Confessions of an Asexual Slut
I’ve come to the realization recently that I got ho tendencies. I mean this in all but the classic sense, having been literally (if nonpenatratively) in bed over the course of the past month with more individuals than I care to grow enough fingers to count. If, as we have been wont to posit from time to time, one can get just as intimate without sex as with it, then hot damn do I get around.
Really though.
One of the quirks of being asexual, I’ve found, is that classifying and prioritizing relationships becomes a mite tricky. Though not all sexual people choose to employ it as such, sexual activity can serve as a neat marker of importance, something that, for better or worse, is saved like fine china for the really special occasions. The same cannot be said of, say, intellectually intense emotively reflectively discussion, which is more my bread and butter. Maybe this is wrong of me, but I’ll have an interesting discussion at the slightest suggestion, and will get intellectually intimate with anything that has a pulse.
This becomes something of a problem, as, like the town bicycle I am, I tend to leave one relationship for another the second it becomes convenient. After all, interesting people are everywhere, so why inconvenience myself?
The result is that I wind up talking not in terms of boyfriends or girlfriends but in terms of networks, entire communities with which I am in some way intimate. I find myself wondering whether this mode of forming relationships is healthy, or even sustainable. Will I eventually “settle down” in some spider’s web of deep, committed friendships that will have me and hold me so long as I shall live? Will I build up a village capable of raising my child or will, as I’m afraid, my fickle and flexible networks disappear into neat bundles of monogamy, reachable only in polite passing company.
Love’s a funny thing. What about the friendships that I’m forming makes them so expendable? Maybe it’s just what I grew up with. There are some who argue that friendship in our society is vastly undervalued. We set out to find “true” (sexual) love and fortune, and friends are the flowers on the side of the road. Deeply enjoyable, an important part of the journey but by no means the destination. I grew up where “just” friendship was always considered relatively expendable. Of course people will stay in touch, but it’s more or less expected that friends will be left for school, jobs, lovers, wives, husbands, kids and all of the other things that count themselves among the nonnegotiable quota of a life well lived. No wonder I’m cheap. Like the classics of my condition I spread my eggs among many baskets because I know I’ll be abandoned. I know that regardless of how close and committed I become to my (almost all sexual) friends they’ll keep up their all-but-obligatory search for the Right One. After hearing friend after friend drone on about their personal life without including me in it it becomes easy to get discouraged. And the discouraged are often predisposed to wander.