CHAPTER 9
PLAYING WITH OTHERS
WITHOUT REALLY BEING TAUGHT, most of us know what a romantic relationship is supposed to look like: heterosexual, often; monogamous, usually; sexual, pretty much always. Relationships are like an escalator, and a successful relationship is one that goes up and up and up, from a romantic relationship to marriage, then having kids. Running parallel to the relationship escalator is the escalator of touch, or, as they are commonly known, the sexual “bases”: hand-holding to feeling up to oral sex to penis-in-vagina intercourse (a “home run”). Sex is the reward and the ultimate destination on the journey. Anything else means getting stuck.
I knew all this, though I couldn’t have told you exactly how I learned or been able to point to who shared this knowledge. I also knew people who didn’t follow these rules exactly, yet their relationships still highlighted the existence of the rules because they so often felt the need to justify any deviation from the expected. The exception proves the rule, even when the rule is mostly unspoken and unquestioned.
Selena, the Bay Area workplace consultant, also believed that relationships should look a certain way, that they had to come prepackaged and ready-made. Selena might have spent her entire life believing this—if not for the fact that the first time she had sex, freshman year of college, she found herself inspecting her fingernails and then wondering why she was thinking about her manicure when she was supposed to be in the throes of passion.
It’s possible that it was just bad sex, but Selena’s girlfriend, Georgia, was “all glowy” and happy afterward. A few more experiments made it clear that sex wasn’t what Selena had expected it to be. Selena wanted to want, but it wasn’t enough. And if sex wasn’t what Selena had expected it to be, the relationship itself would not be what the two of them had anticipated. So Selena and Georgia began to talk, setting out the terms and asking questions where before they had operated from an assumption. They asked each other: How much time did they really want to spend together? What types of physicality and touch were okay and what didn’t do it for one or the other or either? Did they want to have sex?
Georgia’s answer to the last question was yes. Selena’s answer to the last question was no.
Aces are not the only ones who can have very particular requirements for dating and relationships. Take the Amish and Orthodox Jewish communities, for example. Their cultural rules around dating might seem unusual by the standards of liberal culture, but they solve this problem by dating other members of their communities. Aces, however, don’t cluster in geographical enclaves or have our own long-established dating traditions. The numbers aren’t on our side, either. Keeping in mind the official statistic that aces are about 1 percent of the population1—not to mention that being asexual isn’t usually the most important factor in romantic compatibility—most end up entering the wider dating pool and trying to make a relationship work with an allo partner.
The truth is that if aces were forced to have traditional relationships, many of us would end up alone, or partnered but unhappy. To avoid this, it becomes necessary to challenge the conventional wisdom of how relationships are supposed to work, starting with the ur-belief, the one that can be found at the bottom of almost everything else: that sex is one of our most primal instincts, as natural and automatic as breathing.
This is wrong. We don’t have sex purely from instinctive drive. Biology does play a part—it can create the feelings and urges—but biology alone does not tell us what those urges represent and what they lead to. Human physiology provides “a set of physical possibilities unlabeled as to use or meaning,” writes sex researcher Leonore Tiefer in her 1995 essay collection Sex Is Not a Natural Act.2 Culture—like books and movies and what parents say and what we see everyone else doing—then teaches a story to attach to these sensations. Individual psychology and context also play a part. A beating heart and sweaty palms can be interpreted as anxiety or excitement. In one famous psychology experiment, men were asked to walk across either a swaying bridge or a sturdy bridge. All were approached by a pretty woman who asked them to fill out a survey and told them to call if they had any questions. The men on the swaying bridge were more likely to call the woman, because they interpreted their physical fear from the surroundings as attraction to the researcher.3 Sensation plus story.
In the sexual realm, even basic acts can signify very different things. Remember the masturbation paradox and how it’s odd that aces who masturbate are considered to lack a sexuality? Some of the aces who masturbate consider it sexual, but others don’t. To them, masturbation is like any other bodily quirk, no different from scratching an itch on the arm.
Kissing is another example of the slipperiness of the sexual. In most Western cultures, kissing is considered a non-negotiable step on the road to a romantic relationship. Yet when groups as diverse as the Mehinaku of Brazil, the Thonga of South Africa, and the Trobriand Islanders first encountered the act, they perceived it as disgusting instead of a mark of affection.4 Today, romantic kissing is still not a universal human act. In one 2015 study, anthropologists surveyed 168 cultures and found that fewer than half of them engaged in what they called “romantic-sexual kissing.”5 Kissing can be a learned act, not something done by everyone around the world and throughout time.
Similarly, the concept of sex itself is constructed. The word conjures up images of penis-in-vagina penetration, even though that’s a limiting way to think about sex and the many other ways of having sex and being sexual. “We tend to think that sex is immune to social forces,” Lisa Wade, the sociologist at Occidental College, tells me. “We fetishize sex as this unique asocial, ahistorical, acultural force, just something that bubbles up from inside of us and is completely primal. But that of course is not true.”
Rather, social context colors almost every situation. A woman visiting the gynecologist does not consider herself to be engaging in sexual behavior with the gynecologist; she thinks she is undergoing a medical exam. Giving a backrub to a romantic partner might be the same physical action as giving a backrub to a relative, but the intention and feelings provoked are very different.
Society teaches what sex is, how to have sex, how much sex to have, how to feel about that sex, and what a good sex life is. It provides sexual scripts and rules to follow. Sex advice books, which frequently push the narrative of sex as a primal act,6 socialize us too. They teach what sex means for relationship health and what types of sex are good and bad—and in doing so, amusingly, disprove their own claim about sex as an immutable drive. If sex is completely natural and biological, why does anyone need this industry of sex experts at all? Why are there sex manuals dating back centuries?7 Why do we need Cosmopolitan to tell us how to do it, when we far more rarely see guidebooks for how to digest and how to breathe?
The scripted nature of sex and relationships became clear to James, the Seattle programmer, once he started dating an ace woman. For the first time in his life, James realized that he didn’t know whether he liked kissing. In previous relationships, he kissed without thinking, mostly to signal interest and keep the relationship moving forward. Romantic relationships involved kissing; that was a rule.
Since James is a man who dates women, another implicit rule—the expectation that men take the lead—gave him a good amount of control over when or how quickly he initiated sex. The initiation itself, though, always felt non-negotiable. “I definitely feared losing attention,” James says. “There’s an expectation that after a certain number of dates that if some things haven’t happened, you’re not interested.” There was a sense that feelings “were not really real unless we’re doing certain things,” he adds. Without the steady infusion of sexual attention, the woman might think that the relationship was off or that it was a bad sign that he couldn’t be like everyone else and follow the rules. Kissing was so mandatory that it no longer even registered as mandatory. James never thought to question whether kissing brought him any pleasure.
As she’s explored her own ace identity, James’s girlfriend has found that she doesn’t want to do anything beyond cuddling. Along the way, James has had to unlearn some of what he has been taught about how physical intimacy is linked to emotional intimacy and how dating is supposed to progress. “A lot of the things that I would do, I really don’t need to do anymore and in fact shouldn’t do here,” he says. Behavior that would have been a red flag for others turns out to be what she prefers. The first few times they hung out together, James caught himself planning how he would break the touch barrier, a step that would usually be necessary a couple of dates in at the latest. It felt odd to not have to worry about that, and it was a little disorienting to notice how he was so used to always strategizing the next move. “Now I’ve become a little more comfortable with letting whatever happen, happen,” he says. “I have to perform less.”
Romantic relationships without kissing aren’t normal in American society, insofar as normal means common. Sleeping in separate beds or living apart or swinging aren’t normal. All these choices face stigma because of the power of normal, but normal and widespread matter far more in relationships than they should. Normal is often treated as a moral judgment, when it is often simply a statistical matter. The question of what everyone else is doing is less important than the question of what works for the two people in the actual relationship. It matters that everyone’s needs are carefully considered and respected, not that everyone is doing the same thing.
Relationship rules are not natural law. Natural law cannot be defied. Gravity will pull you back to the ground no matter how much thinking and questioning you back do about physics. But though sex and relationship have biological and physical components, they are also interpretations that come from our mind and the minds of others, so it is possible to reframe and start anew. Relationships should always be a game of mix and match, not a puzzle that you have to perfectly snap into, or a Jenga tower that will collapse as soon as you try to wiggle one block out of place. Customizability is the best part, yet most people try so hard to make their relationship stick to its premade form, a one-size-fits-all shape. Many people don’t take advantage of their own freedom.
But they can, and this is good news for aces. Aces, along with other queer communities, have been questioning sexual and relationship scripts for a long time. You have to, when your starting point is on the outside of most scripts. This is good news for allos too, who may be happier opting out of default patterns even if they can fit in. Ace-allo relationships, like all relationships, take creativity, patience, and vulnerability and require both partners to investigate and then violate the lessons we are taught about sex, to interrogate and reframe their own beliefs and desires and beliefs about desires.
Sex, in addition to being primal, is supposedly non-negotiable. “It does not seem to be enough to take reader interest in sex for granted, rather sex has to be promoted as absolutely vital,” observe the authors of Mediated Intimacy: Sex Advice in Media Culture, an academic study of popular sex advice. It is not just vital for a person, but also absolutely vital for any relationship.8 Sex, according to this popular advice, is the glue that holds people together and keeps relationships from collapsing. The Mediated Intimacy scholars quote from sex advice books that tell people that they “owe it to themselves” to leave if there’s no sex and to declare the lack of sex a deal-breaker.9 Other problems can be endured but sexual problems, apparently less so. Without sex, it seems, the health of the relationship and the feelings between partners are always doomed.
Such is the lesson being taught to the masses. Specialized sex therapy books for professionals echo many of the same ideas,10 according to ace blogger Anagnori, who is studying to be a therapist. Well-meaning guides usually point out that sexual norms are too rigid and that everyone would be happier if we stopped worrying about having sex exactly like everyone else. However, almost no books go on to say that it’s okay if someone doesn’t want to have sex at all. Constrictions need to be loosened, but not too much. The underlying assumption is that sex in relationships is imperative and everything else—the amount of sex, the number of partners, the positions, the toys—follows from that axiom.
Accordingly, sex therapists and other relationship experts like to focus on the social factors—for example, sex feeling like an obligation or one person’s sexual pleasure being prioritized over the other’s—that can often responsible for low sexual desire, especially for women. It is true that these factors often play an enormous role. But accepting asexuality requires accepting that these social factors are not always the cause. It is true that sexuality and attraction are social and psychological, as well as biological. It is also true that, sometimes, changing one of these factors cannot fully override the influence of the others. Sometimes, changing the relationship or thinking about sex differently won’t change the level of sexual desire. Sometimes, as in the case of Kendra, the Black ace writer, everything else can be great and someone just doesn’t want to have sex.
Kendra was a virgin when she began dating her boyfriend. Years later, when she told him she was asexual, his first response was that maybe it was because of him, that she needed to try other people because he doesn’t do it for her sexually. “I had to make him see that wanting to have sex wasn’t about him at all,” and had nothing to do with his attractiveness, she says, “and when he finally grasped that, it was like a light bulb went off.” Her low sexual desire was not a reflection of him or the quality of their relationship.
The logical implication of these messages about the necessity of sex is that asexuality is an existential threat to any hope of a lasting relationship. Asexuality begins to feel like a twisted, reverse version of the scarlet A, a modern brand that now stands for ace and alone. It’s no wonder that people hate the idea that they might be ace, if not wanting sex for any reason is a death sentence for romance. Tellingly, this cultural lesson has power even if neither person in the relationship actually wants to have more sex.
Brian and Alison are a couple that haven’t had sex in twenty years.11 He’s fine with it. She’s fine with it. They don’t feel fine about the fact that they feel fine, because “sexless marriage” is not an extremely negative term. It’s all too easy to be haunted by the worry that a relationship without sex is broken, or is about to be, even if the members are happy. Maybe the two people don’t know it yet. Brian and Alison, who were profiled in The Guardian, can keep their sexless marriage secret from others, but the interpretation of that phrase still bothers the couple themselves. Brian and Alison are not their real names
Both questioned their own experiences and their own happiness. They joined a support group for celibate couples. “It did worry me that I didn’t want anything more than kisses and cuddles, and even when we had sex I knew ‘nice’ wasn’t the word most people use to describe it,” Alison told The Guardian. “But I don’t want other people to know because sex seems to be such a big thing to everyone else. I don’t have to justify our marriage to other people, but it’s almost like I have to justify it to myself.”12
Far more common than celibate relationships are ones where the partners do have sex, just not as much as one person would like. Though this situation is frustrating, the reality is that a mismatch can be inevitable—the question is how much and for how long. According to the 2013 National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles (NATSAL), a major survey in the United Kingdom that comes out every decade, among those in relationships in the past year, about one-fourth reported not having the same amount of sexual interest as their partner.13 A mismatch should be treated as an expected issue, not like one person’s fault or a mistake. Sex advice in books and magazines can create the impression that no one should settle for anything less than an amazing sex life, but in the long run it might be more helpful to emphasize how common mediocre sex is, rather than portray it as a terrible embarrassment.
I do believe that certain aspects of relationships, like mutual respect and trust and kindness, are essential rights. I don’t believe that a great sex life always needs to be part of this list. Or rather, I believe that people should decide for themselves what matters in relationships regardless of what others say.
The sex writer Lux Alptraum, author of Faking It: The Lies Women Tell About Sex—And the Truths They Reveal, remembers when a college friend got engaged and insisted that her fiancé was the best sex she’d ever had. This had to be the case, the friend said, because she would never have agreed to marry someone who provided merely okay sex. “That left a huge mark on me, until I started thinking, ‘What does it even mean to have the “best sex”?’” Alptraum says to me. “What does sex even mean and is the ‘best’ sex the most exciting sex or the softest and most comfortable? You get to realizing that your life partner realistically needs to be so many things and sex doesn’t have to be at the top.” Rarely does a perfect correlation between sexual chemistry and relationship quality exist (or last), and the people with whom Alptraum has been most sexually compatible haven’t necessarily been those that were the best for the relationships she wanted. “For me, there’s a baseline of pleasure and there are so many other things about a person that makes them worth it,” she says.
Sexual incompatibility is challenging. So are many other parts of relationships. Every relationship is strained by so many factors—over the eternal return of the same serious fights over spending money, raising children, or taking care of aging parents—yet sexual problems can seem pathetic in a way that is not true of these other situations. Sex can be a reason to leave, but it doesn’t need to automatically be more of a reason to leave than any other important issue. One ace woman who has been with her partner for years simply told me, “It’s a problem for us.” The two fight about sex often, just like they fight about other things too. They still think it’s worth it to stay together.
The idea that it is okay for sex to be lackluster, or an ongoing source of tension if other aspects are worth it, is freeing for some ace-allo couples I know. It can be a relief to decide that a shared love of rock climbing or the same sense of humor is more important than sexual compatibility. Making this decision doesn’t have to be settling. It can be practical and wise and affirming, a sign of critical thinking and an expression of firmly held intention and values.
For her part, Kendra says that all the messages about the special importance of sex and the special torture of not having sex made her feel like a burden. She and her boyfriend will decide to have sex a few times a month but don’t reach that goal most of the time. Then, the guilt comes from both sides: from her because she doesn’t want to have sex, and from him because he does and doesn’t want to pressure her. In these situations, all the other good things about her relationship don’t feel like enough. “I’ve given him so many outs, told him he should leave and find someone else,” Kendra says. “The last time I did it, he was like, ‘Do not ever say this to me again, I don’t want to leave, I don’t want you to feel like I should leave. Stop telling yourself this. I’m not looking for anyone else.’ So it’s never been a question of when we’re going to break up, it’s a question of how we can change our relationship.”
Stay with anyone long enough and that will always be the question. It is more than merely acceptable to pick and choose and then adapt; it is necessary. Tiefer, the sex researcher, is critical of what she sees as a relentless pressure to improve in every aspect of our lives. “You’re not supposed to be tolerant of just ‘doing well.’ You have to be wonderful in all areas, you have to optimize,” she says. “People think that you have to be able to have everything but you can’t. You focus on what’s important.
“I learned that from my mother,” Tiefer continues. “She was an intellectual, political, musical creature and she knew that to gain mastery you have to give in some areas. She didn’t care about cooking. She didn’t think of herself as a sexual creature and never thought of sex as something important to her. Aren’t there studies showing that you can only hold seven things in your head at once? One of them doesn’t have to be your sex life. It can be there, but it doesn’t have to be.”
Sex was important to Georgia, but not to Selena. Selena, who would soon start identifying as ace, said no to sex but yes to everything else. Yes to still dating Georgia, yes to spending the same amount of time together, yes to being affectionate and sleeping in the same bed.
The process of questioning and answering set the stage for how Selena would relate to others and approach relationships going forward. “Relationships and sex were a black box, and we were starting to take it apart,” she says. “Our conversations really stripped the complex parts from what I saw as this machine that I could never crack.” The back-and-forth had made it clear that a traditional relationship—monogamous, sexual—would not work for them, but that something else might.
So the two decided to open their relationship. They discarded monogamy and the relationship escalator and belief that any relationship that wasn’t exclusive and didn’t progress toward marriage was a failure. They stopped having sex but rejected the idea that a relationship without sex had to end or be emotionally impoverished. Both remained dedicated to each other and also started looking for new partners, and Selena became immersed in the kink scene. She threw herself into play parties, learning “so, so fast” about bondage, impact play, dominance, submission, how her body worked, how she didn’t want her body to work, what she liked in a partner and what she didn’t like, as well as what she liked and didn’t like in people generally.
“Now I could actually communicate about what I wanted,” Selena says of that period of exploration. “I could say, ‘I’m looking for this and I don’t want this,’ and that space brought me into real dating instead of treating everyone like this black box that I had to accept on a trial basis. I could be like, ‘You’re very attractive, but that’s not what I’m looking for, though we should hang out,’ whereas before I’d be like, ‘You’re so attractive, let’s just try it,’ and it’d be a couple months of shit.”
One funny thing: At most of the kink parties Selena went to, no one was doing anything that seemed to her to be sexual. People would say, “I’m tying someone up, that’s sex,” but much of the time it didn’t seem to feel sexual and nobody could explain how this made sense. Was tying someone up really sex, or was it a rope and some trust? Selena didn’t care about sex, but she did love rope, so it was unclear what exactly was happening here, and what she actually wanted.
Intimacy, as it turns out. Selena cared about intimacy, and kink was a way for her to be intimate with others. Intimacy and sex are not the same. Intimacy can be in service of sex or sex can be in service of intimacy, or they can be completely separate. People were mixing up intimacy and sex, just as they mixed up sex and what they want from sex. Sexual desire is frequently about ego and not libido. In this, there is an opportunity.
At a workshop many years ago, back when I cared more about self-improvement, I learned a technique called goal factoring. I sat at a table with other young people who all wanted to optimize ourselves to our limit. Each of us wrote down a goal at the top of a piece of paper and circled it. Mine was to run a half-marathon. Next, we asked ourselves why we wanted to achieve that goal, then wrote those answers in boxes lower down on the piece of paper, with lines connecting to the original goal. We kept asking ourselves why, why, why.
When it comes to sex, many people don’t ask why enough. Casting sex as a primal, biological need often hides the fact that, as Selena noted, it is just as often motivated by emotional desire. Sexual incompatibility can be challenging precisely because it is connected to so many emotional needs that, when unfulfilled, create distance and dissatisfaction. These can include everything from the desire to get to know a new person to the desire to use someone else’s desire as a barometer of your own self-worth. Though people do want sex only for the sake of physical release, in so many cases people want sex as a shortcut to something else, sex as a tool and a means to an end—a certain feeling—and not necessarily the end itself. Sex serves many purposes, but without more emotional excavation, it can seem like the why of sex is only to orgasm. And even when someone realizes that the purpose of sex is to reach a feeling, it can seem like sex and its lead-up are the only possible routes.
James believed that you couldn’t enter a relationship and enjoy that bond without touch and kiss. Others think that the bases track neatly onto emotions so that holding hands is a little bit intimate and kissing more intimate and having sex the most intimate thing of all. Reality is rarely this neat or linear. Sex can be boring and impersonal, while a brush of the hand can be thrilling. One person can feel close to another from far away and the same person can have penetrative intercourse and not feel much of anything. Touch doesn’t have to be a hierarchy, and sex doesn’t have to be the only, or even the best, way of achieving intimacy. When I polled my allo friends, many pointed out that holding hands felt like a bigger deal than making out or said that they didn’t like kissing either. People want to experience an emotion and get stuck on the known way to reach it. Yet there are many ways to reach a feeling, if you can figure out which feeling you’re searching for.
Back at the workshop, my reasons for wanting to run a half-marathon were seemingly obvious. I wanted to get in shape and do something that seemed hard and impressive. The others kept asking me: Why did I want to get in shape? Because I wanted to look good and be healthy. Why? Because I wanted to not be tired and sluggish. Why else? Because I wanted to be hot, okay? They continued: Were there other ways to achieve all that? Fitness classes, perhaps, that wouldn’t require me to spend a lot of time outdoors in the winter cold? Anything besides running, which I had said that I hated anyway?
To this day, I have not run a half-marathon. It turns out that the reasons that made people push back against this plan were the same reasons that I am probably never going to run a half-marathon. The goal-factoring exercise was a bit corny, but I frequently return to that experience when I think about goals of any kind. It is easy to commit to a goal. It is easy to stop at the obvious first level when asked about the motivation—to say that you want to run a half-marathon to get in shape—instead of digging further and thinking about why you want to get in shape, why it might be worth it, and how else it can be achieved. Being questioned really did help me refocus my attention on what I truly wanted to feel, not on the goal that seemed like it would get me there.
The same can be true for sex. Cassie, the therapist in Chicago, wouldn’t use the term goal factoring, but they would do a similar exercise if a client said they might be ace and still wanted to have sex. At the end of the day, goal factoring is really just goal questioning. Cassie will ask about the client’s definition of ace and their definition of sex, what else is going on and what purpose everything holds. Who’s in the room here? they’ll ask. You’re in the room, I’m in the room, but who else is speaking? Is this coming from your mother who expects you to have babies? Is this coming from just sitting in the societal soup where we’re all expected to love and enjoy sex constantly, but just not too much? Do you want to keep your partner—is that where this is coming from? Do you want to explore? Do you want to feel sexy?
In the chapter on romance, I suggested that we skip the labels and go directly to asking for what we want. In relationships, one option is to go directly to figuring out what sex is supposed to bring. When people stop viewing sex as the end-all be-all of an encounter, when sex loses its dominance as the most important and intimate thing that could happen, when it becomes feasible to ask directly for what is desired, more ways of relating and connecting become clear. “I’m starting to suspect that the greatest insight the ace spectrum has for sex therapy isn’t identity labels,” writes Anagnori, the ace blogger and therapist, “but making therapists re-examine their assumptions, and expanding their ideas of what ‘intimacy’ and ‘pleasure’ really mean.”14
Re-examining desires is not easy for anyone. I, for example, have never had an ace partner or been on an ace dating app. Partly because there aren’t enough people on those apps and I thought I could easily compromise with an allo partner. Partly because, for a long time, I just didn’t want an ace partner. I didn’t particularly care about the physical feeling of sex, but I craved the thrill of being, specifically, sexually desired. I didn’t experience sexual attraction myself, yet I wanted others to have that desire for me.
The hypocrisy is not lost on me. I have always known that I want to be sexually desired because I want emotional reassurance and a sense of my own power. Sexual desirability is one of the greatest assets that a person can have, a form of privilege and protection that makes it easier to move through life itself, a quality that people can covet even if we don’t feel the symmetrical desire toward others. (As aro aces say, not being romantically or sexually interested in others doesn’t protect you from being treated badly if you’re deemed romantically or sexually unworthy yourself.) Being the target of sexual desire felt like an extra form of ammunition against being left and balm for my insecurities about my looks, which were really insecurities about my ability to get what I wanted in life.
Lust in the popular imagination is involuntary and unendorsed, and that very fact about its nature—that it is disruptive and hard to control—can make it seem stronger than all the platitudes about love being a choice. Choice and intention and reframing and work all seem less powerful than obsession. The flip side of love being a choice is that someone can choose to stop loving you, whereas the compulsive thoughts and obsession that people associate with lust are harder to snuff out. I wanted something strong, something not easily controlled, something—ah yes—primal. Being emotionally desired seemed to be a cheaper thing, sad and second-rate.
An attitude like mine is common. James has sometimes told past partners that he’s willing to have sex but “you have to understand that while I get intimacy out of it, the actual form is for you.” Partners don’t like this, just as they don’t like willing consent. Anything short of enthusiastic, “I want sex for physical reasons” consent can feel like a blow to self-worth, puncturing the wished-for self-image of being someone who can inspire lust despite any and all obstacles. I know people are suspicious of emotional desire for sex because they like to ask me whether it feels good when non-repulsed aces have sex. The question stems from curiosity, but also from worry that the lack of sexual attraction means that all sex is automatic pity sex, endured instead of enjoyed.
The answer to the question of whether sex feels good for aces is sometimes yes and sometimes no, just like with allos. Many people, ace and allo alike, don’t feel a spontaneous desire for sex, but they start to feel that mental wanting once (consensual) physical touch is initiated and their body becomes aroused. This process, called responsive desire, is a slow warming-up, an “I know I’ll get into it once I start.”15 It’s common and often at the core of willing consent. Sex can feel good on a physical level without attraction; I’ve heard it described as “superior masturbation.” For others, the fact that the appeal is emotional or intellectual does not diminish its power. Jessica, a writer in New York, doesn’t experience sexual attraction but did enjoy having a friend with benefits. Jessica’s rule for her own body is “nothing below the waist,” but she finds other people’s sexual desires and sexuality endlessly fascinating. “It’s so intellectually stimulating and that’s fun for me,” she says. “It’s a game, like, okay, if I do this and this and this, what happens? What about that? It’s kind of taking apart the person and seeing what they’ll do and what makes sense, and what pleases them.”
The biggest difference is that it usually requires much more effort for sex to feel good for aces compared to allos and much less awkwardness for sex to feel boring or uncomfortable. To return to a food metaphor: Imagine the difference between eating when ravenous and being full but willing to share a snack. People can enjoy eating when they’re not hungry, but when the food itself is not satiating hunger, the social aspects need far more care and have to be just so.
Not being desired in the right way feels frustrating, and stepping away from this story takes work. But desire of other kinds can be just as heady, its grip just as hard to shake. Willing consent and other forms of emotional desire can be a gesture of caring, a starting point from which to explore and have fun too. The things people do from choice are meaningful and the effort that they take is a sign of a great love, even if they’re not pushed by an uncontrolled, intense physical passion. Few things are more romantic than someone trying hard because they want to make you happy. That is what this is.
A switch in perspective requires elevating emotional desire for sex and seeing work as romantic. It also requires everyone paying attention to what we want emotionally instead of just physically and finding new (or other) ways to fulfill those needs. This challenge can be the start of knowing others more fully, in multiple dimensions. There is often more leeway in relationships than people fear.
Zee Griffler, a filmmaker in Colorado, initially believed that they couldn’t be in relationships at all. After three relationships ended over sexual incompatibility, it seemed futile to even try. Avoiding relationships entirely was preferable to trying, becoming emotionally entangled, and having it end painfully. “If a relationship that was otherwise perfect resulted in me throwing it away because I didn’t want to have sex, why bother?” Zee says. “I had already gotten the data that I needed and there was no reason to replicate that experience if I was just going to keep hurting people.”
After years of refusing to consider relationships, Zee became open to dating again precisely because they learned about asexuality. The existence of asexuality helped answer the long-standing question of why they were different, and the stories of other aces in relationships made it seem like relationships could be possible for Zee too. “That was a revelation,” they say. “It made me intrigued, like, ‘Oh, maybe I should give this another shot on my own terms, rather than with the cultural narrative terms.’”
Zee met their current partner at a party. (“Everything about that sentence is very different from who I am,” they assure me, but it was a “post-election-sadness house party.”) The two started hanging out and were together within a day. For Zee’s girlfriend, sex is a way of reaching others. For Zee, sex goes from “vaguely amusing” to “deeply chore-like” after the first two weeks of a relationship. Sex isn’t repulsive, but it’s a hobby other people have that Zee doesn’t care for, like bowling. “If you have someone who loves to go bowling all the time, that’s great,” they say, “but I’m not the kind of person that wants to go bowling more than maybe once every couple of years, and I’m not going to buy the shoes for it.”
Acknowledging this didn’t magically lift the guilt of feeling that they were unfairly denying their girlfriend and not fulfilling her needs. “I had to work through that and basically stand up for myself,” Zee adds. “I finally got to a point where I was like, ‘This is how I feel and you’re going to have to be okay that I will probably never be sexually intimate from this point on. It could happen, maybe, but probably not.’”
The two are in an open relationship, but that isn’t a panacea. The person who wants sex can have sex with someone else, but confusion and resentment can still develop, and conversations about desire and need and want are necessary to remain close. “In [my girlfriend’s] experience, one of the only ways to be intimate with people was sex and otherwise they wouldn’t be intimate at all, so it took a fair bit of reorienting and negotiation,” Zee adds. “She’s said to me that ‘I feel like I need less sex around you because we’re so intimate in other ways.” Intimacy for them looks like a lot of cuddling, hand-holding, “being close without necessarily having to be unclothed.”
Honesty, better communication, and reframing needs have helped many aces and their partners discover how many options there can be to connect. “I realized there were simple things I could do—like touching him nicely or not being on my phone while talking—to help my partner feel recognized that weren’t just sex,” says Alicia, the scholar who has been with her partner for over a decade. It is only in recent years that they, as a couple, have realized that sex is the gateway to all sorts of issues, related to his need to be strong and respected and her fear of male anger. It’s easy to say that sex is important and it’s harder to be vulnerable enough to say that sex is important because a lack of sex creates fear and insecurity. It’s that “why” and that “because” that have led the relationship to a more vivid and honest place.
My personal curse is that I do question incessantly yet serve as a cautionary tale that knowledge alone can have hard limits. This sad state of affairs is sometimes called the insight fallacy, or the mistaken belief that understanding a problem will solve it. As Zee said, knowing about asexuality was a first step but not a quick fix. It did not prevent Zee from feeling that their partner was entitled to sex with them. Writing an entire book about asexuality has done little to assuage the anxiety that sometimes underlies my relationship.
For my boyfriend, Noah, our relationship was the first time he had been friends with someone before sleeping together. For me, our relationship was the beginning of a strange period related to sex. Previous relationships had all been long-distance, but instead of living a few states away, Noah lived across the park, close enough that on a good day he could run straight through and be at my place in ten minutes. His availability unnerved me. More importantly, this was the first relationship I had entered identifying as ace. We initially had so much sex that I started wondering if I was really ace. Then we started having less sex. Specifically, I started wanting less sex and a new era of my sexual worries began.
Sex plateaus in nearly every relationship, and I never felt any explicit outside pressure, from Noah or anyone else. What I needed to manage was not sexual desire but the pressure I put on myself. Sex can be a symbol, and I watched myself turning it into a symbol that mattered too much. If I didn’t want to have sex, I wondered about what that meant, as if it needed to mean anything at all. If I had sex and the slightest thing was wrong or I didn’t enjoy myself, I was sure that the relationship was headed downhill. I felt agitated if we didn’t have sex for a week, even if neither of us wanted to. I could name the traps, but I was falling into them anyway.
Soon, I found myself navigating the ways that identity labels and knowledge influence interpretation; the result was not always comforting. Before I knew about asexuality, if my desire for sex waned, I would have shrugged and said, “It’ll come back soon like it does for everyone. It’ll be fine.” Now, I found myself becoming strangely essentialist, wondering again if this was who I truly was and feeling bad, and then feeling bad because I should know better than to feel bad. That’s a one-two punch all too familiar to me.
The time I was most fearful and least inclined to have sex was likely related to a yearlong depressive episode related to my mother receiving a diagnosis of early-onset Alzheimer’s, compounded by the stress of office politics and writing this book after hours. All of this is plausible, even reasonable. It’s still a form of mental gymnastics designed to reassure myself that, deep down, I will always want to have sex in some form—and at the core of that reassurance is the tug of compulsory sexuality. Everyone else is fine if they never have sex again, but I, personally, really need to or something bad will happen.
My fear went beyond concerns over relationship maintenance. Noah has said that if I decided that one day I never wanted to have sex again, we would talk about it and consider an open relationship or some other compromise. He has told me again and again that nobody wants to have sex all the time, that it is nothing to worry about and he only wants to have sex if I do. I believe him, but it isn’t enough. I am lucky that my relationship’s existence isn’t pinned to libido, yet I still want to want more.
For most people, our lives are a series of insight fallacies. When I was with Henry, I understood that my insecurity and fears were hurting the relationship. I was willing, and I tried, but no matter how hard I pushed, I could not quickly rid myself of years of emotional baggage. It is the same here. Little of what I learned—about compulsory sexuality, consent, or the ways we privilege sex and how that is culturally ingrained—made a dent in the fear. For all that I am steeped in ace discourse, I would sometimes feel terrible late at night and burst out that I hated being ace, that I wished I were “normal,” that if I could choose, I would choose to be otherwise.
Let me tell you something: When writing this section, I struggled to be honest. I found myself wanting to add in defensive caveat after defensive caveat about how often Noah and I did still have sex. I cut long sections about how my partners tended to comment on how sexually open-minded I was, about how I visited sex clubs, about how I am definitely, absolutely not a prude. I struggled with a dilemma that I knew was silly. If I told the truth—that despite being open-minded, I am indifferent to sex most of the time—I would come closer to proving myself to be a real ace person. If I obscured the truth and emphasized all the parts that I wanted, I would come closer to presenting myself as I wanted to be seen.
I wanted to obscure the truth for Noah. I felt protective, worried that if people knew this about me, that they would feel sorry for him, even though I am far more bothered than he. And I wanted to obscure the truth for myself. I believe I am right when I think about compulsory sexuality and its negative effects, but self-righteousness is not as useful an emotion as I once believed. It’s not an adequate buffer against the other ideas that float in the air and that I have ingested over my life. When it comes to the personal, I frequently lack the courage of my convictions.
The greatest help here has been Noah himself. Noah doesn’t immerse himself in gender and sexuality studies like I do. He is a straight white man from the Northeast who went to private schools and, as a kid, spent summers in France visiting relatives. I am the one who spends time reading about sexuality and consent; he is the one who calmly tells me everything is okay.
Understanding compulsory sexuality does not always let someone stand up for themself, just like understanding racism doesn’t prevent people from being unconsciously racist. Remembering that it is not “normal” that matters but instead what people want—and that what they want may go deeper than they believe—doesn’t strip those expectations of all their power. That sex is often a metaphor does not mean there is nothing left when all that symbolism is stripped away, or that we symbolic creatures can ever fully strip away that symbolism, no matter how much we might wish to. There is no guarantee that being able to name and recognize scripts will solve the problem and save the relationship. However, not talking does guarantee that the scripts will retain their power. Talking may not be sufficient, but it is necessary.
Advice to talk and question everything does not sound radical, in relationships or in any other part of life. I know. I spoke to many experts and scholars, wanting one of them to share with me one weird trick for fixing everything, preferably a quick tip, but I would accept a novel technique too. Instead, therapists and other experts told me this obvious piece of advice over and over again, and the more that I learned, the more I realized just how much no one wants to do it.
People will pay money to avoid talking. This became very clear when, in my day job as a science journalist, I was pitched a $250 suction-like device that promises to help women want more sex, essentially by simulating foreplay on their genitals. Because the device was geared toward women in relationships, I asked the CEO why the customer couldn’t ask her partner for real foreplay, which is free. I was told that no one had asked that question before. The answer is that women didn’t want to ask their partners. They felt pressured. They’d rather pay money for a gadget than talk.
Or they’d rather discreetly have an affair. In a widely read New York Times Modern Love column titled “What Sleeping with Married Men Taught Me About Infidelity,” Karin Jones describes the state of these married men. “After our second night together, though, I could tell this was about more than sex for him; he was desperate for affection,” she writes. “He said he wanted to be close to his wife but couldn’t because they were unable to get past their fundamental disconnect: lack of sex, which led to a lack of closeness, which made sex even less likely and then turned into resentment and blame.”16
It seems plausible that lack of sex might worsen a lack of closeness, but it is less clear to me which causes which. I wonder whether addressing the lack of closeness in another way could help with the lack of sex, or at least with the ability for both to speak about the lack of sex and other options. Communicating honestly and openly—in a way where both people feel free and able to talk—is uncomfortable and painful. It’s unfair too, because it’s easier for some people to speak up than others. But a life of being understood without any uncomfortable conversations does not exist for anyone. Talking and listening are the only sure ways to make intentions clear. The more I’ve researched and consulted, the more I’ve accepted that no one weird trick exists, and that the only way out is through.
Selena has realized this too. Selena is still with Georgia and has found other partners as well: a man named Daniel with whom she’s in a dominant/submissive relationship, and some people that she and Georgia both date. She has sex with some partners and not others. It all depends on the person and the context. “I think something that continues to strike me through all these relationships is how non-important sex can be, and how awesome it can be, but how insignificant it is compared to all of the other things,” Selena says. “I see sex as one of several hundred intimate things you can do, and just like every other one of the intimate things, it has its pros and cons and it’s certainly nowhere near the highest on the list. I prefer hair pulling over sex any day of the week, but that doesn’t mean I dislike sex if it’s done right. If it’s bad sex and no one knows how to do it, that’s not as enjoyable; it’s like getting whipped by someone who doesn’t know how to use a whip.”
She’s grateful to have had those early conversations with Georgia and for the chance to learn all this about herself and others. She knows now that the people in the relationship get to decide how important sex is, and whether this is a challenge they can handle, and what they really care about in life and love. For Selena, sex can be unnecessary or it can be a way to enrich the relationships. It is never the goal.