Thou shalt not kid thyself

There was a time in my life when I sought religion. I was seventeen years old and I had a boyfriend, and all I wanted to do was have sex (yes, me! asexual me!). I thought about sex constantly - whether other people were having it, whether they were enjoying it, whether my boyfriend would enoy it, whether I would enjoy it, whether I could get my boyfriend to do it, whether I ought to try to get my boyfriend to do it.

The problem was that I didn't know the answers to any of the above questions. The problem was that I was seventeen years old and obsessed with sex, yet I didn't feel any drive to have it - just an intellectual infatuation with knowing everything there was to know about it. I was obsessed with sex because, I thought, everyone else was obsessed with sex. My reservations weren't driven by a religious desire to remain a virgin until marriage, though, and for some reason that made them feel hollow. The books all said that I would know when I felt ready for sex, but the truth was that I didn't know how I felt about sex at all. That was why I wanted to have it.

The solution to my problem, I thought, was to find religion. If I could find religion, I reasoned, I would have a moral reason for waiting, for putting my obsession aside. "We can't have sex yet," I could say, piously. "I'm waiting for our wedding night."
It would be so easy.

Well, my curiousity outpaced my religious quest, and before you can say "Gideon Bible," I had seduced my boyfriend (that was the easy part; after all, he was seventeen, too) and we started having sex, a lot of it. I kept wanting to enjoy it, kept wanting to get something out of it, but I just… didn't. I learned things - things about my body and my emotions and the thrill that posessing sexual power can give a woman - but I didn't learn to enjoy sex, even with a patient, attentive lover.

After that, I got my heart broken and didn't date again for several years, and when I did, I learned that little had changed where sex was concerned. I learned that what was "wrong" with me was that I was asexual, and that it wasn't "wrong" at all. And most importantly, I realized that if I had become a pious seventeen year old, I would never have learned these things until it was too late. I could have - and likely would have - ended up in a marriage with a nice boy whom I could barely stand to kiss, agonizing over why, if he was such a loving husband, I couldn't summon any physical attraction for him.

I really could have used a paragraph or two about asexuality back then, because you see, the books don't say what it means if you never feel ready for sex, or how your brain can think one thing and your body and libido can do another.

"We can't have sex," I could have said back then, confidently. "I'm asexual." And how cool would that have been?