 |
| 8 pairs of women's underwear. Image source. |
The topic for the June 2022 Carnival of Aces is "Throwback", so I'm going to go back to January 2020, where the carnival theme was "Conscious and Unconscious Difference." I wrote a post back then called LOLLLLL yep should have known right then I was asexual. And now I want to write about about a similar thing- about thoughts I had when I was a teenager, and how I look back on that and view it very differently now that I know I'm asexual.
----------
I was in high school, and I was talking to someone- maybe my mom?- and the subject of cute underwear comes up. Like am I interested in wearing cute underwear? I said, I think it's kind of a temptation, because if I had cute underwear then I might want to show them to someone, oh noes, and so I don't think I should have cute underwear.
And I'm remembering this now, years and years later, and I'm like, oh my goodness, did whoever I said this to get the wrong idea?
Thinking about, what if she thought I meant... like... like there was an actual real existing boy that I would have wanted to show my underwear to. Oh my. Wow no I did not mean anything like that. Wow, what if someone took it to mean, like... I want Matt from 2nd-period physics class to see me in my underwear. Some high school boy. What if somebody thought that was what I meant?
Like this realization is just hitting me now, years later, and I'm totally shocked because I did not mean it that way at all. Is that a realistic possibility, that someone might have interpreted it as being way more, uh, immediate and sexual than what I really meant? Or... Honestly I don't have a good handle on how a "normal" "average" person would think. I guess that's why I write posts like this, describing my experiences with attraction, even though it feels so weird to talk about it- because if no one talks about it, then no one can have any idea about what the general range of human experience is on the topic.
What I meant was this: I have been told that someday I am meant to have a beautiful marriage, where my husband and I love each other and have sex a lot and the sex is amazing because we love each other fully and we're married and totally committed to each other. And won't that be wonderful, someday, I can be with someone who loves me like that, and we'll be seeing each other's underwear all the time and we'll love it, just love every part of each other's personalities and bodies. This magical relationship which is comfortable and intimate and loving enough that we can share things like that. Like looking at each other in underwear or naked.
So if I wear cute underwear, as a high school girl, I will long for that ideal future marriage. I will fantasize about how it will be, to be so close with a guy, that we can totally see each other in our underwear and appreciate how cute we are. I will look forward to that magical perfect future, and want it so bad... but it's so far away, such a long time to wait, I shouldn't start myself thinking about that yet. It's not the right time for it, and obsessing over something I can't have is a sin. I should focus on following God instead of fantasizing about something way way far in the future.
The other meaning I had, actually, was a kind of six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon game, like let's try to construct some logic that links "cute underwear" with "sin." Well, what if having cute underwear leads to being proud of how cute you look, which leads to wanting to show someone else how cute you look, which leads to actually showing them, which leads to sex? Sort of a word-association exercise, dreaming up a hypothetical path between these two concepts. It wasn't something I actually felt- it was something I was taught to be afraid of feeling.
And, thinking about it now, as it occurs to me that somebody might have thought I meant that it was actually something I wanted to do, in reality, in high school. Like I was really gonna get together with an actual boy and actually show him my underwear. Like, WHATTTTT? OH GOODNESS NO. OH MY. I had crushes back then- very big crushes, so many FEELINGS- but wow, I never ever thought about anything like that. It's shocking to me to even ask myself the question, "Remember when you had a crush on Matt from 2nd-period physics class? Did you want to show him your underwear?" HOLY CRAP NO, like WHAT ON EARTH, NO, OF COURSE NOT.
(Related: Some time in the past few years, this thought occurred to me: "Remember the other guys I dated before I started dating my husband- did I want to have sex with them?" Like, WHATTTTTT OH MY GOODNESS NO, what a bizarre and shocking thought. I never ever thought of anything like that. With my husband, it was different though.)
I wanted that loving romantic relationship, where we know each other completely and share our whole lives. And, I was taught, that is the only context in which you are allowed to have sex and/or show someone your underwear. And so, I viewed sex and cute underwear as a symbol of that kind of relationship. It wouldn't make any sense to have sex or to show your underwear to someone if you didn't have that kind of relationship.
And I totally had no idea that other people experienced attraction differently than me. I thought it was totally obvious that, when I said "if I had cute underwear, I might want to show them to someone" meant "I will wish I was married so much, it will hurt." Rather than, you know, something more like "I want Matt from physics class to see how sexy I am." In recent years, I have learned that apparently a lot of high school kids literally are having sex- so wow, it actually would have been plausible that when I said that, that's what I meant. That's... that feels so unbelievable to me.
(Also, somewhat related: I was always a little confused when people said "it's so hard to not have sex before marriage." Did they mean "I'm so lonely and I hate that, but there's nothing I can do about it"- which is how I felt- or did they mean "I have opportunities to have sex but I have to force myself to turn them all down- and I may or may not be 100% successful at that"...? I sort of suspected it could be closer to the second option, because there were statistics cited about how a huge percentage of people have sex before marriage. But it didn't make sense to me.)
It's interesting to me, thinking about it now, that my desire for sex (or, what I thought was a desire for sex) was only in terms of this faraway vision of "this is the kind of marriage I want to have in the future." Whereas my romantic attraction had both those future ideals and also present obsessions over specific boys. It was "here's my idealistic vision about what kind of guy I want to be with" and "omg I hope Matt looks at me and talks to me, I want his attention so much, and when he smiles and laughs at my jokes, the cuteness radiating from his face is overwhelming, I have to keep myself from giggling, wow I like him so much." Those feelings like, I want this RIGHT NOW, with THIS BOY- and at the same time knowing that maybe it's not actually a good idea to follow those feelings, knowing it won't be the path that would lead to the ideal romantic future I wanted- but man I wanted it so much. That feeling of wanting it in the present reality- in high school I had that feeling for romantic attraction but not sexual attraction. (And then in college I felt sensual attraction in that way.)
(Ah, and then in college there were a few times I felt like "I want to have sex with that specific guy, even though there's no future for us" and I called it "lust" and was very concerned about my "sin" of feeling that way. But I didn't feel that way about guys I had crushes on or dated. And then years later when I actually did have sex, it wasn't anything like I'd expected, so I concluded that those feelings I'd had before weren't actually sexual at all. And maybe the reality is more complicated than that. Not sure how much detail I should go into here- if any ace or aro readers want details, let me know in the comments section.)
And it's hard to say how much of it was because I was repressed, and how much was because I'm asexual. I asked myself that question many times, actually, years ago when I first started to wonder if I could be asexual. "Am I asexual, or just really repressed?" But here's the thing: I wasn't allowed to have romantic or sexual desires back then (except hypothetically when I met the magical perfect guy that God had planned for me or whatever). And I worked SO HARD to repress my romantic desires. BUT WOW, SO MUCH romantic desire. I had to fight it so hard. It was this huge battle. I tried to repress it, but still it was always there. On the other hand, sexual desire... turns out there wasn't really anything to repress.
And one more thing I want to mention: I'm married now, and I do feel like it's amazing and romantic. I won't say "magical and perfect" because real life is never "magical and perfect", but... being married to Hendrix is just so fun. It's different than what I imagined marriage to be. It's better. And I really get to see his cute face every day and tell him every random thought that crosses my mind. I get to live with him and travel with him and raise our kid together. Do we have sex and show our underwear to each other? Yes, and it's good, but that's not really the point; our marriage is so much bigger than that. In church I was always taught "marriage is hard" but I don't believe that- I think living as an adult is hard, and we are doing it together, and sometimes the difficulties of life put a strain on our relationship, but it's never the relationship itself causing the problem. Our marriage itself is a support. It's so much better than what I imagined back in high school, and also so much less about sex than what I imagined in high school.
So. Well this post started with the question of wearing cute underwear, turned into a discussion of how completely different my feelings towards romance are from my feelings towards sex- even though I had always believed I desired both of them- and now here we are. Asexual. Never in a million years would I have thought that me saying "if I have cute underwear I might want to show them to someone" could be interpreted as "there literally exists an actual person that I want to see me in my underwear, and that is something I actually could do here in reality." And that is one of those moments that I look back on now and say, "wow, I am really asexual."
----------
Related:
LOLLLLL yep should have known right then I was asexual
What If I Dated In High School
What My Marriage Is Actually About (It's Not Sex And It's Not Jesus)
No comments:
Post a Comment