I’ve Never Been In Love

I have never had an actual boyfriend. Or girlfriend, for that matter. And I have never wanted on…. At least not since I was a small child!

When I was little, I used to say I had crushes on boys, or say that boys were my boyfriends. A large part of this was because I had an aunt who was about 8 years older than me, so she was a teenager at the time, and she was always bringing home boyfriends. And of course she would ask me if I had boyfriends. I wanted to be just like her. She was sort of a big sister figure to me. So I would say, yes, I have boyfriends! Because that is what girls did!

I remember one boy I felt that I loved was named Victor, when I was in first grade. He spoke Spanish and I didn't, so I got my friend Angela, who also spoke Spanish, to talk to him for me. .

In second grade I had a crush on a 5th grade boy whose last name was the same as mine. I figured this would be a good idea, because if we grew up and got married, I wouldn't have to change my last name. There was a boy in my class who I liked because my teacher said he lived near me.

A lot of the girls in my class loved to sit by the football field at recess time and watch the older boys play football or soccer. I preferred to play on the playground or in the sandbox, but sometimes I went along with what my friends were doing.

When I was ten and my family was on vacation in Wisconsin, I was playing with a boy and girl who were staying in another cottage. The boy, who was the same age as me, pulled me aside and asked me, "Do you want to go with me?"

I asked, "Go where?"

He said, "No, I mean, like boyfriend and girlfriend."

So I said, "Sure!" And we were boyfriend and girlfriend for the rest of the week... which basically meant I still played with him and his sister and nothing changed. After we went back to Chicago, I never saw him again.

But once I got to junior high, where boys and girls were actually starting to "go out" with each other, I realized I wanted no part of it. I had no interest in hugging, kissing, holding hands, or otherwise kanoodling with any boy or girl. I was pretty unpopular, so boys weren't exactly lining up to go out with me anyways... but just in case, I planned out how I would say no without hurting their feelings. I thought maybe I would have a boyfriend in high school.

High school came. I still had no interest.

My best school friend and I made friends with a boy who was as unpopular as we were. He was fun to hang out with. All three of us knew the ASL alphabet, so we would "talk" to each other silently during study hall. After a few months, the two of them came up to me one day and told me, in ASL, that they were going out. They rode on the same bus, and he had asked her out in ASL on the way to school.

When I told my mom about it, I said, "I'm so happy for them!" I was happy. My best friend had always wanted a boyfriend.

My mom said, "I would think that you would be jealous. Don't you want him to be your boyfriend?"

I said certainly not. I still was not "ready" for a boyfriend. I figured I was just less mature than my friends.

When I was 17, I was sexually assaulted multiple times, over the course of 3 months, by a 36-year-old man that I thought of as a father figure. Afterwards, everyone somehow assumed that the reason I didn't have a boyfriend was because I was traumatized from the sexual assault. But it was really because I had always been grossed out by the idea of having a boyfriend (or a girlfriend, or anyone) and still was. If anything, my experience just confirmed for me that I wanted no part of touching, kissing, or God forbid, sex.

When I was 18, a guy who I had been friends with for a while, who had moved away a year earlier, moved back into the state. We had written letters back and forth to each other constantly, and sometimes talked on the phone. (This was before every child and teenager had a cellphone and a tablet. Some kids had pagers, but I did not.) I thought of him as a friend, but he really, really, really wanted me to be his girlfriend. In fact, he somehow thought that, if he just started referring to me as his girlfriend, I would go along with it. And I sometimes did, a little bit. I would hold his hand sometimes, although it turned my stomach. Part of it was because I wanted to be seen as "normal." I still thought I was just very young for my age, and that somehow as I got older my feelings would change.

We eventually “broke up” because he kept pressuring me to have sex with him, insisting that I would like it if I tried it. He wouldn’t take no for an answer, to the point where I finally had to physically distance myself from him in order to be safe.

He was my final "boyfriend." I never had even a pretend one again. Over the years, there were many guys and girls I was friends with that I had extremely strong emotional feelings for. I could easily say that I "loved" these people and that I wanted to be around them as much as possible... but I never had any desire to be touched or kissed or anything else. I never looked at anyone and felt attracted to them. I could look at a person and think they were pretty or handsome, the same way I could look at a flower and say it was beautiful, or look at a baby and say she was adorable. But no part of me felt any sort of physical longing

My friends nagged me about finding a boyfriend. They called me “prude” for not wanting a sexual relationship. I began thinking my lack of sexual desire was because I was autistic. Yet I knew of many autistic adults who had significant others, who even got married and had kids and other "normal" things.

It wasn't even until recent years that I heard the term "asexual." Well, I had heard the term, but only in reference to worms, not to people. When I read about it, I realized it made sense, and it might actually describe me. But I didn't necessarily want to identify myself as asexual.

Why? Because I was still trying to figure out my autism and other mental and developmental disorders. I have a whole slew of them. Basically my brain is a disaster area. I wasn’t eager for one. One thing to have to explain to people about myself. Plus, when you have multiple things that set you apart from the mainstream, people start to think you’re just making things up to get attention. I’d already been accused many times by my brother of being “phony” and looking for reasons to not be “normal.”

I was also wary of disappointing my parents. I mean, they knwe that I had never had a relationship. But they've always liked to think that I had "crushes" on all of my male friends. And whenever I so much as talk to a guy, my mom starts to playfully tease me about flirting. Once when we were staying at a cabin near where my brother lives, I found a dog, and I decided to go ask one of the groundskeepers if he knew whose dog it was. My brother lives in a tiny town, so everyone knows everyone, and I had met the groundskeeper a few times. So I and the dog went to find the guy. and then we went back to our cabin to report that the guy had seen the dog and believed he was a stray. My mom said, "Were you fliiiiiiiiiiirtiiiiiing?" No, mother, I was seeking information!

I didn’t start becoming comfortable with the idea of being asexual until I got absorbed by the LGBTQ side of Tiktok, an app I joined during Covid quarantine to help combat boredom and loneliness. Asexual is technically part of the LGBTQIA+ spectrum. (It is the A, obviously.) I quickly became close friends with many LGBTQ people, including a few that lived near enough to me to hang out in ”real life.” Among them, I started to feel like I actually fit in, like I finally had a community. But not all LGBTQIA+ people believe asexual people should be part of it. I'm kind of nervous about identifying myself as part of a community that doesn't exactly want me. Currently, I'm just tiptoeing near it.

So... all that to say, I'm asexual, but the only thing that has changed is that I now have a word for what I have always been, and I can add that word to the long list of words that I haul around with me every day. Also I sort of wish it was a different word that didn't remind me of worms. But, I digress...