Asexual, Aromantic, Apatrial

what universal human experiences are you missing?

I.

When I was a teenager, I used to hang out around asexual spaces, because while I’m the opposite of an asexual I and asexual groups were both interested in new ways of seeing relationships and sexuality.

Most people I now know use “asexual” as a broad, umbrella term which refers to all kinds of not liking or wanting sex. But at the time the Asexual Visibility and Education Network (AVEN) used a very strict definition: an asexual was a person who didn’t experience sexual attraction.

Asexuals could like orgasms: while some asexuals reported being anorgasmic or having orgasms that felt more like a sneeze, many asexuals felt pleasure when orgasming. Asexuals could have a libido: some noticed a desire for regular orgasms, and even felt irritable or distractable if they didn’t have them. Asexuals could even have partnered sex, to please their partner or because they liked orgasms.

Some people asked, well, if you like orgasms and have a libido and have partnered sex, in what sense are you asexual? What exactly is this ‘sexual attraction’ thing you claim to be missing?

Another wrinkle: Some people on AVEN identified as asexual for many years, were comfortable in their asexual identity, often had no desire for partnered sex or orgasms in any way. Then they formed romantic relationships and discovered, to their great confusion, that they suddenly wanted… something?… with their romantic partner. Their desires seemed to involve… touching?… or something? What?

After a lot of confusion, they figured out that they’d started experiencing sexual attraction now that they were in a romantic relationship. The term “demisexual” was originally invented for this group.

And then the word “demisexual” escaped its context, and people began to say things like “you don’t want sex outside of a committed romantic relationship? That’s normal. This oversexed culture is making everyone think that real life is pornography. Actually, all women are demisexual.”

Which, come on, no they’re not. If all women are demisexual, who exactly is the audience for Bridgerton?

Sexual attraction is, I think, a real thing. Sexual attraction is the desire to have sex with a specific person, for reasons other than the purely instrumental (“I’m dating her and it would make her happy,” “orgasms are nice and she’s in my house and not busy”). Sexual attraction doesn’t necessarily mean you actually want to have sex with the person: a monogamous person can be sexually attracted to people besides her spouse. As I’ve written before, a lot of sexual attraction is similar to my brain’s belief that Tide Pods are a delicious snack: on some level, Tide Pods are appealing to eat, even though I am not remotely tempted to have a Tide Pod for lunch.

But it’s really hard to talk about sexual attraction in a way that isolates sexual attraction alone. There are other reasons to want sex, like orgasms or connection with one’s partner or simple curiosity. There are reasons not to want sex with someone you’re sexually attracted to, like monogamy or wanting to save sex for committed relationships or disliking her personality. If you’re not very precise in your terminology, it’s easy to say something you don’t mean.

II.

Some people on AVEN identified as alloromantic: that is, they wanted romantic relationships, without the sex part. Other people identified as aromantic: they didn’t want either sex or romance, although maybe they wanted to have close friendships and live with someone and maybe even merge finances and raise children together.

If sexual attraction is hard to define, romantic attraction is a nightmare.

Many people believe that the alloromantic asexuals are fooling themselves: if you don’t want sex with a person, it’s not a romantic relationship, it’s a friendship. Other people believed that (many of) the aromantic asexuals were fooling themselves: if you want to be someone’s closest friend and live with them and raise children with them, that’s the thing a romantic relationship is and you’re just being difficult by calling it a friendship. Both of these, I think, lead to unintuitive results. A couple in a dead bedroom still seems to me to be in a romantic relationship. Conversely, if two straight female single moms live together and raise their kids together, I don’t think they’re dating.

Aromantics, in general, didn’t do a great job of articulating what it was they didn’t feel. “You know,” they would say, “the thing with the hearts and flowers and poetry and ‘I love you’s. Valentine’s Day!” But many people in romantic relationships don’t give each other flowers or celebrate Valentine’s Day. And there’s nothing stopping you from writing poetry for your platonic friends or telling your platonic friends you love them.

Nevertheless, I think romantic attraction is a real thing.

I want to have sex with a lot of people, but every few years I meet someone really special. I can’t stop thinking about them. I’m obsessed with them liking me; I spend a lot of time reading tea leaves about how quickly they message me back or whether their compliments are effusive enough. If they suggest a book I might like, I set aside an entire afternoon to read it. If they live in a different time zone, I stay up late every night to talk to them. I can motivate myself to do work by promising that I get to text them every time I finish a thousand words of blog post. I cause great consternation among my friends by refusing to ever shut up about them:

xkcd.

When I meet a person this special, it seems to cause a strange blindness in those around me. It's obvious that this special person is brilliant and creative and kind and unreasonably good-looking and anyone they tolerate is the luckiest person alive, and yet everyone else I know insists that they're basically normal. Sometimes my friends go so far as to claim that they have flaws! I don't know what about this feeling makes everyone else I know so unreasonable.

Since such a person is so special and so good, I acquire two overpowering motivations. First, I want them to be happy, and to be happy because of me in specific. I want to write them stories, make them laugh at my jokes, run errands for them, cut my hair in a way they like. Second, I want to spend time with them. Before I was married, I wanted to wake up with them in my arms every morning, eat dinner with them every night, go grocery shopping with them every weekend, and generally stay with them for the rest of my life. Now that I'm married and poly, I have to get a bit more creative. ("I want to... schedule a weekly date with them... that turns out to be a date every other week because we're both quite busy?")

Some people claim that romance naturally ends after a certain period of time (somewhere between six months and seven years, depending). But I think that it's useful to distinguish romance from what poly people call "New Relationship Energy."

New Relationship Energy only happens in relationships that are (well) new. It tends to be more all-consuming: hobbies collect dust and other relationships go neglected as you devote yourself entirely to your shiny new lover. Intrusive thoughts are characteristic of new relationship energy; so is anxiety about whether they like you as much as you like them. Feeling New Relationship Energy forever is neither possible nor desirable. Your relationship has to eventually leave room for the rest of your life.

Sure, once New Relationship Energy fades, it often turns out that New Relationship Energy was the only thing the relationship had going for it, and the partners break up in a somewhat chagrined fashion.¹ But often, in my experience, the romance sticks around.

My husband is still in love with me after more than a decade. From an objective outside perspective, he has numerous irrationally positive views about how often I live up to my values, how pointlessly bitchy I am, whether I am generally trying as hard as I can, and how likely it is that I'll become a New York Times bestselling author. He finds the idea of leaving me unthinkable. He's willing to do very unreasonable things to make me happy.²

This is all very convenient for me. I definitely recommend marrying someone who's in love with you if you can. But I think it's also good for the relationship. Having so-called "positive illusions" about your partner is correlated with relationship satisfaction and the longevity of the relationship. Romance gives you that little nudge towards stability. Statistically speaking, your partner is probably mediocre; most people are. But if you think your partner is special and perfect, you'll overlook their failings, interpret their flaws in a more charitable light, and avoid stupid drawn-out arguments about the dishes.

As it happens, in our culture, romantic feelings are associated with certain behaviors (hearts, flowers, poetry, Valentine's Day, "I love you", weddings). But I think there's a real feeling those behaviors reflect. Aromantics aren't being special snowflakes when they say that they only like people a reasonable amount for normal reasons, and there's this entire cluster of feelings they don't have.

III.

I am allosexual and alloromantic, but there's another kind of feeling I'm missing. Maybe you could call me “apatrial,” from the Latin pater, “father.”

I want to be clear that I love my child. He's a cool person. I like talking to him and finding out his perspective on the world. I care a lot about his happiness. I love him unconditionally and accept him as he is. I try to be kind and understanding to him. I work on many of my personality flaws (laziness, irritability, refusal to make phone calls) because I know he's dependent on me and my flaws hurt him.

But sometimes people say things like "having a child is deciding forever to have a piece of your heart walk around outside your body" or "no one who isn't a parent can understand parental love" and I'm like. What the fuck are you talking about?

I love my child in the same way I love my best friend: he's pretty neat, he's fun to talk to, and frankly he's been around long enough that he's grown on me.

I know I'm missing something. I remember seeing my husband cradling our child when he was a newborn. As he gazed at our sleeping child, my husband had this expression of complete bliss and peace on his face. In that moment, everything he wanted out of life was fulfilled. I remember thinking: Wow. I sure hope it doesn't traumatize our kid that he only has one parent who feels that.

Until my kid learned to speak, taking care of him was like taking care of a very high-stakes Tamagotchi. I actually liked it; I liked having a long series of unambiguously useful tasks that it was nearly impossible to fail at. But when I look at my husband and my coparent and everyone else with a newborn, I can tell they're getting something out of it that I don't.

Some people I know compare parental love to new relationship energy or even to wireheading. They talk about suddenly not being able to stand stories in which children gett hurt or die, or being endlessly fascinated by their child acquiring new skills, or having an infinite and unfillable desire for baby cuddles. I’ve never felt any of that.

I don't think being patrial makes you a better parent; parenting quality is far more about individual virtue than it is about the emotions you do or don't have. Maybe this is cope but, I don't know, there are a lot of really shitty parents who talk about how no one other than a parent can know what it's like to love your own child. I do think your own parenting is more pleasant if you have it, the way that sex is more fun if you're allosexual and keeping a marriage together is easier if you're in love.

For that reason, I don't want to urge my fellow apatrials not to have children. I had a child, and I'm very happy with my decision. But if you're unsure if you want kids, and you're seeing people say "oh, it's different when it's your own"... well, it isn't, not always. Not for everyone.

IV.

I don't think it's an accident that these three difficult-to-name feelings are all related to reproduction. Allosexuality makes you want to have sex. Alloromanticism makes you want to pairbond. Parental feelings make you want to take care of your children.

Sex, pairbonding, and parenting are all things people do or refrain from doing for a variety of reasons: practical and aesthetic, wise and stupid, common and profoundly idiosyncratic. They're also the three behaviors—other than survival itself—that have the most effect on your inclusive genetic fitness. It makes sense that evolution puts its thumb on the scale to get people to do them. And evolution's technique for doing so is creating emotions, which motivate you to take certain actions.

But because these emotions motivate you to complex behaviors—behaviors that people do for many reasons totally unrelated to having those emotions—it’s hard to point to them. You can have sex with someone without sexual attraction. You can marry someone without being in love with them. You can be a good parent without any sort of deep parental feeling. Some asexual aromantic apatrials, no doubt, have done all three. So it’s very hard to talk about the way your experiences are different from the human norm.

1. If their friends are gracious, they don't make fun of them for all those vows of eternal love.

2. Sometimes I feel tired so I ask him to walk across the room, get my headphones from me, and take them to the charger and plug them in. He somehow doesn't complain about this.