I’m fifteen and saying, “Love is a social construct used by corporations to make us buy more things.” till I am red in the face, cheeks hot in the anger of what I supposed was the anger of the feminists before me. Somehow channelling through the small body of fifteen-year-old me in a dusty classroom in the Southwest of England. The smell of cow dung mixed with the spirits of Victoria’s Secret body spray. I knew this fact had to be true because I hadn’t fallen for the clear marking strategy that was love, a fact that made my fifteen-year-old self better than anyone else in my classroom. Especially the girls, the ones who made themselves small and stupid to impress the boys who were more interested in football than the prospect of girls. I do not entirely see how hypocritical I indeed was. By this point, half of my friends have boyfriends. They’re happy, and I’m happy for them. They hold each other’s hands in the corridors, set Facebook status to cheesy Coldplay lyrics, and ask me if I liked the look of anyone. I guessed a boy in my tutor had a crush on me as they made us sit next to each other on a ride at Thorpe Park. I didn’t buy the photo at the end like I had wanted, to prove to my brother that I had done it. I suppose they wanted me to say him, with his blond hair and light freckles, but I didn’t. I just shrugged.
But then they kept asking,
And asking,
And asking,
Until I made someone up.
That was the only solution—a boy from my old school whom I often spoke to on Facebook. Entirely fictitious, but it worked for a while. He had dark black hair and deep brown eyes; I realised later that I had made him sound like Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights because I was obsessed with Kate Bush. But he gave me a reason to stay home when I didn’t want to see them, google appropriate song lyrics to show how perfect he was, and for all the questioning to stop. They seemed satiated. But then they asked for a photo, and I had to think why I didn’t have any. Sure, I had pictures of my dog and me and saved fan art off Tumblr, but there were no photos of this fantastical boy. “I deleted them all,” I said quickly, hiding my blackberry deep in my pocket. After four weeks of dating, he broke up with me, which only gave me an excuse to act sad and moody, which suited me nicely back then. But one of my friends said something I couldn’t get out of my head. “That’s the problem with long distance. Intimacy. Sex. The most important thing in a relationship.”
The idea of intimacy never even crossed my mind when coming up with this dream boy. Love? Of course. My bookshelf is stuffed with stories like Twilight, Pride and Prejudice, and The Fault in Our Stars. Most of the time, it took the characters half of the book to hold hands. But intimacy? Sex? Sure, some books had that in, but I often skipped them for feeling awkward. Ignore my friends’ conversations when the topic changes, and find the videos shown in Sex Education classes to be like watching some nature documentary.
I’m scrolling through Twitter one day after school when I come across the word asexual. The post is a simple thing, something about how bisexual and asexual people have a lot in common. By this point, I was pretty sure I was bisexual, but keeping said fact safety to myself, but I had never heard of this. I had seen ace in cards; I knew sea sponges and bacteria reproduced asexually; saying you had an ‘ace in the hole’ meant you had an advantage that you only revealed when you knew it would give you an upper hand. This didn’t feel like that. This didn’t feel like an advantage.
“Asexual: Someone who does not experience sexual attraction or an intrinsic desire to have sexual relationships (or the adjective describing a person as such).”
I freeze. My chest feels cold. I logged out of Twitter and cleared the history as if I was looking at some website I couldn’t let my parents see. Oh no, I think. Oh no. I am not asexual. I’m naive; I’m easily swayed; I’m immature; I’ll grow into it; I’ll meet the right person; I’ll try hard enough; I’ll force it; I’ll fake it; I am not asexual; I am not asexual.
I’m nineteen when I finally tell all my friends I’m asexual. I say friends, and I mean the people I went to college with, and I say tell and mean I said it to two people, and it spread like wildfire. I’m met with different reactions. Some say they don’t know what it means but want to learn; some don’t care, and then there are the others. The boys who smirk and say that they could fix me if I wanted them to, or the girls who proudly announce that they couldn’t possibly be asexual as if I had woken up one day and decided to be. I’m acting in a play called ‘Love’ written by one of my teachers based around us, his students. I explained to him, my voice shaking, that I didn’t love like everyone else in the room. That my idea of love is one that no one else here could possibly understand. He writes about my character being in a strange relationship with a boy in my class because he thinks we don’t get on, but we do. There is no mention of my asexuality, but one boy’s love of white trainer socks gets a mention.
It’s then that I realised that maybe no one cares how I love because… I don’t.
I’m now twenty-six, and I know that’s not true. I could have possibly loved a few people in my life, not that any of them truly deserved it. But I’m still coming to terms with being asexual. I am still mourning the simple idea of love that most people have. The love movies and stories sold me on. I still don’t feel like an ace in the hole, like this is an advantage. Something no one has and makes me more potent for it. Maybe one day it will, but currently, it’s a grieving process. One day, it’s the thing I am most proud of, and the next, I would tell you I want to be anything but. I want to fold it like a piece of paper and leave it forgotten in some dark corner of my mind.
But it’s still there, that piece of paper, and hopefully, one day, I’ll feel confident enough to slip it into my back pocket and tell people without my voice shaking.
I’m Rose Dawson, and I’m asexual.
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