Embracing asexuality with both hands

It all began with Justin being absolutely delectable on a video clip that spread faster than a speeding bullet through all the women’s WhatsApp groups. Justin, as in Trudeau, let me clarify, not Bieber.  

As the resident female populace of the groups sent in their heart eyed emoticons in response, I realised that I’d spent much of my life indulging in completely unrequited love of the unattainable variety, beginning with the stubble jawed George Michael who shattered my heart into a million fragments when he came out. And the literary crushes, Mr Darcy, Mr Rochester, Heathcliff and Edward Cullen included. Having plummeted through train wrecks of unrequited crushes, I’d always assumed, wrongly of course, that most folks felt the same.

“I don’t understand how you go all gaga over some random man you will never meet,” she said. I don’t either, I confessed back, but it has been a part of life so long, I feel bereft without a current crush du jour. “I’ve never felt attracted to anyone,” she replied. “All these years I thought there was something wrong with me, but now I realise, I am just asexual.”

Her confession hit me much in the manner of a tiny person head butting me in the solar plexus, knocking the air out of me. When I’d recovered my breath, I began asking the questions. Many of them.

There has been a lot written about why middle age seems to be the point at which most women, liberated from the tyrannies of diaper changing, wiping snot off leaking noses, packing carefully calibrated tiffin boxes, crashing elusive glass ceilings and clawing their way ferociously up the treacherous liana in corporate jungles rediscover their mojo with redoubled intensity.

Not much is mentioned about the opposite. The ones who realise that they are, in troth, what is called asexual, and it took until they reached the self realisation of middle age to embrace it with both hands. “I just don’t feel the desire for sex, I never have, nor attraction for any male or female,” she tells me. Among the many things she has realised, now that she has her head space back, is that she is asexual. “This word wasn’t even around back then. I just thought it was normal for a woman to not want sex at all.” That’s what had been dinned into us back then, that good girls don’t want sex. Those who do are bad girls. Asexual didn’t exist in our vocabulary back then, when we were passing out of college fresh faced and shiny eyed, plagued with infinite photographs of eligible ‘boys.’

A lot of folks are asexual, men and women. According to some estimates, one of every 100 people are asexual. This is not to confuse asexuality with the loss of libido, something that might be a casualty caused by boredom in a long term marriage or the issues that come with changing hormonal levels as menopause approaches. That is another demon altogether.

The ones who are truly asexual spent their adolescent years wondering about their orientation, whether they were gay or bisexual and agonising why neither gender ever did anything for them. An asexual person can fall in romantic love, but not be interested in sex. They can of course have sex, and children, because they do have perfectly functional reproductive organs. The condition of a marriage that has survived the seven year itch, without the application of topical steroid creams to soothe it, is a conversational landmine. Often, there’s the ‘don’t ask don’t tell,’ equation that asexual partners make their peace with when married to a partner who isn’t.

Most of them live out their lives wondering what is wrong with them. But there is nothing wrong. Asexual is just a complete lack of sexual attraction or desire. It is a completely valid orientation to be. Just like being straight, bisexual or gay is. Just asexual. And that is a perfectly fine place to be in if they’re comfortable with it.

Kiran Manral is the author of six published books across genres. She is also a recovering Nutella addict.