My Struggles to Accept my Sexuality

A personal essay by Ari Hensley

 

When I was a kid, I used to pretend to have crushes on people. 

I picked a person I thought was cool, decided that I was going to like them, and pretended that I did so. I did this a total of three times from kindergarten to sixth grade because I decided in sixth grade it was stupid, and that I didn’t want to be like everyone else with silly “crushes”. What I didn’t realize, however, was that people were legitimately feeling romantic feelings for people. I thought that wanting someone to be your friend and having a crush on them were the exact same thing. 

The first person I had a crush on was a kid who I’d picked in kindergarten. I thought that it was time for me to start feeling things and liking people, so I dug my heels in and refused to move him from “crush” status up until fourth grade. This kid was in my class for four years and I had talked to him about five times. Not only did he never talk to me, he was also a little annoying and not fun at all to be around; in hindsight, even if I did genuinely liked this guy in a romantic way, he would have never paid any attention to me, and now he wants to get concussions for a sport he’s mid at (football). But I didn’t care to begin with. I thought it was totally normal to choose who your crushes were, and that you only didn’t get to choose anymore once you were in high school because that’s when “adult” feelings would come out. Obviously, that is not the case.

My second and third crushes happened one year apart from each other. They were both what I like to call “friend crushes”, where I genuinely liked them and just wanted to be their friend rather than actually harbored romantic feelings for either of them. The second one happened in third grade where this guy joined my Quest group (Quest was a program in my school where the smart kids would be pulled out of class and taken to do things that were extracurricular), and I will not be saying his name because I did not ask permission to use it. I thought he was really cool and had similar interests, so what did I do? Did I go up and tell him that I (thought) I had a crush on him? No. I was just an awkward kid and thought that if I talked to him he would hate me and never want to talk to me again. He is now one of my close friends and does not know about the fake crush–only that I wanted to be friends with him. 

I ended up carrying the second “crush” for a while and it continued to fester while I started to harbor another friend crush for–yet again–another person who joined my Quest group. She was the first “girl” other than me (when I still thought I was a girl) to join, and I thought she was awesome. I probably would have pretended to have a crush on her if I knew what the LGBTQ+ community was back then, but I didn’t and was just confused about my emotions towards her. It was so similar to the crush I thought I had on my now friend (crush # 2). This turned into yet another example of a friend “crush” that I had in elementary school. 

 

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It wasn’t until two years after elementary school ended that I found out that I was really different from most of the population.   

It took me till the middle of seventh grade to learn what the LGBTQ+ community was, and I immediately knew that I was a part of it. Call it instinctual, call it wanting to feel different, but I was certain that I fit somewhere among the alphabet soup of people who weren’t how I saw characters in books or TV represented. 

At the time, I was “dating” my now best friend. They asked me out in September and I agreed in life science class, the last period we had together, because I asked him to let me think about it. Looking back, I only agreed because I was scared that he wouldn’t be my friend anymore and didn’t want him to hate me. I came out to him as bisexual a few weeks later because that’s what I thought I was. In mine, having zero romantic attraction for everyone meant I liked everyone the same, after all; if I had to recatagorize it now, I would probably call it being pansexual (blind to gender while bisexual means that you do like all genders but in different ways. I remember the night I was going to tell him–I was laying in the bed of the house we used to live in. I had just gotten a crappy phone from my father because he hated my mom and I was debating with myself whether or not to tell my new “boyfriend”. After all, I had just gotten closer to this guy and I didn’t want our relationship to be ruined. I was so nervous that my friend was going to hate me. But, it turned out that he was totally chill with it. The text conversation went a little like;

“Hey, I have a question for you…” 

“Yes?”

“Are you cool with gay people? o.o”

“Yeah”

“What about Bi people?”

“Yeah”

“Hypothetically, if I was Bi, would you be mad?”

“No”

“Are you bi, ari?”

“Yes…”

“Okay”

“Glad you aren’t mad! <3” 

“ovo”

 My anxiety was, yet again, not worth it, as you can see. 

 My friend and I were “together” for about a year and three months; the only thing that came from this time was us hanging out at his father’s house on Valentines day. I remember that he got me a crappy chocolate rose that was broken (not his fault, I just don’t like chocolate that much and holiday chocolate is the worst) and played Hungry Hungry HipposTM after his dog scared me by furiously barking. I was wearing a hat, and that triggered him into attack mode (for the record, he did not actually attack me). Then we watched JaidenAnimations videos on her YouTube (her Pokemon Ruby Nuzlocke and a few other videos) for a while afterwards, and my mother picked me up. Our first and only “date” since we were middle schoolers and both of us thought romantic stuff was stupid (it is still thought that way by both of us except I like to read romantic literature and he does not). 

As someone who is in the spectrum of Aromanticism, it doesn’t mean what some sources will make you think. I still feel love and all of my emotions (too many emotions, if you ask me) but I am unable to feel romantic love for people. I still love all of my friends platonically and my family with familial love. I also can still find things and people pretty despite being asexual. This is because we are still people with emotions. Think of it like not liking chocolate cake in a world where all people talk about is how delicious chocolate cake is. When you are the only one you don’t know who doesn’t like chocolate cake, it doesn’t mean that your taste buds are broken or you are incapable of tasting things, it just means that you don’t like chocolate cake. Obviously, this isn’t a perfect analogy, as there is an entire spectrum of people on both asexual and aromantic spectrums who feel varying levels of romantic and sexual attraction, but it is an easy one to explain and understand. Humans are so complex, it would be almost impossible to find a perfect analogy. 

I didn’t realize that I was asexual until much much later in the year after Covid started and I finally downloaded TikTok because I was bored. There, I found an entire world of different sexualities and genders that I hadn’t known existed before. Because of that, I found out what Asexulaity is and that it fit me perfectly. For those who do not know, asexuality or being asexual means that you experience little to no sexual attraction to people. There is quite a large spectrum of this sexuality with different varying degrees of attraction, and all of them are valid. 

I quickly snatched that label up and it made me feel better about myself. I remember being so happy about being able to understand myself better and knowing that I was getting closer to being able to figure everything else out as well. 

After this, I quickly started to look at my gender identity and tried to figure things out. I initially stayed using she/her pronouns, then she/they, then they/them. I used they/them for a very, very, long time until I realized earlier this year that it wasn’t that I was nonbinary, rather it was that I experienced no gender. Since this is a more controversial topic for many readers, gender is not equal to sex. Gender is a social construct of our society and wherever people fall is normal. Gender is expressions of how you feel and not always how you look. For example, one person might not relate to their assigned sex at birth and may feel like they are the other one, or a mix of all, or none at all! What’s important with understanding gender is to just be respectful to others and how they choose to identify themselves. Now, you can very well be non-binary and not feel gender at all, but agender–which means that you experience no gender whatsoever–is how I define myself and my lack of gender. This does not mean that I do not experience some gender dysphoria (even if I didn’t, whatever gender you are should be based on euphoria, not dysphoria) along with body dysphoria in general; even though I do have low dysphoria, it does not mean that I don’t want to chop the mounds of flesh on my chest off with a butcher knife. This took me a long time to figure out as well, but I am very happy with how I am able to define myself and be in a place where I feel like I belong because it has been extremely difficult for me to feel that way due to other problems with my brain and such. Feeling like you’re in a place of belonging and being able to love who you love, or be who you are is entirely what the LGBTQ+ community is all about. I am very glad that I am a part of it despite what people think of it, or think that I don’t belong in it. 

 

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Back when I was still denying being Aromantic, it was for a very specific reason that I am a little ashamed of now that I am accepting of it. I chose not to believe who I thought I was because I was scared of not being able to feel love (specifically romantic). I always wanted to fall in love and be able to love that person romantically for all of my life before we died together. After all, that is what our world pushes: everything is about falling in love or looking for love, especially when you’re looking at how society treats women. When you see someone on TV that’s weird as a kid (when watching more adult-ranged shows at least), you learn and see that everyone is only happy when they fall in love with someone and are “fulfilled” by that. There is more education and representation on television than when I was a kid, but it’s still only about love a lot of the time when it is there. 

Since I am Cupioromantic–which is a subclass of Aromanticism where the person wants to have a romantic relationship or feelings but can’t because they don’t feel romantic attraction–it was even harder to admit that I have no romantic attraction because I still do want that romantic relationship. Unfortunately though, I cannot and that has frequently broken down my mental state to little shreds that I have to slowly pick up over time to be happy again. Sad love songs are what usually get me into that funk. 

To provide context, I do not think I–or anyone else on the Asexual or Aromantic spectrum–am broken. I am very well aware that what I and other people like me are experiencing is very normal and may be harder to understand for some people–not only because it’s not in the “norm”, but because it’s a harder thing to understand. Humans typically feel romantic and sexual attraction, so when you try to explain what it is, they tend to not believe you or think that you’re faking, or something else. It is a difficult process to go through, and that is one of the reasons I do not like explaining it to people, especially because many of them don’t try to get it when they ask. A lot of people would just prefer to live in their bubbles and pretend to be supportive of different sexualities and people when they don’t fit into boxes, or decide to tell people they aren’t that thing because they don’t fit into those boxes.

 

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I remember exactly what happened when I finally admitted to myself that I am Aromantic. I was laying in my bed of the apartment (I slept on the bottom bunk while my little brother made a fort on the floor that he preferred to sleep on) and I got the notification from JaidenAnimations channel on YouTube that she posted a video titled “Being Not Straight.” I was really excited because I had gotten The Vibe from her that she wasn’t (my Gaydar is surprisingly accurate most of the time). As I watched the video, my mood slowly changed as I realized that I had also experienced almost everything she talked about. From scoping out people to try and see who I liked, to interpreting how my feelings worked (zero attraction for everyone is still equal) and I just felt… bad. After the video was done. I laid in the silence of my bed for a while, just trying to process everything and not to cry, which I ultimately failed on both parts. After twenty minutes had passed, I was a sobbing mess. Of course I was happy–I had been questioning and denying things for a couple months at this point, but I was also incredibly mad and upset. I didn’t want this for myself; I wanted to be able to do things that so much of the population could, but now I just admitted after so, so, so long of denying it and denying it. It was really hard to truly accept it and not cry every time I thought about it.

It still gets hard sometimes, but I am more happy now then back then and do plan on joining a queer platonic relationship (this is where it’s not romantic feelings, but it’s a commited more intense platonic relationship with someone) when I am ready/find the right person in my life. 

 

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My reasoning for making this essay was three main things. 

One, I wished to share my experience of struggling to accept it because finding out your sexuality is shown as an incredibly easy thing to accept a lot of the time. There isn’t a lot of self-hatred showing because we already get such little representation as a community. You want to make that seem like a positive thing to people, especially because people already try to infantilize us by saying that we don’t know what we’re talking about. If it’s shown as an incredibly hard thing to accept sometimes, we would be taken even less seriously and it could hurt the community in multiple ways. 

Two, I wanted to talk about how Aromantic and Asexual people actuallly are because we are far too often portrayed as robots or emotionless beings because we don’t or feel little sexual/romantic attraction. We’re humans, not robots, or aliens, or psychopaths. Those narratives greatly hurt the community and don’t teach who we are at all. It is horrible for people to figure out who they are when they have no resources to do so. If you see a robot, a villain, aliens, or just emotionless people  as the only representation of you and who you are, you don’t feel good about yourself and your identity. This can be especially bad because the way people learn is through exposure, so when people learn that all aromantic people on TV are evil or emotionless, they tend to have that idea cemented in their mind. We see representation for aromantic people not very often in films because it is a more elusive identity (and newer shows like The Owl House and Steven Universe have done a wonderful job with their aromantic characters (Lilith Clawthorn and Peridot)) in addition to when people are making headcanons (thoughts about a character from something put in narrative about how they act/their identity) they choose the loveless characters, the villains, the aliens, or the robots for our “representation”. One blaring example of this is Lord Voldemort himself. Even though people do not normally see JK Rowling as a good writer in general, people very often tend to make her villain character of Harry Potter Aromantic which is not a good look on your community that you are trying so hard to fight for and prove is real and aren’t incapable of every kind of love. When there is only negative representation in media (of anything, not just sexaulities), it causes people who are that way feel like they aren’t real, or like they’re bad because of things they can’t change; and people who only see that content for people believe that all of those people are that way (evil/emotionless/robotic). Far too many people (including Aromantic and Asexual people) feel like they’re robots becauase they can’t change who they are. 

Three, I wanted to explain how I feel and how I knew I was both on the Aromantic and Asexual spectrum because I want for other people to be able to learn about themselves in a positive way if possible. It sucks to be struggling for years on something you can’t control because you don’t know what it is that you’re feeling, and for people to think you are weird when you try to explain it. If I could possibly offer a way for people to learn about experiences and for them to learn about themself if it pertains to them, then my goal for this is complete. I think that teaching people about personal experiences is a terrific thing and I’m glad I got the opportunity to share mine.