. For the little girl who spent years of her adolescence suppressing who she really is because her feelings aren’t what society deems “normal.” For the girl in her early twenties who had to hold it all in and be strong for others, who blamed herself for the actions of a man. The woman who always only received the message that her feelings were too much, who doesn’t feel deserving of love because she’s never experienced it, whose own mother told her she was more beautiful when she starved and purged herself. The woman who feels shame for wanting it, even though craving love and connection is only human. We are not built to go through it all alone.

It feels lonely to realize that I can never express my grief to her because she will never understand it. To her, my grief would seem, at best, cringy, and at worst, deeply uncomfortable. I know that if I allowed it, she might still speak to me regularly, giving me just the right amount of attention and emotional validation I’ve always craved from someone I’m attracted to, making my face light up with every text the way no one else’s I’ve met since has, but I had to make the hard decision of setting a boundary for myself because I know it would be settling for less than what I want out of loneliness. Staying friends, at least so soon, is a bad idea – friends are people you should be able to express yourself to and be yourself with. Moreover, maybe I don’t want to be friends with someone where I’m unsure of their intentions with me, whether they respect me or speak about me behind my back in the same degrading way they speak about others. Maybe it’s okay to decide I don’t want that, that my own well-being comes first, while still wishing her the best and respecting her journey through her pain from afar.

My favorite song she showed me was “Keys” by Meera. It speaks of how it makes the most sense, as the sole owner of a heart, to protect it and keep it safe, but we are a reckless bunch and we decide to give it all away anyways. The irony of her sending me this song as I decided to let her into my private space, something I rarely do, against my better judgment, was not lost on me. But I don’t regret it, because that’s what I was asking for. Just a story, just some feelings. I know that the leaves were shining brightly and the music sounded magical because of me, not because of her. And if I can still feel it after the deep trauma of my past, I think my heart can survive after a more simple unrequited crush. Moreover, I never shied away from facing the rejection of this connection head-on, without trying to conceal my interest, while maintaining respect for myself, and I think that’s a signal of my new willingness to be emotionally available. What she chooses to do with the knowledge of my feelings is her business, not mine, even if that choice is seeing it as just another conquest. I made it clear that I wasn’t going to participate in any power play games. Moreover, this experience has made me feel closer to my straight friends from college, grad school and synchro, with a newfound understanding of their experiences with men. I feel like I have been through a rite of passage of womanhood. It shocks me every time I realize how our experiences aren’t always so unique.

I take solace in the fact that as much pain as I’ve felt, I’ve always made it a point to use that pain as fuel to try to heal others and not to hurt or use them. I feel sorry for people who turn cold and close their hearts, because I know that as much it can hurt, keeping a soft and open heart is what makes living feel so magical. I understand the power and strength of my softness, even if others don’t see it, and for that, I respect myself.

Asexual Awareness Week

Happy Ace Awareness Week! It’s four weeks into our ten-week quarter, and between my Machine learning class, working on the last edits for my paper, my job, and my board position, I have been making time to attend a weekly virtual space hosted by the LGBTQ center at my university: the Ace/Aro space. Today, in honor of Ace week, we had an Ace Awareness Social, which was incredibly empowering and affirming. I’m still processing my gratitude for this space, and I thought I would take some time to reflect on it a little.

This is a part of my identity that I haven’t discussed with most of my friends in-depth, but since it is global Ace Week, and this quarter is the first time in my life that I have actively sought out Ace-centered social spaces in my university, I thought I would dive in and try to unpack some of my experience. Keep in mind that this post is only one person’s experience, and I still have a lot to learn about myself and others who identify on the spectrum with different experiences. If you want to learn more, there are a myriad of more comprehensive resources. With that, I will get started on discussing the basic theory and my experiences.

From what I understand, the basic pillar behind Asexual Spectrum theory is the split attraction model. The main idea behind this is that romantic and sexual attraction are separate from one another. The Ace community exists on a spectrum; there are some asexual people who are romantic, who date and have romantic feelings and deep emotional connections and commitment with little or no sexual desire. There are also people who are aromantic, who have platonic relationships, no relationships, or purely sexual relationships. And there are people who lie somewhere in the middle, people who experience sexual and/or romantic attraction very rarely, and people who are demisexual or demiromatic, forming sexual or romantic attraction, respectively, only after forming a close emotional bond.

Typically, in mainstream culture, we tend to view romance and sex as closely intertwined, or at the very least, romance always seems to have some sort of sexual undertones. For me, these things have always been separate, and low sexual attraction has always been a point of isolation for me even in the queer community. With the hypersexual and sex-positive, colorful environment, even though I love it and cherish and respect it, I often feel there is something missing for me. It has been extremely affirming for me to find spaces this quarter to discuss these things and hear like-minded experiences.

Growing up, as many young women are, I was taught that if a boy or a man asked for my number or asked me on a date, to say “I’m flattered, but no, thank you.” I memorized these lines and recited them, without giving thought to what I wanted. I felt confused when girls my age started showing interest in boys, and during sleepovers, I would dread the inevitable question: “who do you like?” When boys showed interest in me, it flew completely over my head, and I only became aware of it when my friends pointed it out to me. I tell people that my first love was Chemistry, because once I discovered my passion for science, I didn’t have eyes for anything else. In my senior year of high school, the running joke amongst me and my friends was that I was asexual, because I was the only one in the group who had absolutely no interest in dating.

In college, things became a little more complicated. In my first year, for the first time, lived in a dorm with fifteen other girls. I was in a triple with two other girls, and the three of us were close with one of our floormates and adopted her as our “honorary roommate”. The four of us did almost everything together, from late-night study parties and microwave cooking to exploring gelato shops, restaurants, and beaches in San Diego. After almost a year of being friends, I started to develop a stronger emotional attachment to one of my roommates. At the time, I wasn’t aware that it was romantic, because I didn’t feel any sexual attraction towards her. She was a close friend, and we had edited each other’s essays for our college humanities courses and confided in each other about our vulnerabilities. She was the only person I had trusted with my high school trauma, and she seemed to be the only one who could understand the depth of my emotional experience. It was confusing because it didn’t feel to me like more than a friendship, except for the fact that things were suddenly awkward. I started to become shy around her. When we were hanging out in a group, I became self-conscious. I noticed her from the corner of my eye, and I talked to everyone else in the group but her. “Why are you being weird around me randomly?” she’d asked playfully. At some point, we talked about it. I didn’t understand my feelings at the time, but I explained that I felt more emotionally attached to her than my other friends. She told me that she would always be my friend, but that she preferred to set boundaries in friendships. It was confusing and painful at the time, but eventually, our relationship repaired itself and I grew from it.

I was still not willing to admit that my feelings were romantic, but a few months later, I questioned my sexuality. I downloaded dating apps and tried talking to women. I matched with a lesbian woman who was around my age, who was beautiful by all conventional standards, and who had similar interests and hobbies, including pets. On paper, it seemed perfect. We made plans to meet up with our dogs at a nearby dog park. I enjoyed talking to her and I enjoyed her company, but I didn’t feel any spark. We became friends and kept in touch, but it never became anything more than that. I concluded that it was just a phase, and I didn’t actually like women that way.

A couple of years later, I tried dating men, and was met with the same disappointing results. I liked them as people and understood they were attractive by society’s standards, but I didn’t feel any sparks. I remember telling my friend that I was confused because the guy I was seeing kept texting me between dates. I was going to see him in less than a week. Why was he so clingy? My friend burst out laughing and told me that was normal for guys you’re dating.

Although I’d had admiration crushes on my female teachers in the past, a lot of it had more to do with wanting to be like them and seeking their approval. The summer before my last year of college was the first time I had a crush on another woman, which made me realize that I definitely liked women. Suddenly, I became a clingy texter, much like the guy I had been seeing. I wanted to talk to her all the time, but I convinced myself that it was just because I admired her and really wanted to be her friend. There was so much shame and unpacking my own trauma that came with that experience that I denied it for several months. But finally, during the spring break before my last quarter of college, I watched the movie “Love, Simon,” a coming of age story about a teenage boy and his process of coming out to his friends and family. I was inspired by this movie, and I joined a support group in the LGBT center in my university, which helped me process my attraction to women.

About a month before graduating, I finally came out to one of my friends. She’d always teased me about men, and it never even occurred to her that I might like women, which made the experience scarier. But she was incredibly supportive, and she told me that she wanted to take me to a gay bar, which remains one of the only girl bars in California. When we reached the bar, she looked around at all the women and asked me “So, any prospects?” Although I was extremely moved by her support, the idea that one could be attracted to someone they’d never even spoken to baffled me.

When I came to grad school, I became a lot more involved in the LGBTQ+ community on campus. I made a lot of new queer girl friends, and I felt a sense of belonging from being in spaces where attraction to women felt so normal. But even in those spaces, I found myself suppressing parts of my identity in order to fit in. I realized that most people form attraction upon first glance, that they can immediately tell from looking at someone whether or not they would date them. This is something I’ve never been able to relate to. Even during the times when I’d experienced attraction to women, I never really had the thought that I wanted to date them or become physically intimate – it was more that I had affection for them and wanted to get to know them better – but on a different level than with friends. Although a lot of my attraction was based on feeling emotionally connected, I recently learned that in asexuality theory, there are, more complex forms of attraction, such as aesthetic attraction. You can be drawn to someone because of how they look, without the underlying desire to be physically intimate.

I’ve realized that part of the reason dating apps never seem to work for me is because the intimacy feels forced. In order to have genuine intimacy and a connection that doesn’t feel like a chore, I need to get to know someone on an emotional level, in a setting that doesn’t feel like there is pressure to date or escalate things physically. However, to avoid complicating my friendships by developing feelings, I have started keeping more emotional boundaries with all of my friends. Sometimes, I wonder if I will always be lonely. But today, something a woman in the Ace Awareness Social said really resonated with me, about demiromanticism, and wondering if romantic feelings arose simply because society puts pressure on us to “find someone.”

I’ve thought about that often, whether I really want to “find love” or I just romanticize the idea of falling in love because I’ve never experienced that deep, powerful feeling that they show in the movies, where you love someone with all their heart and they love you back in exactly the same way and you lean on each other and support each other through all your endeavors. I’ve spent so much of my life taking care of myself and focusing on school that I often feel that having someone else there would make me feel stifled. But then looking around and seeing everyone else in love makes me feel pressure to find “the one.” I know that at some point, most of my friends are going to find “the one” for them, and since society tends to place romantic relationships high on a pedestal over friendships, I sometimes fear that I’m going to be left behind.

When I first started grad school, I considered attending the weekly Ace Space, but it was at 11 am on Friday, and I always had a class or some meeting or the other during that time. This is the first quarter where I don’t have a full course load, and the online setting makes my schedule even more flexible. I’m very grateful that I’ve been able to find the time to squeeze it in. Attending the weekly space and this Ace Awareness Social has been extremely powerful, because I’ve realized that there are other students in my university who share my experiences, whose lives aren’t centered around physical intimacy and they’re okay with it. I’ve started to grow fond of this space where students get into passionate discussions about tea and animals and aesthetics and ice-cream flavors, as well as deeper discussions about self-discovery and finding our place in the world. With the pandemic, the election, uncertainty about the future, and navigating this perpetual feeling of being an outsider in society, it’s easy to feel lost. But during this month, the Ace community has been an anchor that has been keeping my hope and motivation alive, and for that, I am extremely thankful.