No Sex, No Problem: Confessions of an asexual slut 

David Jay is the founder of www.asexuality.org, an online community of people with no interest in sex. According to the website, an asexual is “a person who does not experience sexual attraction.” Unlike celibate people, who choose to abstain from sex, asexual people simply have no desire to make sexuality a part of their relationships. Some asexual people are happiest leading a solitary lifestyle. Others, such as David, take a different approach…

I’ve come to the realization recently that I’ve got ho tendencies. I mean this in all but the classic sense, having been literally in bed (nonsexually) over the past month with more individuals than I have fingers to count. If, as the asexual community has been known to speculate, one can get just as intimate without sex as with it, then hot damn, do I get around.

Really though.

One of the quirks of being asexual, I’ve found, is that classifying and prioritizing relationships becomes a mite tricky. Though not all sexual people choose to employ it as such, sexual activity can serve as a neat marker of importance, something that is saved like fine china for the really special occasions. The same cannot be said of, say, intellectually intense, emotively reflective discussion, which is more my bread and butter. I’ll have an interesting discussion at the slightest suggestion and will get intellectually intimate with anything that has a pulse.

Is that so wrong?

For all the wacky rules we’ve managed to cook up about sex, there seem to be relatively few about actual down-to-earth intimacy. If someone I’m interested in has a boyfriend, the rules about nonsexual messing around are vague at best and nonexistent at worst. Not interested in my gender? Not a problem. Juggling two relationships at the same time? There's always room for more. Even I’m disturbed by what I can get away with.

Not that it started out this way. Even I was a naïve and inexperienced little asexual once, which is not a fate I would wish on anyone. From the moment that we begin to learn about sexuality, it is made abundantly clear that sex is not an optional endeavor. As far as our eventual happiness is concerned, finding a good sexual relationship is up there with having a job and owning things. And just as it is our patriotic duty to get good grades and make money so we can afford things, we must search for that special someone who will lead us to committed sexual bliss, which, we’re told, all true Americans enjoy.

This is not what you want to hear when sex seems about as natural and fun as doing your taxes. The message is a pretty bleak one: Without sex, relationships don’t matter. No matter how good a friend we are or how close we become to someone, they will eventually privilege their (sexually) significant other over us. Passion, romance, and falling in love are all things that require sexual activity. All that we can ever be is friends, with a big fat “just” slapped on for good measure. We can either try to force ourselves to start liking sex, or give up on the possibility that our emotional lives will get interesting.

Needless to say my emotionally randy self was less than pleased with this prognosis. I didn’t know precisely what nonsexual intimacy was or how it worked, but I wasn’t about to sit around virginally waiting for it to walk up and invite me to coffee. It wasn’t long before my close friendships started to look and act like dating, and it wasn’t much longer until they broke away from that and started to become something else entirely. Relationships, I realized, can be fun, in much the same way that I imagine sex is fun for sexual folk. New types of pleasure started popping up all over, and it seemed like there would never be time to explore them all. They ran the gamut—from the intellectual to the physical, from the deeply empowering to the utterly frivolous.

I may not like sex, but I love variety. Pleasure comes in a cornucopia of forms: meeting people on the dance floor, conversing until four in the morning, fighting like hell for something you believe in. Keeping the endorphins flowing is a simple matter of keeping my eyes open to the possibilities, and if they are open enough there is rarely a shortage. That being said, some areas have a great deal more possibility than others. Things like sex, lima beans, and photocopying tend to fall to the periphery. Of course I could approach things differently. I could bring my life to a screeching halt, take the time, energy, and money I use to have all that fun and focus it on squeezing some drop of excitement out of sexual activity. I’ll pass.

There is a pretty big perk to this broader view of what’s pleasurable. So long as I have a willing partner, I can do it however I want, whenever I want, wherever I want. My life, contrary to what I was told in middle school, has most certainly gotten emotionally interesting. What to do with all the feelings is another question entirely. With all that fooling around, more and more relationships push that “just friends” barrier, raising a whole host of questions in the process.

Growing up, I was aware of the distinction between “friendship” and “dating” that sexual kids liked to stress, but I wasn’t entirely certain how it applied to me. I found so many more ways to connect to people; there was no way I could draw that clear of a line. Was deep trust more important than hanging out and having fun every day? Should I give the person I cuddle with some special status over the one who finishes my sentences?

As it turns out, the language of the sexual world was poorly equipped to deal with a loaded asexual social calendar, so I had to start making my own. What does it mean to be “more than friends” without the nookie? For me it all came down to the three T’s:

Time. Check your dictionary; the word “date” is mostly about time. Time makes relationships, and the relationships that matter are the ones that I make time for. For me, becoming involved with someone means that we play a significant role in each others’ day to day lives.

Touch. Sex aside, there’s a lot of fun that two people can have with their bodies. Cuddling, dancing, playing basketball, sparring; the majority of my closer relationships involve some sort of physical affection, and many also involve working up a sweat.

Talk. If I really want a relationship to get out of hand, I acknowledge that it exists. I’ll tell someone how I feel about them, I’ll talk about what I want from my relationship with them, and I let them do the same.

When I see someone I’m interested in, these are the three things that are on my mind. They’re what I gossip about to my friends, how I think about my relationships progressing, my own asexual answer to the base system.

The astute of you will note that in this setup that “monogamy” is a somewhat shady concept. It’s kind of hard to be sexually committed to one person when you don’t have sex. Town bicycle that I am, I tend to favor communities over individual connections, never letting one relationship overshadow all of the other things I’ve got going on. I wind up thinking not in terms of boyfriends or girlfriends but in terms of networks, entire communities with which I am in some way intimate. Why hang on by a single rope when I can settle down in a spiderweb of connections reinforced by a few particularly strong threads? I have every intention of raising children. Why not build them a village?

Conventional wisdom is that none of this will work. The people I’m involved with could all wind up dropping me for someone they can sleep with (in the usual, penetrative sense). My solid social networks will disappear into neat bundles of monogamy, reachable only in polite passing company. But conventional wisdom has been proven wrong before. As my relationships begin to move from talking about emotions to talking about commitment, as my friends begin to get married and don’t fall off the radar, the likelihood that I’ll wind up alone seems slimmer and slimmer. Surprisingly enough, the sexual people I am involved with feel just fine (and even a little liberated) taking their intimacy à la carte. Though they’ll certainly experience sexual frustration from time to time, there’s no particular reason for them to direct it at me. It turns out that when everything else works, sex just isn’t as important.

Love’s a funny thing. In a world where sex is overcrowded with expectations, guidelines, layered meanings, and predefined scripts, an intimately active asexual such as myself is faced with a vast expanse of open unexplored territory. If you want, we can head back to my place for coffee and talk about it. www.asexuality.org. Call me.

David Jay writes and speaks regularly on the topic of asexuality. In addition to founding asexuality.org, he has spoken at the True Colors Conference and Creating Change Conference and appeared and discussed asexuality in major media outlets in both the United States and the United Kingdom.