Writing a Book About Asexuality Taught Me to Look for a Fate Beyond Numbers

I learned to reevaluate the meaning of ‘normal’ in relationships, and also my habit of reflexively turning to data.

Numbers, not people, used to be my go-to when I needed guidance. Friends could share anecdotes, but surveys and studies could tell me how to live an evidence-based life, my best life. Data showed me what to expect; it provided a glimpse into how things had worked out for many others and how they could work out for me.

Which was fine right up until I stopped being normal. Or rather, until I realized that I belonged to a group of people who are considered not normal: asexuals, or aces, meaning people who do not experience sexual attraction. “Not normal” as in “uncommon”: according to one statistic, only 1 percent of the population is ace. And “not normal” as in lacking moral standing, as in “you should be otherwise.” The two meanings do not always go together, but of course that which is statistically uncommon can morph into a judgment of that which is not right; the distinctions blur, the very existence of the distinction gets erased. I use these words now not because I believe them in all their implications, but because they represent how many people still see us. And how I sometimes, against my will, once saw myself and my prospects.

Intellectually, it was obvious that there was nothing wrong with being asexual. Emotionally, it was hard to fight where the data seemed to lead me. For much of my life, there was no area where I wanted advice more than in the realm of relationships—and it was precisely in relationships that my asexuality was most likely to create conflict. Many studies suggest that low sexual desire can be a major stressor and cause of relationship breakdown. The numbers suggested that because I was different, my life would be worse and I would be to blame.

Then, three years ago, I began writing a book about asexuality, to prove to others that different did not mean lesser. The process of writing the book forced me to learn this for myself, to feel in my gut what my brain already knew. It forced me to reevaluate the meaning and purpose of “normal” in relationships, and also my habit of reflexively turning to the data. It showed me a different way.

*

For James, a programmer in Seattle, realizing that he was ace initially caused a profound sense of loss. “I’d like to have a life that works, so intuitively the most straightforward way would be to have a ‘normal’ life,” he told me. Today, James is in a relationship with an ace woman who doesn’t want to do anything physical beyond cuddling.

A romantic relationship like this is not normal in American society, insofar as it is statistically uncommon. And so it took time for James to feel okay about this partnership that didn’t follow the script. Normal and the perception of normal hold power, even though this was what his girlfriend wanted and even though it gave James the space and freedom to figure out what he wanted too. It was only after dating his current girlfriend that James realized that he didn’t know whether he liked kissing. In previous relationships with allosexual (non-asexual) women, he kissed without thinking, to signal romantic interest and keep the relationship moving forward. Kissing was non-negotiable, simply what you did.

The numbers suggested that because I was different, my life would be worse.

Now, James had to unlearn some of his assumptions about physical intimacy, how it is linked to emotional intimacy, how dating is supposed to progress. The first few times they hung out together, James caught himself planning how he would break the touch barrier, a step that would usually be necessary a couple of dates in at the latest. It felt odd to not have to worry about going through the motions. And it was a little disorienting to notice how much he had absorbed the unspoken rules, and how he was so used to always strategizing the next move.

In the specificity of James’s experience, I found someone who had the same worries and had ended up okay. Better than okay. Once, I would have said that one example meant little against the numbers, but now I recognized the chasm between what I’d previously had—zero examples—and one. One was enough to open up possibilities. The surveys had more statistical power, but James provided the narrative power to tell the beginning of “what if,” and of a different story.

*

Lucky are the aces who find each other. In practice, many aces, including myself, date allos—and here the pressure of normal is not merely the pressure of an outside standard, but the pressure of making it work with a partner who has differing needs and numbers on their side.

Alicia, an academic, spent years cycling through medications, trying to “fix” her disinterest in sex for the sake of her allo partner. “I had enough confidence in the back of my mind the whole time to ask myself, ‘is this really a problem?’” she said. Yet his level of desire was the more common and accepted one, and so the burden fell on her to solve what he had declared a problem.

It wasn’t just him, but much of the world. Countless books and therapies and treatments focus on increasing sex drive and few on dampening a high sex drive. Asking the lower-desire partner to try to have sex seems reasonable; asking the higher-desire person to try to be celibate seems unthinkable—even though incompatibility, and not low desire, is the real problem. There are two people in a relationship, and their preferences should be given equal weight; there should be a shared compromise and a shared solution.

Alicia didn’t want to mess around with libido-affecting medications anymore, but without strength in numbers—and before she knew about asexuality—she had no language or framework to explain why she was whole and not broken. “Normal” had become a bludgeon, a way to make her shoulder the blame. This angered me. It can be easier to advocate for others than for yourself and, squarely on Alicia’s side, I found myself thinking that statistics didn’t matter, that “normal” didn’t matter. That one reason we want to be normal is because being normal means never having to explain yourself and risk being misunderstood or rejected. That, ultimately, a life of never having to explain exists for no one and so in the end, normal is a way to put off the intense conversations that build intimacy and trust and true understanding. That when the explanation does happen, it is not “normal” that matters, but carefully considered ethics. I felt for Alicia a righteousness I had not felt toward myself—but when we finished talking, I found that some of that empathy remained, and that I could apply it inward, too.

*

A month before my book came out, I came across a study claiming that “higher desire, rather than matching in desire, between partners predicted relationship and sexual satisfaction.” My breath caught. It felt like years of work had been undermined.

Then: So what? So a study of 366 couples had shown that those with higher desire had happier relationships. One more study of many such studies, many of which have a slew of methodological problems. What does that really say about me and my chances? Why should I be so affected, when I knew there were exceptions?

After three relationships ended over sexual incompatibility, Zee, a filmmaker in Colorado, decided that trying again would be futile. “If a relationship that was otherwise perfect resulted in me throwing it away because I didn’t want to have sex, why bother?” Zee says. “I had already gotten the data that I needed and there was no reason to replicate that experience if I was just going to keep hurting people.” Like me, Zee had gathered the numbers and projected into the future: this is the way it was, this is the way it will be.

A study had shown that those with higher desire had happier relationships. What does that really say about me?

Learning about asexuality helped Zee become open to dating again. The existence of asexuality helped answer the long-standing question of why they were different, and the stories of other aces in relationships made it seem like relationships could be possible for Zee, too. “That was a revelation,” they say. “It made me intrigued, like, ‘Oh, maybe I should give this another shot on my own terms, rather than with the cultural narrative terms.’”

Zee met their current partner at a party. (“Everything about that sentence is very different from who I am,” they assure me, but it was a “post-election-sadness house party.”) The two started hanging out and were together within a day. For Zee’s girlfriend, sex is a way of reaching others. For Zee, sex goes from “vaguely amusing” to “deeply chore-like” after the first two weeks. The two are in an open relationship, but that’s not a panacea. The person who wants sex can have sex with someone else, but confusion and resentment can still develop. Nor did the open relationship magically erase Zee’s guilt at feeling like they were unfairly denying their girlfriend and not fulfilling her needs. “I had to work through that and basically stand up for myself,” Zee adds. “I finally got to a point where I was like, ‘This is how I feel and you’re going to have to be okay that I will probably never be sexually intimate from this point on. It could happen, maybe, but probably not.’”

This time, though, Zee didn’t believe that what was true for others had to be true for them. They started from a new place, from the belief that the people in the relationship get to make their own rules, and neither person is broken, and that there is often more leeway than people fear. “In [my girlfriend’s] experience, one of the only ways to be intimate with people was sex and otherwise they wouldn’t be intimate at all, so it took a fair bit of reorienting and negotiation,” Zee adds. “She’s said to me that ‘I feel like I need less sex around you because we’re so intimate in other ways.’” Intimacy for them looks like a lot of cuddling, hand-holding, “being close without necessarily having to be unclothed.”

*

To rely so much on statistics to tell the future is not only folly, it is also the product of privilege. It is not a coincidence that my uncritical fetishization of data was shaken once I discovered the area in which I am most an outlier. For those who are marginalized, surveys have often painted dark futures. Minorities have long had to believe in possibility over probability and had to have faith that we can transcend that which data says is our most likely fate.

My fixation on numbers, and how my own life fit within them, was a form of compression, and richness is often lost in this process. Writing my book showed me that. Speaking to other aces about the details of their lives showed me that. Our lives are full of events that buck the odds and features we could not have imagined.

I am not one of the statistics in that study. I am who I am—a person who is normal in some ways and not so normal in other ways, a person with things that make me hard to live with and things that make me a good partner, just like the other aces I interviewed. Just like all of us. Surveys and statistics are useful but they do not necessarily provide moral guidance, nor do they doom. Data reveal general trends, but relationships are specific. They are between you and me.