What You Need to Know

I always thought I was broken.

When I was a kid, my friends would always talk about celebrities being “hot” and I would go along with them, but I couldn’t understand their feelings. I’ve never looked at a celebrity, friend, or stranger and thought, “Wow, that’s sexy.” Never. I certainly had unrequited love, but it had nothing to do with the other person’s appearance. You can only find someone cute if you like their personality.

My friends were excited about a cute boy at school and I was playing with them. I trusted them completely and thought if they thought they were cute then they must do it. right? I never quite understood what was so appealing to them. They were mostly nice, but I didn’t understand why my friends wanted to kiss them. I didn’t know anything about most of them. Even after puberty, I never felt any sexual or physical attraction to people I didn’t know well.

Now that I’m an adult, I realize that’s exactly what demisexuality is.

I am attracted to someone only after I become that person. Develop deeper emotional connections with them. I can count on one hand the number of men I’ve kissed or been attracted to in my life, and there’s nothing wrong with that. I never feel like I’m missing out because my body’s tendency is to have a seven-hour conversation with someone more than to be physically intimate with them.

The best way to explain it is that I’m attracted to a person’s personality, not their appearance.

For sexual people, sparks can fly instantly with someone you meet for the first time. A kind of sudden chemistry that draws them together from the beginning. For asexual people, that spark doesn’t tend to happen at all over time. For me, the only time I’ve felt that excitement was when I knew the other person well and we both expressed romantic interest in each other.

I’m a romantic at heart. I’ve never been the “make eye contact with a stranger at a bar” romantic type.

As a demisexual person, when I meet someone for the first time, I just look at them. I don’t think of their physical characteristics as anything more than a part of who they are. Do you have great abs? Neat. Do you have a chiseled chin? Okay, whatever. It’s only when I start to see what’s behind the eyes looking back at me that those physical features catch my eye. So I knew I wasn’t asexual. It’s tempting, but it just takes time to get there.

I was 16 when I had my first boyfriend, my first kiss, and my first understanding of attraction. never I wanted it Kiss someone before that. He made me feel seen, beautiful, and understood. For the first time in my life, someone was truly invested in who I was and wanted to know everything about me. My first kiss was during a movie. As he moved closer to me, I suddenly felt a knot in my stomach. I was drawn to him like a moth to a flame, and it felt as natural as breathing. Everything my friend was saying made sense to me. The more I got to know him, the more beautiful he seemed to me.

Like any other naive high school girl in love, I doted on him. I felt like I finally understood what my friends saw in their boyfriends and girlfriends. Maybe this was the only person for me all my life, or maybe I was just lucky to find him so young?

This school sweetheart has been my partner for about 6 years. Our very ugly formal breakup happened a few months after we started connecting emotionally because I knew in my heart that he was cheating.

After this, I was once again thrown into a vortex where I didn’t understand who I was. For me, being attracted to someone involves a lot of personal emotional investment. And as a monogamous person, I have no interest in pursuing other people when I’m in a committed relationship. I was furious and more confused than ever. This partner was the only one I was attracted to. No matter how close I got to other people, I only had those feelings for him. Demisexuals usually do not have one-night stands or affairs. We build physical relationships from the fragments of emotional relationships.

I started questioning everything about my sexuality. “Wasn’t I broken?” Is it normal to not feel attracted to people in general?