I’m sure I’ve mentioned it, but have I written a whole post about it yet?
I’m 55 years old and I’ve just started to come to grips with this. My mom, I think, was also ace. I think she was a sex-averse ace, too.
When the girls in my Girl Scout troop were all boy crazy, I just . . . wasn’t. I was very uncomfortable and my mom literally had to force me to go every week. She said that, basically, she didn’t believe me. She suggested that I wasn’t boy crazy because I’d had guy friends. Guys weren’t a mystery to me.
She tried, “Girls don’t talk that way about boys.” And I was, like, “Yes they do. I hear it every Monday night.”
Finally she settled on, “They’re just more mature than you are.” Now, granted, I did have a low frustration level, and that is kind of related to maturity, but it’s more of a neurological problem on some levels. It also relates to how in control of your life you feel, and we’re talking about my mom forcing a 13-year-old girl to do what the mom wanted me to do. In other words, I had very little control over my life.
I started dating a couple of years after I finally got my mom to let me quit Girl Scouts (oh, and by all accounts the senior troop that that group fed into was led by a woman who had more control over the girls and, rather than going places to check out guys, the girls went on educational trips and things of that nature, which was what I had wanted all along).
Anyway, my dating life was meh. Every time a guy I dated got handsy, I’d cool off quick. Because, just, no. And most of my peers were surprised because some of the guys I dated were really good looking. Then I started dating Thomas and I really didn’t mind all that much if he got handsy.
In the years since my divorce, it became increasingly clear to me that I just am not interested in interacting with people sexually. I mean, I can appreciate attractive people, but the idea of having intimate contact with them? Meh.
For years, I thought that I just needed some time to have my body to myself, but then I heard the stories of asexuals and they all sounded more-or-less like my story. I’ve thought of this period of my life as being like the A Chorus Line song “Hello Twelve, Hello Thirteen, Hello Love,” in structure, but not so much in content. If you know the song, everyone is singing about their sexual awakenings. They’re saying different things, but they’re all telling the same story. And the aces I’ve heard are also telling the same story and when I was 54 years old, I realized that it was my story, too.
I searched my Goodreads for books that users have tagged with “asexual,” but don’t have any results, so no Germane Amazon Link today. So here’s a Gratuitous Amazon Link. Looks like it’s time for In the Shadows, by Kierstin White and Jim DiBartolo. In the Shadows is a story told in alternating sections. We go back and forth between graphic-novel-style adventures of a young man who seems to stay the same age as the world ages around him and the text tale of two adolescent sisters, Cora and Minnie, and two brothers the same ages, Charles and Thomas, and Arthur, a stranger about their age who has recently arrived and who clearly is carrying a secret.