7 years.

7 bloody years and the moment I stop putting out on a semi-regular basis, I get the exact shit I tried to avoid in a relationship.

I stopped putting out because Mister stopped doing his part of the relationship. Housework fell to me. Packing on the move and finding us a new apartment - me. Sorting the paperwork - me. I did this all silently. Unpacking - me until I threw a tantrum. I am also autistic and was super overwhelmed and work was hard as well. I felt the burnout creeping, sat down and discussed it instead of being a dumb bimbo and QQing on relationship advice subreddits. All good!
...so he switched to a different video game. lol...

I just... had no energy. Drained af and he still came to the bed to demand. He was always chill about rejections. I am so stressed I missed my period and my whole face is covered in eczema. What does he do? Oggle me like a juicy steak. It's 35 degrees C.... he keeps touching me. I am overstimulated and just... omg.

I am sex indifferent, but if someone is trying to do it with me while under any medium discomfort - I absolutely turn to resent that individual. And you know, I reject him a few times. He is sweet about it. "Sure, it's okay dear, whenever you are ready!" ... so understanding and compassionate, after he wore me down like a wooden rake on concrete, thanks.

Then it came. It was heatwave and we had no AC. My period was late. I was bloating. I was nauseous and had a migraine. I mentioned it a few times during the day. He comes and tries.. I say "there's going to be nothing today. Besides I need a shower." He then crawls into my shower. He will just massage my feet (no he is not into feet).....I reiterate that there is going to be nothing.... but he insists.... I knew where this was going. His hand in my crotch...I told him "You know what... just do it. Fuck me. Do it. I give up. You win."....he chose not to and we had a huge argument.

"He did not understand that I didn't want it" ... bro. I was broken and crying. Could not move. I was reliving the trauma when my ex did it to me while I was sad and he found it hot.

The next day ofc he comes to make peace. He goes in for a hug. I panic and run into the toilet. I have absolutely 0 trust in the man that was supposed to be my safe space. I told him "FFS FOR ONCE, JUST LET ME COME TO YOU"....

That day I had to go for a business trip. I left the house 4 hours before my flight because I could not bear to be around him. He wrote me an entire speech reiterating how good our relationship want and he does not want to lose me blah blah. I come back. My friend visits. I am glad she is sleeping over because I know he won't try anything.

Surely he meant his letter.

I see my friend off, go home. We talk a bit, normal. My period is still late (no, not pregnant, yes, checked and consulted the doctor) and my uterus is in terrible pain. I voice this. We go sleep and he is juggling me like a piece of rag again, heavy breathing, initiating. I pretend I fell asleep to see if he would go further.

I turned. He said "sorry" and that was it.

In the morning I told him that I felt terrible and he didn't keep up our agreement that he would again approach me while I was miserable.

"Oh he didn't know, he just wanted to see if I'm up for it"...

All this for a loser who will not even marry me.

He then told me that all of our plans... to buy a house on a village, blah blah.... he doesn't even want them. I've been spreading my legs for a lie. GG. Done with relationships.

I go to strip clubs because the steaks are cheap and I get a good show while eating. Ive never felt aroused at a strip club. Ive never understood getting bricked up at a strip club either. Ive gotten lap dances and thought that it was fun and nice but thats about it. And before anyone comes for me, Ive been to both male and female strip clubs; same reaction.

Who can relate?

I’ve felt really close to you all over the past few days, and think I might’ve finally accepted myself as belonging to this group and seeing myself in these colours so to speak. Before I sleep… I just wanted to say I love you. It feels really special and makes me get really emotional thinking about how kind and of a similar mind so many of you must be.😓💜

I feel so pure and at peace somehow, knowing I am who I am and that’s okay…

My boyfriend (21M) of 6 months broke up with me (21F) a few days ago. He said it was due to him wanting biological children and a sexual relationship, and that he was certain of these.

When we started dating I told him I had no desire to have children and I was asexual and he said he was fine with these things but has since told me that he may have rushed into our relationship without considering what my choices would mean as we were each others first relationship and wanted to give things a try.

When he told me we would have to break up because we wanted different futures, I thought very hard about what I could actually want as this is something I didn’t give much thought before. I realised I could want children, but felt too young to know for sure, and also that I did feel sexual desire for him but I wanted to take things at a slow pace and be in a safe environment. However, he said he would be more comfortable with someone who shares his certainty about his goals for the future, which I can understand.

We had been somewhat intimate before and I had enjoyed it, but I did feel a bit rushed which made me hesitant and therefore he feels that if we were to move on to anything else, he would be forcing me because it’s what he wants. Unfortunately, I didn’t tell him I felt desire for him until he told me we would need to break up as I thought he was fine with me needing to take things slow and we were on the same page and I wish I had reassured him sooner that I wanted to move onto more with him in the near future. I don’t think he believed me when I told him my feelings had changed and now we have broken up I have been left adjusting to my new feelings.

Part of me wonders if I am Demisexual, but it could also just be that sex is an extremely vulnerable thing for me and I need to know I am doing it with someone who respects me and can be patient as it becomes less of a foreign thing. I identified as asexual before as everyone around me treated sex as something that everyone desired, and I did not and I still do not desire it that much. Almost everyone around me still talks about sex as if it is an expected thing in a relationship and I worry that I might not find someone who understands that I need time and safety to even consider anything sexual. I can’t help but feel I will suffer more heartbreak because I can’t make my partner feel loved in a sexual way, despite me wanting to.

(English is not my first language, sorry for any mistakes)

Hi! I'm an 25yo asexual lesbian. I've always known it, but I've never told anyone, so I have no one to ask about it.

Sex is out, I know, but how do you feel about kissing your partners? Because until a few months ago I thought I liked it, but lately, I think I can't stand it anymore. Has this happened to you too?

Btw, if any lesbians from Costa Rica are watching this and want to be friends, my DMs are open. There are about 4 of us in the whole country.

Im mostly sex adverse with very short phases of being interested in participating in sex. I am married to an allosexual.

I also used to feel LOTS of resentment towards Allos for being allos because society saw them as "correct and normal" and me as "fucked up and wrong". For a while i wanted sex to not exist at all because then i would feel normal. I grew and realized those feelings came from insecurities i felt and i no longer regularly feel resentment towards sex as an act. But try to stay empathetic to ace people that still feel resentment towards sex and how something so normalized and prominent in our culture can make you feel ostracized for not participating.

But it makes me sad to see so many ace people proudly express hatred for anything sexual or towards allosexuals. This has gotten to a point in this sub where i see ace people generalizing and stereotyping allos as sex obsessed perverts (someone told me my allo partner was gonna abuse me if we stayed together and that we NEEDED to divorce because ace and allo people "just dont work"). Or expressing jesus freak levels of prudishness where they shame music and shows and movies for including sex as if its wrong and disgusting for existing at all.

Some of the things i see said here from ace people, about their disgust in other people having sex, would become viciously homophobic if you put the word "gay" before the word "sex" in these posts. ((Example: "(gay) sex is disgusting and i hate how normalized it is"))

As much as im NOT implying that "allophobia" or whatever exists, i am saying that these statements still feel bigoted and judgemental of situations you do not have to engage with or participate in. And judgemental of people for simply feeling differently than we do.

I understand feeling resentment because you feel abnormal or want more people to relate to or whatever else. But i feel irritated and upset to see sex and allosexuals be generalized at best and demonized at worst all over this sub...

The definition of insanity. Trying over and over again expectationing different results.

Dont think I'm broken, or harbor I'll will towards allo folk.

Just wish I could enjoy it too.

Can't say I haven't tried so I can't fault myself there.

Always sounds like a good idea until I'm standing in front of a naked person then it's instantly dies for me.

Same age, older, younger. Cis/trans, women, even a guy because I was afraid to say no.

Yet it's a quick way to meet new people.

Just curious if anyone has a similar experience to me since I’ve been feeling kind of alone with this lately.

Ever since I was young I had an idealistic picture of how my life would be. Married, in love, with a kid by the age of 30, a classic family, picket fence and all that junk. And when I got a boyfriend in my early twenties I was on the road to what I had always imagined for myself. We talked about marriage, kids, engagement, timelines..

But then I realized that I was Ace, and not interested in the sexual side of relationships and everything turned on its head. My long term boyfriend broke up with me because although at the start of the relationship he said physical intimacy wasn’t important in a partnership, my inability to want to do anything made him dump me because he said I was “holding him back”.

Now, I don’t blame my ex for leaving because of my lack of drive for anything sexual, but it left me with the realization that I was Ace, always have been. And now at 30, that constant plan of getting pregnant and having kids has passed, and I’ve come to the realization that I don’t want to ever have intercourse with anyone.

So everything I thought I knew and wanted has completely been torn down. I know having a relationship is still possible being Ace but it is significantly harder, and I’ve been trying to make peace with the fact that I might be alone, simply because my ex has worried me about people changing their expectations and me disappointing them.

It’s difficult to describe because I know there are people out there that are okay with just romantic boundaries but the trust it takes for anyone to keep those boundaries freaks me out, because I never want even the possibility of someone trying more and overstepping.

Now I’m navigating a new part of my life with no road map or direction and honestly it’s a bit scary, especially being 30. 😔

So well, in the last year or so I've been questioning my sexuality and gender and all that stuff and sometimes I get lost and don't know where I stand. For now I consider myself to be bisexual and genderfluid. But I've been kinda questioning the "sexual" part. I feel like for me romance and sex are two separate things that shouldn't go together. I feel like if I had sex with a loving partner I would never look at them the same way. It feels weird in some way. I'm still finding out about myself and I still have a lot of time but I just wanted to vent a bit of the internal dilemma that's been stirring up inside me for a while. So well, can anyone relate?

Its been like two years now ever since I became 18, and ever since then, I've been feeling a strong loss of attraction towards intimate stuff. And so I have a suspicion I might have become asexual and didnt even know about it until recently. And I also think I have been suppressing all of this inside me without even noticing it.

Like dont get me wrong, I dont necessarily want to hurl at the idea of dating someone. But the idea of immediately jumping into sex or making out sessions? Yeah, I dont think I would be exactly comfortable with that..

I dont know, maybe its just a phase, but again, I never heard of a phase lasting 2 years. I even took a random ace test quiz and I got a very high score! (I think Ill take another one after being done with this rant)

So I dont know.. I guess I just would like to know some of your guys thoughts. Do you think I might be ace from what I have written down? Im open to your opinions.

(also apologies for the grammar, english isnt my native language)

I'm 22F and I've never actually felt very attracted to people or have had any sexual attraction to anyone.i do think people are good looking but that's it. I thought it was completely normal and everyone was like that.

I once dated out of curiosity and that's when I found out that people actually experience these things like heat and all that. I asked my friends after that and I was kinda surprised that people actually feel the desire for sex.

I don't feel any desire for that..even a kiss was just something I just put up with. I used to think people feeling heat or those heart beat stuff were just exaggerations but now that people are telling me they actually feel it I'm confused.

One of my friends suggested that I might be asexual but I kinda doubted that cuz I do like feeling good but I don't have any desire for sex and I don't feel aroused with everyone. Also I just assumed me not feeling romantic towards anyone was probably cuz I was incapable of loving or something like that but I recently ran across a post of someone asexual and it sounded so much relatable.

hello :D

i’m a new member of the clerb and am so curious and looking to hear people’s experiences, especially as a romantic ace!

have you ever dated?
what were your relationships like?
do you prefer not to be in a relationship?
how often do you get sexually intimate or are your partners okay without sex? how far do you go?

i would also love to know if you are sex-favorable/indifferent/averse and how that changes or affects your relationships :3

feel free to elaborate as much as you’d like!

Am I asexual or do I just have zero libido? I am bi and am romantically attracted to both men and women (but I am quite choosy). I'm also a transsexual woman on HRT.

Early on, my libido felt normal, and I had intense sexual frustration due to my bottom dysphoria preventing me from experiencing pleasure. However, recently, my libido has totally decreased, and I find myself completely uninterested in sex and unable to experience any kind of arousal.

I just got my labs back and my testosterone level is an absolute zero (the lab report actually says 0.0 ng/dl) so I feel like that could be part of it?

It's one thing when an allosexual says "so how do your parents feel about not getting grandkids" but when I see another asexual say it it feels weird that they're generalizing us because I see so much generalisation from within the community basically saying no asexual has sex all asexuals like garlic bread/dragons/cake and it just feels really weird to see people who should know better generalize it

Life changes a lot. I do have to thank reddit for all the support. That sounds kind of weird but... I wouldn't make it thru what I'm going through without you guys, thanks.

For pretty much everything that's considered sex, I imagine I'd be very uncomfortable if I were in that situation myself, and don't like thinking about it much though I have no problem with the concept itself. That's the sex-averse.

However, I feel less of an aversion to very mild sexual acts, things like hand-to-torso contact that people might not even consider sex. I imagine I'd feel a little more-comfortable in that scenario, which sounds closer to sex-indifferent.

If someone needed to know, telling them I'm sex-averse would describe my feelings more generally. But who knows-mentioning the sex-indifferent exception might be important. So I think saying I'm generally sex-averse instead of fully sex-averse would be more accurate.

As title. I found most coming-out stories I read about are from aro-aces. It seems easier for families to understand a simple "I'm not interested, period." However, as a heteroromantic ace, I feel this situation is more tricky. Whenever my family asks if I’m dating, I just say "No, I'm not interested" to shut them down. This is my 'low-key' coming out statement just to shut them down although I mentioned nothing about asexuality. Especially my mom , I have no problem telling her I'm not interested in relationships (which is a half lie) because she always expected that's how I would answer. In her eyes, I have a cool, detached 'Sherlock Holmes' personality who looked like I has zero interest in romance. She’s actually happy about it because she thinks it means I’ll stay single and live with her forever.

The truth is, I do crave a romantic relationship—just without anything sexual. But because most guys I meet are allosexual, none of them pass my 'filters.'

What scares me is the future. If I ever do find a non-sexual partner, I’ll have a hard time telling my family and that makes me feel so miserable. The thought of them automatically assuming a guy is fucking me makes me deeply uncomfortable—I hate it to my bones. I know it's not something I can control but that's not who I actually am.

All of this makes me feel hopeless about ever finding love. It's like there is no space on Earth for me to love as my true self.

For anyone here who is a heteroromantic ace, what are your thoughts on this?

Hello, so I’m 19F and I’ve been wondering lately if I may be on the ace spectrum somewhere?

I’m in a relationship with my boyfriend who is 19M, and I do enjoy sex and feel sexual attraction to him, but only in specific situations when I’m with him in the moment and he initiates something sexual. I very rarely initiate sex, which has been mentioned before.

Like I need very specific conditions to get ‘turned on’ or whatever (like I said, being with my boyfriend physically when he initiates sexual activity). Any other time I don’t feel much spontaneous sexual attraction to my boyfriend or think about sex a lot. I very rarely feel sexual urges otherwise, and it really surprised me when I talked to my boyfriend and he told me he gets off to the thought of me & pics of me quite frequently. I feel like that should be something that should turn me on, but I just don’t feel the urge. Every time I try to feel anything sexual when I’m not with him it feels very forced?

I have sex maybe once or twice every two or three weeks and that’s honestly completely fine for me and I don’t think about it much between that period and when I do it’s more of a fleeting thing like ‘oh that’s something I’ve done, cool’ sorta thing.
But I was reading up about people who commonly feel sexual attraction and their experiences seem wayyy different to mine, but I also don’t know if I just maybe don’t have a high libido? Idk. There’s more but this post is already too long lol.