The Monster That Never Came: Growing Up Asexual and Religious
When I was little, I used to stare a lot at one of the boys in church. I liked his colorful suits and his big brown eyes. On our way home in the car, my mother would tease me about having a crush. I grew to think of that boy as my first love — not because I had any particularly warm feelings towards him, but simply because everyone else told me that was the case.
As I got older, I watched other girls gush about boy bands and giggle over handsome actors. My cousin had a picture of Vin Diesel plastered on her wall, and one of my classmates had a keychain of Justin Timberlake dangling from her backpack. “Isn’t he cute?” she asked when she saw me looking at it one morning. I smiled and said yes. I wasn’t really lying, but deep down inside of me was a stirring of unease that I felt I was not allowed to voice: that we meant very different things when we said “cute.”
While physical attraction was not a totally foreign concept to me, it wasn’t something I experienced often — and when I did, I had zero interest in doing anything about it. Sure, the stocky redhead who lived down the street gave me butterflies, but I was fine with just looking. I preferred to spend my nights reading Anne of Green Gables for the fourteenth time.
My religious upbringing complicated things further. I was raised with an emphasis on saving sex for marriage and frequently warned about the power of sexual temptation. I spent my adolescence on edge, nervously clutching rosary beads and preemptively praying to the Blessed Virgin Mary for strength as I braced myself for the inevitable rush of hormones. I waited for it to become hard not to masturbate, sneak porn, or think about sex.
It was a frightening time for any good Catholic girl who was fighting to stay in God’s good books (and nothing made you fall from grace as fast as sexual sin). I especially had to watch out for teenage boys. They were practically animals; they’d go as far as I let them, and I needed to dress and act a certain way so I wouldn’t lead them into sin. (I discovered much later in life that this philosophy didn’t make me any more or less pure. All it did was give me a deep-rooted fear of men that I struggle with to this day.)
Somehow I survived high school with my precious virginity intact. So I went off to college, and I continued to wait for the monster of sexuality to pounce.
Repression and Desire
Once I began to interact with the secular world, I wondered if my lack of desire was simply repression. Everyone else seemed to really want to date and have sex. I would hear the lengths some of my colleagues would go through just to meet someone, and I would grow exhausted on their behalf. On television, I watched characters tumble happily into bed and discuss sex like it was as natural as breathing. Even the ones who wanted to wait with their partners eventually “gave it up.”
So why didn’t I? Why didn’t I at least want to?
I’d been told that desire would ignite once I met the “right” person, but even after that happened, the embers remained relatively unstoked. Was I just scared of my own urges? Maybe I had stuffed them down so far they could no longer be felt.
But that wasn’t quite right either. I came to realize that the problem wasn’t that I was repressing my urges; the problem was that there was nothing to repress in the first place. Whenever I reached for a warm spark of desire, I came up with nothing. It was like rummaging around in an empty sack.
I’d heard the word “asexual” before, but I always assumed those people were like Sherlock Holmes: they had never experienced romance or attraction and they had no desire to do so. Since that didn’t quite fit with my own experience, I discarded the term. But as I fell down a rabbit hole of research, I eventually unearthed the word “demisexual.” As I read the definition, I felt something in my brain lock into place. So I’m not weird after all, I thought. There’s actually a whole word for people like me.
The world cracked open like an egg and clarity rushed in. I had context now for my entire life. It was incredibly empowering.
Sacred Voyeurism
Both religious and secular communities made me feel like I was lacking something that was crucial to the human experience. One system called it “repression” while the other labeled it “purity.” But ultimately, the messages were the same: whether it was going to be with an eventual spouse or with the people I dated, sex was expected of me.
It was something I was supposed to eventually want and then give at the appropriate time per the arbitrary discretion of others.
As hurt as I was by societal expectations around intimacy (such as the erroneous idea that sex is always “part of a healthy relationship”), religion added an extra sprinkling of shame that secular peer pressure (as damaging as it was) did not. It said sex was holy, a sacred gift given to us by God. Abusing it incurred His displeasure (as well as eternal hellfire). By elevating the act to this level, religion added an uncomfortable layer of voyeurism to an activity that was already glazed in high levels of fear and anxiety. I felt like an omnipresent parent was always watching me, taking notes on what I did in the bedroom.
I didn’t learn about the highly subjective nature of desire until I had stepped away from religion and its binary mandates. The distance gave me some perspective. It allowed me to see things through a broader lens, to make peace with myself and to accept, without judgment, the desires of other people.
