OK, there’s a possibility that a fair few people might have been linked here. Please don’t hurt me. And just to reiterate, I don’t claim to speak for all asexuals. I try to include viewpoints of aces who aren’t me, as far as I understand them, but I’m always going to be limited by the simple fact that I’m me, and I’ve never been anyone else. That said, let me go back to making sweeping and authoritative sounding statements about things.
Love. What is it? Here’s a conversation which I’ve blatantly stolen from Brian Davies:
“I love you,” says Mary. “Do you really mean that?” asks John, “Yes,” Mary replies. And the ensuing conversation goes like this:
John: Then you want to be with me?
Mary: No.
John: But you want to talk to me?
Mary: No.
John: Surely you want to share things with me?
Mary: No.
John: And you don’t want us to make love together?
Mary: That’s right.
Does ‘love’ actually mean any of these things? Random hypothetical: A madman threatens to kill you and the person you love if you go near them or talk to them ever again. I, personally, would want to avoid them as far as possible. Or suppose you know that every so often you go insane, and kill anyone near you. Or suppose you’re very poor and either you feel you’re a burden to them, or that you might love them, but you love yourself more, and can’t afford to share with them. There are hundreds of ways the above conversation might be perfectly justified.
Leaving aside the rather contrived situations of the previous paragraph, can you really say you can’t imagine a situation in which you’ve broken up with someone, but you still have feelings for them. I personally tend to avoid people I have a crush on. You might say that that’s not ‘true’ love, but the fact is that no matter how much you love someone, there’s no guarantee that they’re going to love you back. In which case you might well decide that hanging around them was too painful, and start to avoid them. And if we’re on the subject of True Love, surely the truest love would include valuing someone else’s feelings above your own. So you’d want to do whatever you thought would make them happiest – not necessarily any of the things John mentions. So no. None of the things John mentions are actually necessary for love. In which case love has to be based on feelings, rather than either on the actions you take, or the actions you want to take.
Furthermore, it is perfectly possible to want to have sex with someone who you don’t love – unless I’ve totally misunderstood the concepts of one night stands, celebrity crushes, friends with benefits, pornography and prostitution. So we have to ask: what is it that makes ‘loving someone’ different from simply wanting to have sex with a friend?
Why do I mention all this? Well, most of you have probably figured it out by now. The logical conclusion, I think, is that love must be a feeling that is actually qualitatively different from wanting to have sex with someone. In which case sex in a relationship is important not for what it is, but for what it represents to the parties in the relationship. Thus, if sex means something completely different for one or both of the parties in the relationship – say if they’re asexual, so they hate the idea, or are simply indifferent to it – then what sex represents in that relationship will change, and it might be perfectly possible in such circumstances to have a loving relationship with no sex in it at all. Of course, some aces might have sex with a sexual partner, in order to make that partner happy. Again, it’s not about the sex itself, it’s about what the sex means. I would argue that having sex with someone who you don’t really want to have sex with for the sex itself is a far truer expression of love than having sex with someone because you’re desperately lusting after them.
So yeah. Despite how inseparably linked they might be for a heterosexual heteroromantic (or a homosexual homoromantic, bisexual biromantic, etc.) in our culture, sex and love are very much separable – and there’s much much more to love than ‘close friend you want to have sex with’. It’s hard to imagine being in love with someone you aren’t friends with, but if you accept that crushes are kinda akin to love, then it seems sorta possible. Ish. But regardless of that, love is, at least for me, and I would guess for all romantic asexuals (and probably even all romantics) different from friendship. Maybe not entirely separate, but definitely at least partially so, and in many ways beyond it as well.
So we can love. Tomorrow I plan to talk about the asexuality and the arts. I can’t remember exactly what I was going to say about asexuality and the arts, though, so that title might change a bit between now and then.
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