Situational asexuality

Interesting (it a bit smarmy) piece on the strange twilight world of the asexual amid all this week’s stories about World Pride–which is what they’re calling it in Canada this year and may be calling it everywhere else too, for all I know or care.

I’ve been “asexual” for quite some time now, not because it’s my natural orientation but through a series of circumstances that have made it the easiest option for a variety of reasons. Initially, it was about the depression thing combined with the fact that I’d more or less just been dumped…and as a result wasn’t exactly overflowing with self esteem at the time. In my younger days, I would probably have reacted to this by becoming more sex-obsessed, but the middle-aged version of me recognized his limitations. And frankly, I just wasn’t that interested at the time. I most certainly didn’t want another relationship, and I’d sort of gotten out of the habit of casual sex too.

I’m pretty much past all that now and might be inclined toward debauchery if it weren’t so much fucking work–or of it weren’t so much work fucking. (Sorry, it was too obvious not to go there.) Given my age and size, I’m not an unattractive man, really, but I’m not the sort who turns a lot of heads when he walks into a room either. Sad as it may seem, pudgy librarians approaching fifty are just not a really hot commodity around here. Fifteen years ago, I may have a certain sexual presence that attracted attention, but nine years of marriage and even more years of reduced testosterone production have tempered that considerably. They’ve also made me much more nervous about STDs and allowing strange men into my house.

So while I probably could get laid, it would involve a great deal of effort than it used to. And that’s more effort, it turns out, than I seem to want to put into the process. I’m still not interested in a relationship; my identity does not depend on that. I was single most of my adult life, so I know how.  And hookups just sort of work differently now than they did before the turn of the century (I was dying for an excuse to say “before the turn of the century”). I don’t want to cruise using an app. I’m pretty tech-savvy–I work in the IT department ferchrissakes–but that’s just not how I do it.

Then there’s that whole issue of the fact that someone who is interested in me is very often someone in whom I have no interest at all. It’s much harder to feign interest at my age too…both from a physical perspective and from the “I don’t need to be bothered with this bullshit” perspective.

So I call my current condition “situational asexuality” mainly because it sounds better than “celibate due to lack of initiative”, which is how I described it last week.

If it changes soon, I’ll let you know. Maybe with pictures.