My story

Hi, so I'm here to share my asexual story, because it's a little different than how most people's go. I don't think a trigger warning is necessary for this so I didn't tag it at all as that, but this will have some mild mention of sexual activities and if you squint there might be some parts where the validity of the consent gets a bit questionable, so if you're particularly sensitive you're welcome to scroll past :)Okay, so it all starts with my parents giving me ~the talk~. Unlike most my friends who talked about being thoroughly disgusted, or the occasional peers who were "ready" to start boinking at the ripe old age of 10, I don't remember getting the talk. Well, I remember sitting down with my mom (she had a book and everything, bless her heart), her starting to explain, and I quickly got bored and started daydreaming. I literally paid no attention to what she was saying, and because of that I didn't actually know what sex was until I was like 12ish, instead of 9-10 like most my friends. For context, I'm almost 17 now. Anyway, my friends start making sex jokes around age 11 and while even in my ignorance I still find them funny, but I like to make the jokes myself because it just makes me feel kinda weird.Let's fast forward to 8th grade. My best friend since 4th grade (who is still my best friend) left the small school we had been at since elementary school to got to the local public middle school. She was the most popular girl in school, and always had guys (and girls for that matter) crushing on her. A lot of stuff changes this year, because unlike before where because of her I got to be one of the popular kids too, I was essentially on my own and had to find an entirely new friend group. Puberty is in motion, my friends are starting to talk about boinking their boyfriends, but I've stayed blissfully single, never even really having a crush. That is, until a girl named Ella comes along.Ella and I had known each other for a while. Our entire class had about 20 kids, the same kids that had been there for years, so it wasn't like she was a new face. However, we had never been in the came clique. I was with the popular kids, while she unfortunately was stuck with the losers (for the record, most of these losers are some of my closest friends now, I just genuinely don't know how else to describe their group). Usually, we never would have become friends, but when your metaphorical popular train ticket leaves you stranded, sometimes you don't have anyone else to turn to. Begrudgingly, I started sitting at their table at lunch, making friendly conversation with those who it had never been acceptable to like. It was crazy how well I fit in. Ella and I got on like a house on fire.At this point in time I didn't really know I was ace. I knew what it was of course, but I had ignorantly believed that the only actual asexuals were either sexual-assault survivors, or had some sort of mental disability, and that most the people claiming to be asexual were actually just mad because no one was interested in them. Since I don't fall under those categories, I didn't give it a second thought, and simply brushed it off. I had, however, determined with absolute certainty that I really didn't want to be intimate with anyone who has a penis, so I told everyone I was a lesbian. Technically I was outed, but no one cared and I was treated completely normally, so it's not any sort of traumatic story or anything. However, now that I was a seemingly out-and-proud lesbian (except to my parents), I allowed myself to start looking at girls in ways I didn't usually. One girl in particular, the only other properly gay girl in my grade: Ella. I fell horrifically in love with her.In hindsight, I'm not sure if that was real love or not, or if I'm even capable of experiencing "real" love, but every time I hear someone explain what love feels like, that's how I felt about her. So, one day when we were over at our mutual best friend's house, and we decide to play spin the bottle (technically it was truth or dare, but in our friend group that just meant an excuse to kiss each other so call it what you will), and Ella always made sure I was the one kissing her, I was quite happy. I have always liked kissing, and I've kissed quite a few people subsequently, because I like that feeling of connection with someone else, but this was my first time properly making out with someone, and on top of that, I'd never even kissed someone I actually was interested in. I know for a fact I did not do it properly, but that's alright because she didn't either. We fell asleep cuddling that night and I absolutely loved it. Ella asked me out two days later, and I, of course, said yes.I heard a lot of my classmates talking abut sex and bragging about all their "experience" that no one could ever seem to confirm. Hearing kids say they weren't virgins any longer was familiar to me. What wasn't familiar was my best friend, the one at a different school than I, who is the type of girl who gets good grades and steers away from parties, texting me saying that she and her girlfriend had sex. Like real, actual sex. She'd actually lost her virginity a few months before she told me, but unlike most friends, I wasn't angry that she didn't tell me, or disappointed that she had done it at all. You could say that was the moment it sunk in that there were kids, most of them actually, who were genuinely interested in sex at that age. I thought I was just like everyone else, and that I just chose not to make up lies, but it turns out, not everyone was lying at all. No matter how hard I thought about it, I couldn't make myself actually want to have sex. So I turned to porn. Er, well, tries to at least. My parents had a content filter on all the devices in the house, so I couldn't. However, I realized fanfics were free game, and very easy to access. I must've read hundreds of thousands of fanfics with how frequently I logged onto wattled or ao3. I still, to this day, like reading fanfics, but now it is for an entirely different purpose. With the amount of fics I read, by this point I swear I know every kink, fetish, or sex position possibly out there. I searched up anything, trying to find something, even if it was labeled as weird or unusual, that I actually wanted. I didn't find anything.Okay, back to Ella. At this point we've been dating for quite some time, I'd say about three months. Everything had been chaste kisses and cute handholding. It was absolutely perfect for me. Summer came along and we didn't get to see each other really at all, because neither of our parents new we were together. However, we manage to convince them to let her sleep over at my house. This was especially difficult because my mom does not like Ella, or her family, at all (that's a long, unimportant sorry I don't feel like telling). So, we're hanging out up in my bedroom, late at night, and lets just say things were getting kind of heated. We're both still fully clothes, but the making out is getting a bit heavy to just stop at this point, so it's clear where she wants this to head. She started to flip her hand just under the back of my shirt, and in my panic to stop this from going any further, I sit up and move just a few inches away from her so we're no longer touching. When she looks at me weird, like she's confused on why I suddenly changed my mind about my intent, I just say "I'm not ready". She nods and wraps me in a hug (she's always been a hugger) and says into my ear "We won't do anything until you're ready". That was exactly what I needed to hear, and burying my face into her shoulder I nearly start to cry. It felt like I had someone who might not care if I'm different, for the first time ever. That is until she pulls back and says "But like, you should be ready in a few months, right? Like, we're going to do it before we hit a year". My heart sank. She wanted to do it, with me, in less than a year. The good news is though, I had a real timeline. I had about nine months to get myself okay with it before it had to happen.For those of you wondering about the dubcon, it all relates to the ending of the last paragraph, so if anything about that bit makes you feel particularly icky, don't ready any further.Anyway, now I bet a lot of you are like "Why didn't you just break up with her!?!" and let me tell you, I wish I had, but as I mentioned earlier, I really, really liked this girl. I wasn't ready to throw her away just because I wasn't ready. So instead, I start acting gradually more sexual around her. Maybe just kissing her neck a bit, or setting my hand on her thigh, just little things that don't necessarily mean anything, but somehow still do. She responds to it in an embarrassingly eager way. It becomes clear that she really, really wants this. I almost convince myself that I do too, until she starts asking about turn-ons and kinks. I don't have any answers for her, but thanks to reading all those fanfics, I've gotten rather good at predicting what she wants to hear, so I just tell her whatever I think she wants. I'm quite a good guesser, and that just makes her want it more. I still wasn't really freaking out about my deadline, because what middle/high school relationships last a whole year, especially ones where you aren't even really allowed to see each other outside of school. It still seemed pretty safe for me.Well apparently, we were the type of relationship that lasts a year, because all of a sudden I realized that we'd been dating for ten months. Ella was getting quite impatient, and at every chance she got we were doing something, whether it be heated make out sessions in the local library, or sexting when we had to be apart. I had managed to avoid any actual sex, but there was an extreme amount of pressure, and I caved. I said I was ready. I (partially) lost my virginity in a public library. And I absolutely hated it. It's only partial because my mom came to pick me up early, so mid-y'know I heard my phone go off and got a wonderful excuse to leave the situation. I was so, so not ready to do that with her. I'm not sex-repulsed but the thought of that, and how it went down still to this day is so unsettling to me. Very shortly after that happened, my mom found out what was going on between us, and then just a little bit after that she found out we had been intimate (she accidentally read our sexts, which was extremely mortifying). We were only allowed to see each other at school after that, not even any trips to the library, and my mom set something up so she'd get a copy of just my and Ella's texts to each other, which certainly meant no more sexting. Ella was heartbroken. I was relieved.I fell out of love, which sucked. We dated for a little while longer and I tried my best to love her, but it was hard when she was so obviously upset about our lack of sexual intimacy. At some point, while we were still together, I developed feelings for a friend of mine. For privacy reasons I'm not going to say his name (it's a much less common name than Ella's, so if a friend of mine stumbles upon this any anonymity will be ruined). I knew it wasn't love, but the feelings were certainly there. This was a little confusing because I, along with everyone else, was under the impression that I was a flaming lesbian. That didn't matter to me though because I genuinely liked him, so who cares if he's a boy.My and Ella's relationship was far from perfect. She had become rather toxic, very controlling and manipulative, but I had tried to brush that away. After all, at one point we genuinely loved each other, so it was hard to see past that. This friend I started liking was what really made me realize that I was in a very unhealthy relationship. We'd been talking for quite some time but it started to get significantly more flirtatious. Then, one night, while I was sleeping over at his house, we kissed. Yes, I was still with Ella, so yes, I cheated on her. I felt so bad that after he fell asleep I locked myself in his bathroom and had one of the worst anxiety attacks of my life. I broke up with Ella two days later, after nearly a year and a half of being together.I tried to stay friends with Ella but it didn't work, because according to her, she was still in love with me. She didn't understand how much being with her hurt me, and how severely incompatible we were. About a month later me and the boy started dating. It was wonderful for about two weeks. I had assumed that because he was a completely inexperienced virgin he would be okay with waiting a while before we, y'know, did it. I was wrong. He was an extremely sexual person and was always trying to get me to 'help him out' when he was horny. He was still better than Ella though because except for a little whining about it, he never pressured me to do anything I didn't want to. We ended up breaking up after only about three months because his mental health was struggling. I'm so glad we had to call it off, we never would have worked out. He's a good guy, just not the right one for me.Quarantine hit less than a week after our breakup. I had all this time to myself, and for the first time in almost two years, I was single. That's when I started to look into asexuality. I realized that the entire time during quarantine, I had never had a time I actually wished I could be having sex. On top of that, there wasn't a single person out there I wanted to have sex with, even just in theory. What really clued me in though was that I had been in a long-term intimate relationship with someone I genuinely loved, and I still never wanted to do anything more than kissing. I've only known I was ace for a few months now, so who knows, maybe it is just a phase, but right now I don't have a better label for myself. The only people who know are a few online friends. Part of me really wants to tell people, my best friend specifically, but I would be the first asexual any of them have knowingly met. That's terrifying. I don't want there to be that wedge between us, but at the same time, I'm not really me if I don't tell them. If tonight goes how it's planned, I'm going to post about it on my private instagram story. I am absolutely terrified. Please, wish me luck. via /r/asexuality https://ift.tt/3nh5NRw