on being asexual with a high libido

I have decided to write this after a continual feeling of being misunderstood in my sexuality. Honestly, the past year or so I have felt myself releasing labels for the simple reason that I do not believe words can fully encompass each unique human experience, and sometimes it feels impossible to try. We evolved from smaller simpler beings (towards the beginning) and somehow still feel a need to describe and justify specifically what makes our complexity higher with wider scopes of emotional capacity and variations. There is nothing wrong with that at all, but I have recently felt the subjectivity of wording to describe an individual’s experience as futile, especially if the primary goal is to get an outside opinion to understand.

This essay is about to become slightly sexually explicit, so if you are a family member or feel uncomfortable with the idea of that, there is your heads up. I am going to say these things not to be crass, but to illustrate the misunderstanding people consistently have with my own sexual identity.

I have always had a high sex drive. There was no repression of that in my childhood. My mom was the daughter of a psychiatrist, and though we were Mormon I knew that masturbation and curiosity surrounding sex were both normal and healthy. (Yay parents!) I have had many sexual experiences (not that that is a requirement to understand YOUR OWN brain and body). Sex to me feels like an activity, comparable to tennis. I feel both in awe and honestly a little perplexed at what I witness on the other person’s side of my sexual experiences. While mid hookup, I researched on my phone if all Cheeto bags say “crunchy” on them, or if that is a special variety. How am I supposed to explain that to an older man that thinks I am sexually repressed without exposing myself and being so vulnerable with what is often an absolute stranger.

When I was in a relationship I could both have sex multiple times a day, or not at all (this defaulted me to every day lmao but I didn’t care either way). It truly made no difference at all, because I’ve been managing my own arousal since childhood. I am statistically nowhere near alone in this experience.

I understand the propensity of human brains to change and adapt and that sexuality is fluid. Regardless, all people feel the same to me in terms of sexual attraction – in that I do not feel any. I have tried my best to explain this to all of my sexual partners, and to be honest it has never been a problem. Sometimes people are curious, and I go in depth about how the most attracted I’ve felt to a person is through intellectual connection, but either way it does not matter.

If you feel the need to reduce my human experience to suppression or miscalculations or my generation, you may do so, obviously. You seem to not understand that instances of asexuality have been recorded since the very beginning of emerging queer identities, along with being gay. But you are still missing a bigger piece of the puzzle. Someone’s own lived experience is allowed to be different than your own- and that actually makes logical sense if you take the wide array of biological and environmental factors at play. Not everything can be categorized and scientifically measured and found to have a clear explanation. It’s never been that way. And that’s not enough to deny a person their own reality just because you don’t have the mental flexibility to imagine an experience outside your own, or what is perceived to be the “norm”.