Squish!

New word to add to the vocabulary of asexual experience: squish! I get squishes!

---UPDATE---
I added "squish" to the Urban dictionary: go vote it up so it can rise in the rankings!
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Invented in this thread on Aven.

Others have described it beautifully, so I will copy:

I've been trying for a looong, loooong time how to describe the "crushes" I get on people. It was getting frustrating having to say "I got crushes on people, but they weren't really crushes because blah blah, and so blah blah blah......." So I finally decided to just pick a word, and I'm calling them SQUISHES. I just have a desire to talk to the person and be friends with them. I may desire romance for a brief period of time, but then I'll be over it and I'll be glad that desire passed. [...] There's one guy that I have a squish on right now. He's very sexual, so I know a relationship would never work out. And that's fine by me. I don't care if he ends up with a girlfriend, or a boyfriend, because I don't want to be exclusive with him, I don't want to date or have sex with him. I just want to spend some time with him, talking and laughing.

i sort of have that when i am friends with someone but it's sort of a mushy kind of friendship, or when i'm unusually fascinated by someone i've just met, sort of a "i have really got to get to know and be close to this person." but it's just a desire for a deeper friendship, not a relationship.

I used to say I got "friend-crushes", which involve me feeling very impressed by somebody or thinking that we'd get along really well; as a result I really want to be friends with the person. I'm told these feelings are stronger than the feelings most people have for friends. But perhaps now I can call my "friend-crushes" "squishes".

>>>I hate to be the skeptical one here, but what exactly is the difference between this and wanting to be friends with someone?<<<<
There's a big difference. Maybe if you've never felt it, it might be hard to imagine... but it's just like having a crush, only platonically. For me at least (I'm not sure if this goes for everyone), I really look forward to seeing them, I think about them a lot, I have a very high opinion of them, and I really care about their opinion of me. Other friendships develop because you just happen to spend time with the person... but I will go out of my way to spend time with my squishes, and I get super-elated when I get any kind of proof that they like me/want to spend time with me.

The desire to get to know someone can sometimes be a lot more intense for certain people I know, with lots of happy fuzzy feelings associated with it. But it doesn't happen with every person that I'm wanting to get to know better.

I will probably use this. I've had squishes. For me it's the nervous, butterflies in my stomach feelings. Usually I don't want to date them, and sex was never a goal. Using the word squish would avoid all the assumptions people would make if I used the word crush.

You've made me realize that precisely because I do have squishes on them we will never be close friends the way I want us to be. I care about their opinions too much. Which sucks.

Squish is perfect lol I love it, great way to describe it!

To sum up, a squish:
- is an intense feeling of attraction, respect, appreciation and admiration
- is a desire to be close and connected and important to each other
- is not a desire to have sex or be in an exclusive romantic relationship
- gives you a nervous or excited feeling when you're with that person, and you may act kind of silly
- makes you think about them a lot
- gives you disproportionate joy to see that they like or respect you back
- makes you feel delighted that this person exists!

My squishes, in contrast, have often been on people who I did end up becoming close with, and yes, the squish does wear off in the sense that the nervousness and excitement die down, but the intense feelings of affection and appreciation remain. They are all still my squishes. I love being able to use a noun for it.

Vicarious attraction

I have to write this somewhere, it is just too bizarre not to mention. I've been noticing that in a situation where someone is strongly sexually attracted to me, I can feel it - or I feel something - through empathizing with how the other person feels, or how I imagine they feel. It's not even thinking about it, I can reproduce a physical response. I can see a picture of myself and, bringing that other person into my awareness and knowing about the intensity of their feeling, experience a thrill, a strong pull of attraction in my whole body. Attraction to the person in the picture, apparently. I get a kick out of that. I think this is similar to romantic attraction, it evokes something I have felt on occasion in my life, the rush of seeing someone or a picture of someone who was very important to me, or receiving their letter. Without being sexually aroused, I think. But with this vicarious thing, even when someone was appreciating my, um, physical attributes, I could identify with that, looking at the same picture of me and feeling a kind of tug from my core, a kind of boost of energy, like electricity, and a knowledge how satisfying it would be to merge with that body. Is that what they call sexual attraction? I just think it's weird that I can feel it for myself. (I've heard of autosexuality - but when this feeling happens, I have no desire to do anything about stimulating the body I'm sitting in - just that I see the picture of myself as if it were someone else.) It's like identifying with a character in a movie or in a book, I can re-live something akin to what they are describing - I just can't take it seriously in real life.

And I can persuade myself to a certain extent that I'm feeling the same thing for someone who is attracted to me - but I question that, I question that it's really coming from me - because it's so easy for me to drop the idea of pursuing any kind of sexual relationship with any person. To have certainty that there's no chance of that happening, and that they don't want that with me for whatever reason, just feels like a relief and a complication taken away. Then I look around and wonder where my "need" evaporated to. Just yesterday it seemed I might be interested and willing to experiment with sexuality with you if you ever wanted to - and today, knowing that you would not want it to happen, it's a complete non-issue, unnecessary, and I feel happy to move on.

Comfortable with sex

At this point, after scrutinizing physical reactions, sensations, thoughts and feelings that occur to me, for a number of months, I could assert with a great deal of integrity that I don’t mind sex. I don’t have any scruples about being touched “down there” when I know that it's within a context of a reasonably loving and trusting relationship. The fact that another person has different physical responses and experiences, is no longer scary, because I've left behind the fear and anxiety that there's something wrong with me if I don't experience the same. So for me now, sex feels neutral to pleasant, and I like the fact that the other person seems to be enjoying it so much.

It’s a particular way of touching, and I don’t draw an arbitrary barrier between sexual and non-sexual touching. That would only make sense to me if I had sexual feelings that I needed to differentiate from other feelings. But when I don’t operate within the context of sexuality, it’s all just touching. And there's nothing wrong with it and I don't have any reservations about it, I just am not as focused on this one type of expression as most people. And my body doesn't inherently tell me that touching one person in this particular way now signifies that we are exclusively pair-bonded, and that if I were to touch another person in that way, it would signify some kind of betrayal. That attitude just seems completely invented and random, and I wonder how it is that most people understand it and subscribe to it so implicitly and intuitively.

The thought that I have not allowed myself to have (because it’s socially unacceptable), is that actually, I probably wouldn’t mind being naked and having sex with people I feel pretty close and trusting with, if there was interest on their part. I haven’t tested this in practice, but I sense that if such a situation arose, I wouldn’t have a problem sharing that kind of touch with several different people in the same period. The only reason I would be holding back is because I know that having sex does create the expectation of pair-bonding, and I am reluctant to send out the wrong message, or rather to have my behavior be misinterpreted.

The way I can participate in this is, essentially I’m responding to the energy of a partner: if there is a sexual charge there, I can pick it up to a certain extent and have fun with it, play with our responses. The only thing is, I guess it’s not as much fun for them with me as it would be with someone more sexually-driven. Maybe kind of as much fun as a hearing person and a deaf person going to a dance together. They will move and have their own enjoyment, but they are not sharing your experience. I don't get “lust”, or maybe I do, for moments at a time, but then it eludes me again. So people may in the end conclude that sexual activity is not something they particularly want with me anyway. And that settles that!

Breaking it Down

The way I was trained to think from a very young age, was this: you want to find a perfect person (of the opposite gender, of course) who you will have romantic feelings for, have sex with, want to pair-bond with as your partner, and want to have children with and live happily ever after.

It's amazing how ingrained that perspective is, unconsciously, and how I have to intentionally question it and "manually" readjust my attitudes or actually choose something other than my automatic assumptions. Even now when I'm becoming close to someone, there's this momentum of thought that says the only way to safely proceed is for this relationship to follow a particular track towards increasing commitment, and that I should employ certain tactics to make sure that this person becomes attached and bonded to me in a unique way so that we will need each other more than we need anybody else in the world.

Screw that. I don't want to manipulate anyone this way. I understand a lot of people would find following that track mutually enjoyable - good for them. But I can't do it and feel clean about it at the same time.

But what I wanted to write about was "breaking it down" - break down this perfect person that is supposed to fulfill me and make my life complete. Break them down into needs.

It seems that several wants, usually conflated into meaning one and the same thing, can actually exist quite independently of each other, in the same way that yawning and sleepiness can exist independently of each other. If I want one of these things with a particular person, it does not necessarily mean I want any of the other things. What I want is always something to be verified with my own feelings, and not assumed. So this is how I break it down at the moment:

1. Need for meaningful, intimate emotional and spiritual connection.
This is my primary need in relationships and what comes up the most. I'm not particular about who I have that with - I can have it with anyone who shows themselves to be willing, open and capable of intimacy and radical honesty, even if we have differing opinions or interests or are at different points in our life paths. I don't care. Give me truthfulness and transparency any day, and I will be irresistibly drawn to it. That's my ultimate passionate attraction. There is nothing more enjoyable than seeing and knowing each other as we are.

2. Need to pair-bond.
Now this is the confusing part, I always used to think that wanting #1 must mean that I want #2, must necessarily lead to #2. That when I'm feeling #1, I should already be planning for #2. I'm seeing now that the two do not necessarily overlap, and expecting them to overlap is an unexamined simplification. I don't get a lot of desire for pair-bonding and never have. Pair-bonding is what girls did with each other growing up, when they were best friends and shared everything, and it was a world I was never privy to - I never "got" how you were supposed to do that. Pair-bonding is what you are expected to want with your romantic partner, when you start thinking as a "we" rather than an "I" and you plan everything together and buy things together and people see you as a unit and invite you places together and address you in plural and always have you sit together. I've experienced some of that once, in the early stages of my longest relationship to date. But it did not stay, and I can't honestly say I feel any need to find a particular special person to settle down with and see myself as paired with.

3. Need for sex.
The fact that this can exist independently of anything else, has been covered at length in many different places. Further broken down into need for sexual release (masturbation will do) and need for sexual intercourse with particular people. Neither of which I experience.

4. Need for intimate loving touch.
I experience a lot of that, and do desire and crave it as a physical, visceral, most immediate expression of trust, closeness and affection. I'm often frustrated and feel blocked because the kind of physical closeness I would enjoy with my dear ones is normally socially sanctioned only within relationships that are romantic and sexual.

5. Need to have children.
Never experienced it, or only in a somewhat detached intellectual way, as something I think I'm supposed to want. I'm fascinated by some women's accounts of the clear sensation of a biological urge - and only reaffirmed in my knowledge that I have never sensed that.

And so I attempt to exist, feeling a bit alien living from a template that is unlike that of most people, not even knowing yet where I want to go with this. But as I am, so my world becomes - and unsubscribing from common unexamined beliefs brings me in touch with new people more open to experimentation. Which I'm happy about.

Neither

Just a small visibility achievement that probably no one noticed, but anyway. It's a principle. When you register with a physician, they ask you all sorts of interesting questions that don't see their own slant or bias... Like are you currently "using" alcohol. Or lumping the use of cocaine and marijuana into one question. And at the top of the list, the obligatory question about your marital status: married - single - divorced - widowed. WTF? What does it matter to them? Oh this time yesterday when I signed up with a new doctor, I was extremely lucky, one of the options was "partnered". But that didn't quite fit either, so I made another check box, "complicated", and checked that one.

Then the nurse asked me again about my marital status, and I just paused for a long time and smiled at her and said, "I'm not sure". We then established that what she was really needing, was the name of the person living with me - for some reason? I asked her why do they ask that and how is it relevant, and she was genuinely surprised and said, "I don't know! I wonder about that!" Then the doctor asked if there were any people or animals living with me, so I laughed and told him I was happy that he was asking a more specific question. I asked him too about why they want to know about marital status, and he also said he didn't know, and that it was probably a hold-over from a hundred years ago, and everyone just keeps doing it.

Everyone just keeps doing it. It's not that people are intentionally bigoted, they just don't often question habitual realities.

Anyway the asexual visibility thing. For whatever reason the doctor's form feels like it needs to ask you about your sexual preference. And it gave me two options: "males" and "females". Not even "both"! So I felt really smug and wrote "neither" in the blank space next to it.

Nobody asked me anything about it.

Relationship 2.0

This is going to be about undesired sexual attention. In AVEN forums, I often see people complaining and freaking out about those sexuals who won’t leave them alone and just don’t get it. And what I hear in their frustration is asexuals wanting respect and wanting to be believed and acknowledged and seen for who they are, because there is (not surprisingly) probably still some insecurity and fear about asserting themselves as different, and the hope is that being believed and respected by other people would bring these asexuals the peace of mind and comfort in their own skin, that they need so much.

Fact is, if by a fluke of fate you find yourself asexual, it means you just set yourself up for MORE exploration of “relationship” rather than less. That’s right, you can’t sustainably use the “asexual” label as a way to avoid having to deal with people because you just can’t handle them. Because your label is going to be continually challenged and disbelieved and suspected. And unless you’re comfortable hiding out in your room forever playing video games and chatting online only with other people who are safe because they are “asexual”, you will have to continually question and carefully observe what is going on in the relationships that you enter into. One of the things that I liked most about AVEN when I first found it, is that you were being invited to not assume this as a monolithic identity, but rather to use the word to describe yourself for as long as it makes sense to.

So as with everything else, in order to assert yourself, it's best to come from a place where you are really, really comfortable with yourself. If you go out into the world saying to people "I've determined that I'm asexual and I never ever want to have sex ever, how gross" while you still have doubts and insecurities inside of yourself, and so you’re really invested in people believing your statement, because you think that will help you believe yourself – well you’re just not going to be convincing. People can always feel that you’re not sure of yourself, sometimes subconsciously, and they will respond to your insecurity with doubt and dismissal, sometimes also subconsciously (even if they verbally reassure you). So how do you become sure of yourself?

It’s paradoxical, but the more flexible you are and the more you allow for your identity to not be fixed, the more stable and unshakable you are. It’s scary because we are used to having firm and solid definitions of everything. And society’s rules are not made to accommodate a lot of “I don't know". Nevertheless. The ultimate tool you always have at your disposal is telling your own complete truth, and sometimes that truth is “I don’t know”, or “I don't relate to that question" or "I'm not sure what that word means" or "I don't remember ever feeling that way" or “I have mixed feelings about that”. Just be as truthful as you can – and speak from your own authority, from what you really, really know to be true for yourself. But the more you try to present yourself to people using external labels of identity, the easier it is for them to dispute that.

It’s like in literature, you have passive and active characterization. I can write a novel and say “John is outgoing, friendly and cooperative”, or I can narrate a story in which John does and says certain things that demonstrate his character. Which are you more likely to believe, the conclusions that I’ve made for you about John, or the conclusions that you’ve drawn yourself based on what you have seen about John?

I haven’t actually said to anyone “I’m asexual”. In some relationships, I’ve mentioned that asexuality is an orientation that I relate to and understand the most. Other times, that hasn’t even been necessary, I’ve just described how I feel about certain aspects of sexuality. And what I get back from friends is a lot of understanding and support and acceptance. I’m making sense to them, even if their experience is different.

Does everyone who is trying to romance you necessarily have to know that you identify as asexual? I don’t think so. There’s someone who is really, really in love with me right now, and since I’m living the crazy experiment of not knowing and not defining my relationships inside the friendship/romance dichotomy, so I’m living from a place where nothing HAS TO happen, I’m allowing myself to simply enjoy his company and enjoy as much physical affection from him as I like without having it have to mean anything. At the same time I’m also being super attentive to myself and clearly knowing what I do and don’t want, and communicating my boundaries. I’m allowing this powerful intense energy to flow towards me from him, while knowing where I stand, and allowing any response that arises in me, to happen. Even allowing for the possibility that if at any point the unlikely impulse comes to have sex with him, I will. Everything is so much easier when I no longer tell myself that I have to resist or fight anything, or on the other hand that I have to follow and fall in and reciprocate. Just doing what comes naturally. I’ve let go of a lot of guilt there. As long as I was telling myself that I should be a certain way, there was plenty of discomfort. Now I allow myself to feel anything that is felt in the moment, and it’s great to have that validation in real time from within my own body that no, I don’t actually want that.

You are strongest when you don’t have to convince anyone. When they tell you how much they want to be with you, can you, instead of wincing and trying to get away, just look them straight in the eye, feel what’s going on for you right then and there, and express it? I would personally find that much more believable than hearing “I’m asexual, leave me alone”. I think it’s a great challenge for asexuals to learn to absorb and deal with and become comfortable with direct sexual energy – and I see it as an inevitable part of maturation, to be willing to face that at some point. This guy who’s in love with me, I simply told him that I was very open to people, and that that didn’t mean I wanted a relationship - but that I knew this could be confusing. And he WAS confused, but he said that I was wonderfully strange. :) Well, I enjoy being strange. And if at any point he wants to ask more, I can explain more. But I don’t feel like I HAVE TO make him understand what I’m all about. And that’s freedom.

What would you ask an asexual?

I took this asexuality survey for the National University of Ireland. Their idea is to explore the experience of asexuality and sense of identity as an asexual, and I'm really glad that they provide space for essay-type answers rather than pigeonholing you into multiple choice. And happy that someone took this on, and would really like to see the results!

"How would you define your gender identity" is a relevant question, since I would expect many respondents not to have a strong gender sense. Some other questions seem largely irrelevant, like how does ethnicity or age or religion affect your asexuality. Age probably only has relevance in that people take you more seriously the older you are, but that goes for everything and not just asexuality. I'm curious about religion, as a disproportionate number of AVENites seem to be non-religious/atheist/agnostic. Pretzelboy is also making some guesses as to why so many don't have a religious affiliation. I guess the assumption many people on the outside make, is that being religious and believing you should not have sex much, makes people asexual... But in reality it seems rather the other way around. My completely unscientific 2 cents would be that a lot of religion is about instructions how to deal with sexual desires and channel them towards some spiritual ideal, doing right as opposed to wrong; and as asexuals are already living the experience of being outside of society's norm and not even having to control their sexual appetites, not fitting in and thus not having a strictly black-and-white view of the world, that kind of religion simply does not seem relevant, and has little appeal for them.

Some good questions in this survey were around relating to others, disclosing one's sexuality and how that has been accepted. How does asexuality fit into your self-concept. Other questions were decidedly too generic, like listing the good points and bad points of being asexual. And I would like to see more specific, juicier questions being researched, such as:

- When did you first realize you were asexual? Have you ever felt sexual? How did you discover this identity, and how did it feel? What did you identify as before?
- Do you ever fall in love? If you are attracted to people, do you have a gender preference?
- How do you feel about touching and sensuality? Hugging, kissing? How do you express affection and how do you view intimacy?
- What kind of close relationships would you ideally like to have in your life?
- Have you been in sexual relationships and how do you negotiate that? If you have had sex without actual desire for it, why did you do it?
- Do you want to have a family, children?
- Do you have a sex drive? Do you masturbate and how do you view masturbation? How about orgasm?
- Do you have a spirituality/religion and which? Does it bear any relation to your asexuality? How much does your (lack of) spirituality/religion define you?
- How was sex viewed in your family of origin, and do you think that has had any effect on your asexuality?
- When did you first realize that someone was sexually attracted to you, and how did you know? Are there particular areas of daily life that are confusing to you and that you would like more understanding around by people in general?

You know, lots of questions researchers could ask. Just imagine that your best friend comes out to you as asexual, what would you be curious about?

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Update: Here Pretzelboy suggests some good Topics for future research in a more methodical way than me.