Whether or not you’re ace is only something you can determine. I can only tell you that my own sexuality is…weird.
I personally have issues connecting emotionally with other people. I can feel just fine, but there seems to be an invisible wall between what I feel and how I process my emotions and other human beings. I can show compassion and sympathy and empathy, but it’s purely performative: I don’t feel these things for others.
No amount of therapy has ever been able to fix this. That part of my brain just…doesn’t work that way.
But I still experience attraction. I still want someone to share my life with, romantically. I still like sex, a lot.
Romance, for me, is just finding out what behaviors my partner recognizes as me caring for them and then modeling those behaviors. It can sometimes be a strange cognitive dissonance to have someone who says how loved I make them feel and yet my attachment to them, such as it is, is pure intellectual and sexual, no emotional component at all.
Anyway, sorry for the word vomit, I guess all that was just to say that there’s nothing wrong with not fitting any of the existing labels 100%. Labels are just descriptors, and their only value is in communicating a shared experience to others. If they fit, they fit. If they don’t, no worries. You’re you, and that’s okay.
Whether or not you’re ace is only something you can determine. I can only tell you that my own sexuality is…weird.
I personally have issues connecting emotionally with other people. I can feel just fine, but there seems to be an invisible wall between what I feel and how I process my emotions and other human beings. I can show compassion and sympathy and empathy, but it’s purely performative: I don’t feel these things for others.
No amount of therapy has ever been able to fix this. That part of my brain just…doesn’t work that way.
But I still experience attraction. I still want someone to share my life with, romantically. I still like sex, a lot.
Romance, for me, is just finding out what behaviors my partner recognizes as me caring for them and then modeling those behaviors. It can sometimes be a strange cognitive dissonance to have someone who says how loved I make them feel and yet my attachment to them, such as it is, is pure intellectual and sexual, no emotional component at all.
Anyway, sorry for the word vomit, I guess all that was just to say that there’s nothing wrong with not fitting any of the existing labels 100%. Labels are just descriptors, and their only value is in communicating a shared experience to others. If they fit, they fit. If they don’t, no worries. You’re you, and that’s okay.