G – i mean. it did feel a little bit disgusting yes R – Oh!!
G – no offence
R – No I like it. you’re definitely the anti-me G – we are very opposite people, yes R – Very refreshing
G – love that for us
R – Tasty
G – delicious content
R – 10/10
We both started giggling, and then we couldn’t stop, until the professor shushed us and we looked at each other, grinning. Everything might have been shit still, I’d hurt my two best friends and I knew I had so far to go before I could even begin to like who I was, but at least I had Rooney sitting next to me, laughing instead of crying.
The internet is a blessing and a curse. Googling ‘aromantic asexual’ unleashed a quantity of information I was not mentally or emotionally prepared for. The first time I searched it, I quickly exited the window and didn’t search again for a whole day.
My animalistic instinct was this is stupid.
This is fake.
This is a made-up internet thing that is stupid and fake and absolutely not me.
And yet, it was me. Sunil and Jess were not the only ones. There were thousands of people on the internet who identified this way and were very happy to do so. In fact, people had been using the word ‘asexual’ as a sexual identity since as far back as 1907. So it wasn’t even an ‘internet thing’ at all.
Sunil had explained it pretty concisely, to be fair. The internet informed me that asexual simply meant little-to-no sexual attraction, and aromantic meant little-to-no romantic attraction. On a more intense internet dive, I discovered there was actually a lot of debate over these definitions because people’s experiences and feelings could be so vastly different, but at that point, I decided to log the hell off again.
It was too much. Too confusing. Too new.
I wondered whether Sunil had ever felt like this about his own asexuality, and after I scrolled down his Instagram for a while, I found he had a blog. It was called ‘Diary of a Cellist at Durham’， and it had posts about all sorts of things – studying music, Durham activities, his daily routine, his role in Pride Soc and in the student orchestra. He’d also posted a few times about asexuality. One post stuck out to me, where he’d written about how he’d initially found it difficult to accept his asexuality. Sexuality in general was very taboo in Indian culture, he’d explained, and when he’d looked for support, he’d found that the asexual community – even online – was incredibly white. But after finding a group of Indian asexuals online, he’d started to feel proud of his identity.
Sunil had no doubt been on a very different journey to me, and a lot of things that he’d dealt with, I would be shielded from due to being white and cis. But it was reassuring to know that he too had felt some anxiety about being asexual. People didn’t always love who they were right away.
I soon found the courage to continue googling.
It turned out that lots of asexual people still wanted to have sex for all sorts of different reasons, but some felt totally neutral about it, and others – what I’d originally thought – literally despised it. Some asexual people still masturbated; others didn’t have libidos at all.
It also turned out that lots of aromantic people still wanted to be in romantic relationships, despite not feeling those feels. Others didn’t ever want a romantic partner.
And people identified as all sorts of combinations of romantic and sexual – there were gay asexuals, like Sunil, or bisexual aromantics, like Jess, or straight asexuals, pansexual aromantics, and loads more. Some asexual and aromantic people didn’t even like splitting up their attraction into two labels, and some just used the word ‘queer’ to summarise everything. There were words I had to google like ‘demisexual’ and ‘greyromantic’， but even after googling I wasn’t sure exactly what they meant.
The aromantic and asexual spectrums weren’t just straight lines. They were radar charts with at least a dozen different axes.
It was a lot.
Like a lot a lot.
The crux of it all was that I did not feel sexual or romantic feelings for anyone. Not a single goddamn person I had ever met or would ever meet.
So that really was me.
Aromantic.
Asexual.
I came back to the words until they felt real in my mind, at least. Maybe they wouldn’t be real in most people’s minds. But I could make them real in mine. I could do whatever the fuck I wanted.
I whispered them sometimes under my breath, until they felt like a magic spell. Pictured them as I fell asleep.