I feel so grateful and blessed for the people in my life and for all the understanding I receive. I was talking to a friend online who lives in another country, and we had not seen each other in a while. We came to the subject of relationships and he was asking me if I was open to a new relationship. I kind of went, well, it's complicated, and he asked about the details, so I started explaining how I felt and what I had discovered and gave him the link to Aven FAQ.
At one point he was trying to make sense of it and saying, wait, I'm confused, so you don't really want sex, but you like sensuality? I tried to ask him to say what exactly was confusing, but he just turned right around and said: I didn't get it, but emotionally I got it. There are just different ways of saying "I love you".
Even right now as I write this, I feel deeply touched by that kind of understanding and acceptance. That, to me, is an act of love. Just seeing me as I am, without trying to find any reasons for it.
One of the other things he said, when I was explaining how I've never really cared about sex, was - "You have always felt this way?" And I said "Yes". And realized how his question underscores for me that what I have always felt is not the same as what he has felt. That this must be new and odd to him. That he, in fact, must have those desires I find so hard to comprehend. Realizing that I had never imagined him as a sexual being. That I have the automatic assumption that all my friends are like me: even though I intellectually know they are sexual, instinctively I assume that they just form relationships the way people watch television, because it happens to be there and it's an imitation of what society does. But to think of my friends as genuinely desiring sex with one another, and having it be an important component of their relationships. Still wrapping my head around that one.
I imagine it must be the same in reverse: even though someone intellectually knows that you are not sexually driven, they will automatically make unconscious assumptions about what you are like, based on what they themselves are like and have always known. Just because they haven't yet deeply considered what it would be like to really LIVE from a different perspective. Can't blame that.
