By: Sara Schmieder (she/they)
In 2021, I found myself sitting in my car next to this person I had just concluded a 3rd date with. It was raining, like a torrential downpour raining so we were sitting in the car waiting for it to subside and debriefing the movie we just watched. When the conversation hit a lull, they turned to me and said, “Why haven’t you kissed me yet?”
I was frozen, not knowing how to respond. I hadn’t thought about kissing them at all; all I had been thinking about was getting to know them better and seeing if we have a connection, not anything physical. So all I could bring myself to say was “I haven’t wanted to kiss you yet.”
To me, the “yet” held a lot. It held the possibility that I would want to kiss them after I know them better, the possibility that I may never want to kiss them, and the fact that up until that moment, it hadn’t even crossed my mind. They were aesthetically attractive, sure, but that deep desire to lean in for a kiss (or anything beyond that) hadn’t occurred yet.
They were not happy with my response, ranting about how women need to take more initiative in dating (fair), how I can’t rely on heteronormative dating scripts (also fair), and concluded with how I “need to tell people [I’m] demisexual so [I] don’t lead anyone on thinking [I] want to fuck when [I] don’t” (not so fair). Which is how we concluded the date with me dropping them off and being told to do some soul searching before I ever try queer dating again, because no one has time for people who don’t know what they want. And we never saw each other again.
At the time, I didn’t think much of that conversation. To me, it made sense. I didn’t want to kiss someone on the first date, let alone do anything more. I could never do casual (in fact, I bought a book to study casual sex because the concept was so foreign to me), and I always tend to fall in love with and feel sexual attraction to people whom I’ve known for a long time or been friends with first. I was attracted to multiple genders, yes, but without knowing someone, I can’t feel sexual attraction to them. For a long time, I thought this was everyone’s experience and that sexual attraction came after emotional attachment for everyone.
It wasn’t until I tried online dating again in 2023 that I realized maybe my “I need to have an emotional connection with someone before I’m interested in them sexually” was more than a preference. I would go on a few dates with people and by the time I should “know” if I was sexually attracted to them (according to the extensive research I did to try to figure out when I’m supposed to feel sexual attraction to someone I met on a dating app and have spent all of 10 hours with over the course of a month) I just didn’t. I knew if I liked them as a person and if I found them aesthetically attractive, but sexual attraction was elusive. But I knew I wasn’t asexual, I’ve felt sexual attraction before in previous relationships, and I felt sexual attraction to multiple genders. In fact, around that time, my current partner and I started dating, and I knew from our first date that I was sexually attracted to him. The thing is that I’ve known him since 2021, and we’ve been friends for a while.
This led me down a rabbit hole to figure out if others were the outlier or if I was. I ended up on the Asexual Visibility and Education Network (AVEN), trying to reconcile my well-known bisexuality with the realization that I might not be completely allosexual. After all that research, I have to admit that the person who told me I need to tell people I’m demisexual was absolutely correct: I am demisexual.
Demisexuality is defined as lacking sexual attraction until a deep emotional connection forms. It is a descriptor of how one experiences sexual attraction, so it’s not mutually exclusive with bisexuality. On the spectrum of allosexual to asexual, it lies, much like bisexuality, in the messy middle where it’s not fully allosexual nor fully asexual. What people get confused about with demisexuality is that before an emotional connection is formed, there is no sexual attraction, so it’s not a matter of “I just like to take my time” and more of “I need an emotional connection to feel sexual attraction.”
The complete lack of sexual attraction until I felt an emotional connection left me in dating limbo. I liked people as individuals and wanted to spend time with them, but I didn’t want sex. The stereotype of bi+ people as hypersexual made my bisexuality feel less legitimate. This was even harder when I was younger, hearing friends talk about casual relationships or hook-ups and wondering why I couldn’t be like them. I was sex-positive, but I couldn’t feel sexual attraction to someone I didn’t know. I could find people attractive, but I still wasn’t sexually attracted to them.
All of this to say that if you’re like me and find yourself questioning if the way you experience (or don’t experience) sexual attraction can coexist with bisexuality, then you need to know that it can. I still have the capacity to be attracted to my same gender and different genders, but it’s going to take a long time and a deep emotional connection for me to want to take it any further than platonic. So no matter where you fall on the asexul to allosexual spectrum, your bisexuality and experiences are still valid.