I Discovered I’m Demisexual and I Don’t Know What to Do About It

I haven’t had much of a romantic life and I’ve just turned 50. To my family and my best friend,this is rarely if ever mentioned. To be fair, to my family and my best friend, it’s never been an area of any concern. To them, I suppose, it’s just always been “Natalie just doesn’t do that kind of thing… just the way she is.” For my father, I think it was a relief. He was very protective and a bit on the old fashioned side.

I just assumed I’d develop more of an interest when I got a little older. My mother told me I was a late developer “where dating and other stuff were concerned.” I was awkward enough to wonder what the “other stuff” was until I was about 15.

As an awkward child, the she doesn’t really fit in kind of awkward, I was most definitely on the outside when other kids my age started showing an interest in one another. I would develop “crushes” just as they did, but mine took longer to manifest themselves. I would start paying attention to how someone acted, how they talked to other people, what they talked about, especially if I felt the same about what they were discussing. I’d spend a month or two learning more about them and if I liked what I learned, I would develop a crush on them.

Early on, I would let my crush know that I thought they were swell. I didn’t know I was supposed to feel embarrassed being honest and forward about how I felt. But after a few pretty nasty rejections, being told that “I was doing it wrong,” even hearing that “I was embarrassing myself,” I started keeping all of it to myself. Even the awkward girl starts to feel bad about herself when she hears over and over how wrong she is.

Eventually I started to think something actually was wrong with me. My 20’s and 30’s were a confusing time, watching people I went to college with and my best friend pair off, move in together, getting married. I couldn’t seem to find anyone to feel that way about and I didn’t understand why. Oh, I understood why no one showed any interest in me. I am not the kind of person others pick out in a crowd and make a beeline towards. In any group I’ve been a part of, I was considered the DUFF… a term my nieces recently taught me… the Designated Ugly Fat Friend. And people rarely take the time to get to know the DUFF, I’ve been told.

I eventually did what so many people end up doing: I tried online dating. This was a very vexing process because messaging back and forth with someone and trying to learn more about them is not what most people want to spend time doing. I went on 3 dates with 2 different people and both times it was a bust. If I had had more time to get to know them, who knows? It might have worked. But it turned into an “I’m here for sex right now” situation and that’s just not me. It obviously is the thing to do for some people, but I felt uncomfortable because I didn’t have the chance to get to know them, so I wasn’t attracted to them. Why didn’t they feel this way too?

I then did what every nerd does when they have questions: I started to research. Now I had heard the term asexual before, but I had incorrectly thought that it meant the same thing as castration, and I was in my 40’s! (The only excuse I can give: when you’ve spent most of your life living inside your own head, you tend to miss important facts that everyone else already seems to know.) At a colleague’s suggestion I visited AVEN, the Asexuality and Education Network. (https://www.asexuality.org) I did a lot of reading, asked a lot of questions and talked with some very wonderful people. I finally had an actual explanation for how I felt. In essence, a name for my sexuality. I was demisexual. Not the same as asexual, but in the same wheelhouse, found somewhere in between asexual and sexual.

Webmd.com describes those of us who are Demisexual as people who “only feel sexually attracted to someone when they have an emotional bond with the person.” We can identify with any part of the LGBTQ+ community, but the attraction we feel towards another is “secondary,” an attraction “that only happens after knowing someone for a while.” You might have also heard us referred to as Gray-A, Hyposexual or Semisexual.

Putting a name to something that confuses you is a good first step in better understanding and maybe even accepting yourself. It doesn’t fix everything though. I know I am demisexual, and that is an important thing to have learned, no matter when it was that I learned it. On the other hand, I am a 50 year old demisexual woman who would love to have a real grown up life with someone else, living in a world that is always uncertain and seems to move too fast for me. Knowing doesn’t make it any easier to exist there. Especially when you’re kind ofafraid to.

All information found and sited from webmd.com, using the article: What Is Demisexuality? By WebMD Editorial Contributors, Medically Reviewed by Dan Brennan, MD on June 28, 2021