Whether or not you’re ace is only something you can determine. I can only tell you that my own sexuality is…weird.
I personally have issues connecting emotionally with other people. I can feel just fine, but there seems to be an invisible wall between what I feel and how I process my emotions and other human beings. I can show compassion and sympathy and empathy, but it’s purely performative: I don’t feel these things for others.
No amount of therapy has ever been able to fix this. That part of my brain just…doesn’t work that way.
But I still experience attraction. I still want someone to share my life with, romantically. I still like sex, a lot.
Romance, for me, is just finding out what behaviors my partner recognizes as me caring for them and then modeling those behaviors. It can sometimes be a strange cognitive dissonance to have someone who says how loved I make them feel and yet my attachment to them, such as it is, is pure intellectual and sexual, no emotional component at all.
Anyway, sorry for the word vomit, I guess all that was just to say that there’s nothing wrong with not fitting any of the existing labels 100%. Labels are just descriptors, and their only value is in communicating a shared experience to others. If they fit, they fit. If they don’t, no worries. You’re you, and that’s okay.
I agree having a close friend who you can trust is more important than having someone you can have sex with.
But these things are not mutually exclusive. My fiancee is my best friend and I trust them completely. I couldn’t be in a romantic relationship with someone who I didn’t trust and who wasn’t my friend first and foremost.
I’ve been in romantic relationships lasting years which were both sexual and non-sexual. In my previous relationship lasting two years, you could count the number of times we had sex on one hand. It was more like we were to best friends who also cuddled, kissed, slept in the same bed, and other romantic things.
I think the answer to “am I asexual/aromantic?” is one you gotta answer yourself. But from the sound of it, you’d definitely be in good company with us.
More specifically, I think words like that are best used as descriptors when you’re trying to communicate your deal to other people — if they’re useful descriptors, go ahead and use them. If they’re not, then toss em.
And then the labels are useful for finding people with similar experiences, so that you can hang out with them.
I have a short laundry list of labels and “diagnoses” I don’t care about making official in any kind of capacity because that’s not the point, the point is finding the people I can relate to and the ways of approaching the world that work for them, because often those things work for me too if I try them out. In the context of ace people, it’s taught me that it’s actually viable, and a thing that’s valid to want, to have a relationship where sex is not an important focus, and it’s helped me reorient myself towards close friendships as I’m getting over my last very bad long term relationship.
Everyone has their own definition of love. For me it’s about what you say: A close friend that you trust. And that’s exactly who my boyfriend is. He’s my best friend, I help him out, he helps me out and we both trust each other. Occasionally we have sex, but that’s not a huge fixture of our relationship, it’s fun for 15 minutes every week, but that’s around 0.5% of our total time together. Hanging out and playing games and doing chores is the other 99.5% of our lives together.
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