Can You Tell Me What I Am?

One of the most common questions that I get when I blog or talk about sexuality is “I think I might be demisexual/asexual/whatever, how do I know?” I’m certainly not the absolute expert on how to figure out your sexuality, and I’m still in the process of coming to an understanding with my own (we have an uneasy truce at the moment). But I have spent a great deal of time and energy trying to understand my sexuality, and so I thought I’d share some of the things that I’ve found helpful to keep in mind or to try when trying to figure out what the heck your sexuality is.

There are a few guiding principles that most people who talk about sexuality all suggest as good places to start when you’re thinking about sexuality. The first and probably most frustrating of these is that no one else can tell you what your sexuality is. At the end of the day, you are the one who knows yourself best and who will understand what identity feels right to you. This means a lot more work for you, but it also means that no one else gets to police your identity or demand certain performances from you in order to “count” as your chosen identity. It’s better that way, I promise.

Relatedly, there is no “right” answer about what your sexuality is. Sexuality is a fluid thing. What feels right for a while might change with new experiences, and your understanding of yourself absolutely changes. You can change how you identify. But there’s also no identity that will be exactly you in every nuance and stereotype. You don’t have to check off every body of “homosexual experiences” or “asexual identifiers” in order to identify as those things. People are complicated, and if you think that your overall experience falls into a particular identity, then that’s probably you. It doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to work for you.

On that note, keep in mind that identity terms exist to help you. You don’t owe anyone anything when it comes to figuring out your identity. They’re there to help you understand yourself and communicate yourself to other people quickly. You don’t have to follow some sort of dictates in order to carry out your identity, you don’t have to stick with one once you start identifying, you don’t even have to identify as anything if you don’t find it helpful. Identity terms are useful to give us different potential templates of sexuality. “Oh hey, there are people out there who experience sexuality in x way and I also have y element of that, that’s nice to know. I wonder if they have any experiences or suggestions for how to successfully navigate dating?” Keeping this in mind can take some of the pressure off. This is something you’re trying to understand so you feel more comfortable and happy and maybe have more tools and support to figure out how you want to relate to other people. If it’s not helping, you don’t have to do it.

So with these guiding principles in mind, here are a few things to try. First, research! What are some of the labels that are out there? Here’s a good list to get you started with some basic definitions. It’s one of the most complete I could find, but if something sounds like it might be you spend some more time Googling see if it leads to anything else. One of my favorite resources for asexuality is AVEN. If anyone in comments has suggestions for resources about other sexualities (I’m not horribly well versed in most queer resources), please leave them in comments!

It can also be helpful to talk to close friends. They can’t tell you what you are, but bouncing ideas off of someone and hearing their perspective on what they’ve seen you do in the past can help clarify things that might have seemed muddy before. If you’re going to ask someone who’s more of an “expert”, it can be useful to have specific questions, e.g. I thought I didn’t want sex because of my upbringing, but now I’m not sure. Is it possible to be asexual if you have a history of conservative sexual messages? Someone who doesn’t know you can’t speak to your personal situation, so asking about facts that require their expertise is probably a better way to utilize their help.

It can also be useful to “try on” different labels. This can mean different things to different people. I’ve been “trying on” asexuality for a while now. I started by thinking of myself that way privately, then mentioning it to a few close people, then openly using it as a template for my relationships. Over time, I’m not sure how well it’s fitting with my experiences, so I might end up trying something else on instead. That’s ok. Sometimes you realize something doesn’t fit you when you first start trying to think of yourself with that term, and that’s ok too. Take whatever time you do (or don’t) need. There is no penalty for “I don’t have it figured out yet”.

One thing that I’ve found incredibly helpful is reading narratives/blogs/stories from people with a variety of different identities. It gave me a better feel for what the subjective experience of different sexualities was like, rather than a colder “definition”. It can be easier to empathize or imagine yourself in a narrative than in a definition.

If anyone else has suggestions or tips that they found helpful while trying to understand their sexuality, please leave in comments.

What If I Don’t Know?

This week was April Fool’s, and one of people’s FAVORITE jokes on April Fool’s is coming out as gay. Miri, a fantastic beast of a human being, decided to do the opposite yesterday. Her essay is hilarious and you should probably go read it.

But there was one element of Miri’s essay that stuck out to me as potentially damaging for those who are questioning or who (such as myself) are rethinking elements of their orientation and identity. I understand that within the context of the essay this paragraph is about the assumptions of many that bisexuality is fake, however this same rhetoric can be used to delegitimize those who might have questions or be uncertain, and to shut down conversations from those who are simply trying to understand their own sexuality.

“I’m straight because I started seeing guys long before I started seeing women. How could I have really known I was bisexual if I didn’t have “experience”? Unlike straight people, bisexual people do not have the luxury of being born with an innate and immutable knowledge of their own sexual orientation. Nothing–not their turn-ons, not their crushes, not their romantic daydreams–nothing besides Real Sex with someone of the same gender is sufficient to prove for certain that they are really bisexual as they say they are. ”

Because here’s the thing: there are some people who don’t have an innate and immutable knowledge of their own sexual orientation. There are some people who feel like they need to try sex to find out if they’re attracted or not. There are people who don’t know what their identity or their orientation is and who take a great deal of painstaking reflection, experimentation, and thought to figure out what it is that they feel they want in their lives. Sometimes feelings just aren’t clear: not all of us get crushes that come screaming at us that WE REALLY LIKE THIS PERSON. Sometimes instead it’s a slight inkling that we want to hang out more or a little bit of anxiety when we see the person.

In fact, even for those who might have a very strong attraction (or lack thereof), life itself can make it extremely difficult to recognize those feelings. As an example, my eating disorder certainly disguised some of my lack of sexual attraction for a long time: it’s easy to simply write it off as “I’m just self-conscious”. I imagine that there are similar intersections with race, gender, class, physical health, or any of the other ways that our lives differ from the basic script of “very white guy falls in love with very white girl, actively pursues, gets married and has babies”.

Sexuality and attraction are far more complicated than we give them credit for. Attraction doesn’t feel the same to everyone. Our sexual desires are not all the same. Not only do you have to determine who you’re attracted to (men, women, other), but you have to figure out what you actually want to act on, how attracted you are, what type of attraction it is, whether you’re attracted to multiple people or not and in what ways, what relationship style works best for you…each of these things can be clear or muddy, can be specific to one person or very generalized, can be affected or obscured by other things in your life. Maybe you are actually quite poly at heart, but you’ve grown up in a culture that deeply prioritizes jealousy as a healthy and good emotion and now even the concept of being attracted to multiple people doesn’t make sense.

I think sometimes it’s easy to forget that if you’ve never seen a template of what your sexuality might look like that feels right to you, you often just assume that you’re basically the same as what you’ve seen. You might have some weird feelings that don’t quite fit, but it’s fairly easy to write them off as something else, especially if there’s anything else about you that’s outside the norm.

This is not the narrative that we hear from those who talk about GLBT issues. We often hear “I knew I was different” or “I tried to be like other people but it felt completely wrong”. And that’s true for some people. But for some people, muddling through doesn’t feel completely wrong it just feels a little bit off. By no means do I think it’s inappropriate to assert that some people know right away. But for some people it’s really hard to figure out what the heck they are. It’s fairly invalidating to hear over and over that your sexuality is an innate drive that you just “know” because of your daydreams and crushes and attractions. What if it’s a hard process of learning to listen to your emotions, your boundaries, your likes and dislikes? What if you actually really don’t know you like/don’t like something until you try it?

Just like there’s no one way of having a relationship, there’s no one way of figuring out what kind of a relationship you want. I think it’s quite possible that some people’s identities are more fluid than others, just like some people are far more committed to a national identity or a career identity than others. It’s important that we learn to validate the experience of “knowing” without simultaneously implying that everyone should know, or that identities which are a little gray (like demisexual or gray asexual) don’t get blown off as special snowflake syndrome or stealing the real queer identities. The identities that are more indicative of uncertainty are just as valid and just as real: being straight up confused is a valid identity!

I seriously doubt that anyone is intentionally invalidating people who aren’t sure of their sexual identity, but simply using a little more care in how we talk about sexuality and being willing to multiply the possible experiences rather than close them off can go a long way towards validating those who are already confused.