I always thought I was broken.
Growing up, when friends always talked about a celebrity being “hot,” I went along with it but didn’t understand how they felt. I have never looked at a famous person, a friend or a stranger and thought “wow, you’re sexy.” Not once. I had crushes, sure, but they never had to do with someone’s appearance. I thought other people were cute only after I developed feelings for them because of their personality.
My friends would gush over the cute guys in school, and I played along. I trusted them entirely so I figured if they thought those boys were cute, they had to be. Right? I never fully understood what it was that was so appealing to them. They were usually nice but I had no idea why my friends wanted to kiss them. I knew close to nothing about most of them. There was no inkling of sexual or physical attraction to people I didn’t know very well even after puberty.
And now, as an adult, I realize that’s exactly what demisexuality is.
I’m attracted to someone only after I develop a deeper emotional connection with them. I can count on one hand the number of men I’ve kissed in my life or have even been attracted to and I have no problem with that number. In no way do I feel that I’ve missed out because, to my body’s inclination, I’d much rather have a seven-hourlong conversation with someone than be physically intimate with them.
The best way to describe it is I am attracted to a person’s personality, not their physical appearance.
For a sexual person, there can be an immediate spark with another person when they first meet. A kind of sudden chemistry that draws two people together from the get-go. For asexual people, those sparks tend not to happen at all, even after time passes. For me, I have only ever gotten that butterflies in the stomach feeling when I’ve known someone really well, and we’ve both shown romantic interest in one another.
I’m a romantic at heart. I’ve just never been a “lock eyes in the bar with a stranger” kind of romantic.
As a demisexual person, when I first meet someone, I just see them. I don’t see their physical characteristics as anything more than just part of who they are. You have great abs? Neat. You have a chiseled jaw? Okay, whatever. It isn’t until I start to get to know what is behind the eyes looking back at me that those physical features catch my eye. I knew I wasn’t asexual for that reason. I do feel attraction, it just takes me a while to get there.
I was 16 when I had my first boyfriend, my first kiss, my first real understanding of attraction. I had never wanted to kiss anyone before. He made me feel seen, beautiful and understood. For the first time in my life, someone was really invested in who I was to my very core and wanted to know everything about me. My first kiss was during a movie. He leaned in close to me, and suddenly my stomach was in knots. I was drawn to him like a moth to a flame, and it felt as natural as breathing. Everything my friends had been talking about now made sense. The more I got to know him, the more beautiful he became in my eyes.
Like any other naive high school girl in love, I doted on him. I finally thought I understood what my friends saw in their boyfriends or girlfriends. Maybe this was just my one person for life, I was just lucky enough to find him so young?
This school sweetheart was my partner for about six years. Our extremely ugly official breakup happened months after I started disconnecting emotionally because I knew in my gut he was cheating.
After this, I was thrown back into this whirlwind of not understanding who I was. Being attracted to someone, for me, involves a lot of personal emotional investment. And as a monogamous person, I have no interest in pursuing other people when I’m in a committed relationship. On top of being furious, I was more confused than I ever had been. The only person I had been attracted to was this partner. Regardless of how close I became to other people, I only had those feelings towards him. Demisexuals typically don’t do one-night stands or have flings. We build our physical relationships from pieces of our emotional ones.
I started to question everything about my sexuality: Was I broken? Is it normal to not find people attractive in general?
