I have been drifting more and more asexual over the past six months or year or so. Yet, when I think about romance and love, I am totally on board.

Love Everywhere

I see a post shared like this one:

Twitter screenshot from noelle (@nnnooellle): The idea that saying "I love you" is a momentous step in a relationship sucks. Don't be stingy with your love. Tell people you care about you love them all the time. Love freely and recklessly.

And I am screaming, “YES!!” from the rooftops.

Sex Nowhere

At the same time, this is what comes up for me when I think about adding sex into any of my existing relationships:

Image of two clothed people sitting talking on a mattress. Filling the rest of the room casting shadows against the ceiling is a blocky, hulking giant who takes up almost all of the space in the room. Text at the bottom reads "Sex wants to join your relationship...."

Wow! It’s like I’m two totally different people.

How Did I Get Here?

My current best lead is that I have been trying to distance myself from toxic masculinity since well before that phrase existed. I didn’t want to have anything to do with my sex/gender teasing girls, reinforcing glass ceilings, using/abusing/controlling women, etc. My current sex-phobia is certainly, at least partly mixed up in further distancing myself from all of that.

Another lead is that while romantic love can easily be asymmetric, the word for asymmetric sexual love is rape/assault/non-consensual. As I have further embraced asymmetric romantic love, I come to greatly fear asymmetry in sexual love. If I want to do [insert-some-urban-dictionary-term-here] with you when you’d rather [insert-anything-else-here] with me, my brain locks up in trying to get around that.

So… more as that progresses… but for now… that’s the news that’s fit to print.