Well, things are getting a little heavy around here, aren’t they? Just to balance things out a little, I thought I might talk about some of the more positive aspects of my relationship with M, which was, at least from my perspective, quite complicated and confusing, but at the same time… There was a simplicity to it as well. Now that I think about it, we really just had two totally different styles, and I think that, although personality certainly also played a role, in large part this had to do with the fact that I am asexual, and he is not.

One reason I like listening to David Jay’s podcast is that it gets me thinking about relationships. In one of his more recent podcasts (Episode 19), he talked about the economics of relationships–that is, the similarity between the way money works and the way relationships work. He makes a very good point that while we have all these complicated models for understanding economics, very few people think of relationships the same way. But relationships follow models as well. Dating is a good example; there’s a certain set of rules people follow when going on a date. When those rules are broken, it can lead people to form a negative opinion about their date. For example, a friend of mine once went out with a guy who didn’t pay for her meal, and based on his failure to follow unspoken dating etiquette, she decided he was stingy, and she wouldn’t go out with him again.

Now, I have never been on a date. Or at least, I have never been on what I thought was a date, although I suppose I may have been on some sort of informal dating-ish thing, but I didn’t think of it that way at all. Never, in any case, on a formal date. The idea of going on one has always made me rather uncomfortable, because I only vaguely understand the rules, and the entire concept is one that just doesn’t jive with me. The way I see it, there is a long-term goal of dating, and a short-term goal–i.e. marriage, and sex. Since I’m not interested in either of those things, I really would rather not put myself out there in what serves as a market for both. I’m interested in forming relationships with people, sure, but I don’t want to trap myself in conventional ideas of romance, because that just doesn’t work for me. Flowers and chocolates and fancy dinners are fine for people who like them, but seem pretty hokey and insincere to me. So I reject the whole dating model of forming relationships.

My ideal relationship model would probably be romantic friendship, which was common in the Victorian era, but has become virtually unheard of now. This would be a viable alternative if I were involving myself with another asexual, but M’s sexuality rendered it unusable. This left me with the difficulty of having no model on which to base my interaction with him; I had to negotiate it completely from scratch. I had some idea in my mind of what I wanted the relationship to look like, but there was no easy way to communicate that to him. I’m inarticulate in the first place, when it comes to spoken communication, and he has always been rather impatient with me, when it comes to these things. He always wanted me to just say what I had to say, but never understood that if I were to do that, he would misunderstand me. And he did, time and time again, because he was relying on heteronormative assumptions to interpret what I was trying to say, rather than letting me establish a more appropriate context. Of course, that led to me being even less articulate, because I was trying to come up with a way to circumvent his heteronormative assumptions, rather than just focusing on saying what I was trying to say. On top of that, his unwillingness to just take a few minutes to listen to me left me unsure about whether it was a good idea to try to establish any kind of relationship with him.

Most of my friends who also knew M thought it was a bad idea. In fact, they were baffled about why I liked him in the first place. They thought he was an asshole, and could see no merit whatsoever in the idea of me getting involved with him. I can certainly see why they didn’t like him, since he does tend to be rude, selfish, and arrogant. I can see that he must’ve been quite the pompous little jerk, when he was younger. But age has softened him, and although my idea of what he must’ve been like is based mostly on what he told me about himself, it seems that with maturity he has learned to be less of a douche, and much more good-humored about things. That’s one thing I appreciated about him–he likes to deal with the cold, harsh truth, but he doesn’t do it in a cold, harsh way. He has a way of being easily upbeat, freely and spontaneously playful. He put me at ease in a way no one else has ever been able to do; he didn’t just make me happy, he made me feel pure, simple joy.

That was probably the biggest benefit to my forming any kind of relationship with him, but there were many, many others as well. He was a resource for a wealth of information that I couldn’t get from anyone else, because he takes time to research things that very few people are even remotely aware of. He also introduced me to a lot of good music, stuff that I would have never sought out myself. And I could talk to him about virtually anything, except for asexuality.

All of that is lost to me now, and I am missing it, but I think my biggest disappointment is that now, I am left with no one with whom I can explore sexuality. Whatever pain he may have caused me, he gave me in greater measure a sense of safety, wherein I could feel free to try something new. And what’s more, with him I actually wanted to try it. I don’t know if I was sexually attracted to him or not, honestly, mostly because I don’t even know what sexual attraction is. I mean, in theory I do, but practically, what does that mean? What does it feel like, to experience that? Could I have experienced it but not even recognized it for what it was, because it was so low intensity? I was certainly very much attracted to him in other ways; he was (and to this day still is) the only person I have ever been physically attracted to (meaning I wanted to touch him, kiss him, etc). But really, in large part I find it very confusing to try to separate out all the different types of attraction. It all ultimately comes down to desire anyway, doesn’t it? Sexual attraction is the desire to have sex with someone, physical attraction is the desire to be physically (but non-sexually) close to someone, emotional attraction is the desire to be emotionally close to someone, and so on. Of course, these things are what one would desire under ideal circumstances, without factoring in the consequences of the real world. I think there is some distinction that must be made between attraction and actual, practical desire, but our language is not sophisticated enough to show that.

Language is definitely a problem that we asexuals face when it comes to trying to communicate our experiences to others. We have had to coin many new terms, which are still relatively unknown. Having a word for what I am (or what I am pretty close to being, at least) definitely helped me to feel more comfortable in my own skin. But I am left with a problem of semantics–I am trying to figure out all these terms and how they apply to me, but I’m not actually sure what they mean because the concept of attraction, to me, is too abstract. I don’t know how to apply it to myself, except in the most contrived way.

To be more accurate, I know what I felt, but I don’t know exactly how to define it. I kind of think Rabger’s model describes what I experienced a little bit better than the standard definition of asexuality. The first thing I noticed about M was his voice–a form of aesthetic attraction. As I got to know him better, I felt more and more attracted to him, in various ways. Interestingly, even though the general consensus seems to be that he is pretty hot, I didn’t even notice his looks until I had already developed some other, different kinds of attraction to him. Basically, the better I got to know him, the more attraction I felt for him. In the latter months of our association, it felt like I might have been developing secondary sexual attraction to him, but I was never sure about it, because everything was all muddled and confused. If I did start developing secondary sexual attraction, it was very faint, and got drowned out by everything else. What I really needed was more time with him to see if that’s really what it was, but I don’t have that, and I won’t get it.

So I sit here spinning my wheels, and going nowhere. Pretty normal for me, really. I am the type of person who thinks long and hard about things, until I’m satisfied that I have thoroughly gone through a problem and come up with a solution. Relationships are kind of a cognitive obsession for me, because I know that I have to come up with an entirely new way of doing things, so I’m always trying to come up with a workable system, even long after a relationship has ended. I’m sure I’ll have more thoughts about this later, but for now, I think I’ve squeezed just about all I’m going to get out of my head. I doubt any of this is even coherent, but oh well.