how intimacy works in my asexual relationship

So, I'm asexual and I'm in a relationship and a lot of people have a lot of opinions about how my relationship should be and how my relationship is. Being asexual and also in a relationship is a thing that confuses a lot of people a lot in the first place. A lot of people think it's either like being best friends or roommates that occasionally hold hands or things like that and that's not how my relationship looks at all. And I've seen so many comments asking me about this so I kind of want to make a video about it.

I think it's very beautiful and I'm not going to go into a lot a lot of details because my partner is not a public figure not trying to be a public figure. So, I don't want to share a lot of details that maybe he doesn't want the world to know. So, I'm going to talk about it from my perspective in my current relationships and also in my past relationships but I'm not going to talk about specifically how my relationship right now looks like. I want to start with a normal day because I feel like a lot of relationships are just small days and small things just accumulating on top of each other.

The magic of a relationship is not the grand gestures I think. It's more the small moments that you get to spend together. We talk about anything and everything and specifically in this relationship that I'm currently in we were super close friends before we even started dating. So, we had a very big baseline of being open with communicating about anything.

We talk about what happened in our day and what our fears are and we also we always check in with each other about how we're feeling any that important day. We have inside jokes and inside words that we made that most people will not that most people will not understand probably if we started talking about them with them. We are physically affectionate in everyday basically. We hold hands, we lean into each other, we hug, we cuddle, we take care of each other, heads on shoulders, heads on back, basically every single thing.

Basically every single thing that a normal couple does we do too in terms of physical affection. I think a lot of people assume that a lot of this physical affection doesn't really exist in on asexual couple. And my boyfriend is not asexual, so for him it was also kind of like he was questioning how our relationship would look like in the beginning because there's a lot of boundaries that we had to set and a lot of communication that we have. Even for him right now, although he's not asexual, a lot of the physical affection that we have became more and more important than what in his previous relationship it would look like.

I kind of want to talk about this because the moment that your physical affection is not related to sexual interactions at all, it starts becoming a very beautiful, caring thing. And I kind of learned this from him because for me it was always like this, but for him it wasn't. The fact that the physical interaction that we're having is usually intentional and it's usually not sexual. In our case, it's even more intimate because it holds a lot of deepness and meaning and beauty and love into it.

Not necessarily just something that we do to get to some sexual act later. Every touch is chosen for what it is, not for what it will lead to. And I think this is so important because we are lacking this kind of touching in our current society and this is why a lot of people are feeling alone and lonely because it's so hard to live a life without any physical touch that is just affection. And I feel like we've been stripping away most of our friendships of that.

We laugh a lot. We laugh about silly things and I think being able to make each other laugh is so important in the relationship cuz it's just making life more fun every day. And I feel like a lot of relationships have that, too. I kind of want to talk about how intimacy looks like if it's not sexual in our relationship or like in general in my relationships.

Because I feel like our culture has a very narrow definition of intimacy. Intimacy in most cultures and contexts is a code word for sex. They were intimate means they had sex. So when you remove sex from the equation, people just assume that there's no intimacy anymore.

But I feel like intimacy, the real one, is actually just being fully known by another person. And yeah, your body is fully known, your mind is fully known, your emotion is fully known, your spiritual being is fully known. It's showing someone every single part of you that is messy, that is scary, that is holding a lot of insecurities for you, and they will choose to stay because they love you as you are. It's telling someone what you're ashamed of or what you're thinking or the weird thoughts that you have and them still loving you.

It's being understood without you having to explain yourself. I don't think intimacy, which probably is the core of a relationship alongside trust and honesty, I don't think it's dependent on sex because I think I have it a lot more than a lot of people who are having relationships while sexual interaction is involved. Well, of course, other people have it more than me, like, you know, it's not like a competition or anything. I feel like sex can create a feeling of intimacy and I feel like it creates that for a lot of people because it's just the norm of creating intimacy, but it can also kind of but it can also kind of substitute for that.

And I've also seen asexual couples reach a level of intimacy that is so enormous because a lot of people because they have the context of a relationship in which sexual and physical intimacy is not as available as water, basically. And so, other types of intimacy kind of pop up in their relationship and have time to grow. Now, what kind of intimacy is important for you and what ways of growing that intimacy is important for you, of course, depends on every single person. And if for you sexual intimacy is more important than any other kind of intimacy, go for it.

Like, I'm not here to judge basically anyone and I don't think it's like even something to judge people for. I'm just saying that when you cannot use sex as a connector, you find different ways of connecting with each other and those different ways are also super beautiful, important, and probably are important in other relationships, not just in mine. It's just that a lot of people just think that sex is the most important thing. You can accumulate connection through words, through attention, through taking care of each other at your lowest points, through the slow accumulation of honest moments and trust building.

And what you build there is very sturdy because it's been having a history of a lot of small moments that build up to very, very stable trust. It doesn't really depend on mood or hormones or physical attraction staying consistent. It depends on choice and a choice to be there every single day. And I think that choice is more reliable than chemistry.

But of course that doesn't mean you cannot have both. You can definitely have both. I've seen a lot of happy couples that have both and that's amazing for them. I also want to talk about about the hard parts too because I feel like if I only show the beautiful parts then I'm kind of doing what everyone else is doing on the internet which is like basically showing curated parts of your relationships which is sad because we don't get to see the other parts and we probably think our relationship is broken just because we have the other parts.

There are hard conversations about boundaries and about what we want and what we need and there's so many things that we have to kind of calculate to make sure that both people in the relationships are happy. Both people in the relationship are happy. And also you have to do that not only once, you have to do that constantly because people change, comfort changes, boundaries change. I changed a lot and my asexuality also changed a lot in my relationship so we have to constantly talk about this.

There's also guilt and I feel like we both feel guilt. There's kind of an irrational guilt that tells you that you're not doing enough, you're not being enough, you're not providing enough for the other person. At least in my case it is in my relationship it is. But I know in my head this is actually the voice of kind of compulsory sexuality which is actually something that exists that just because of how society is built we are kind of seen as every relationship has to have a very strong sexuality in it to be even called a relationship.

So because of those standards I just feel like sometimes guilty for not being able to provide as much as that society thinks, as much as society thinks is needed for the relationship. So I know where that voice comes from but sometimes I do feel guilty and I talk about that guilt. And there's also external stuff, like the questions from people. Honestly, I don't think I've had this problem now that I'm in a relationship.

I feel like a lot of people either just accept it as it is or like see us happy and like they just like calm down. When I tell strangers, they usually like kind of look weirdly and don't really understand in the beginning, so I just have to explain again and again. And there's kind of like this And there's kind of this um distance that we have from what is the template. So, we don't really have a template for how our relationship should look like.

So, we have to redefine it every day. We don't really know if it's good or bad. And I think redefining it is actually why our relationship is so healthy because we get to talk about it and define our own relationship. And we're not really following a template, but sometimes it feels like, "What if we're doing something wrong?

What if this is not how a relationship should be? Is this good long-term?" Things like that. When you don't really have an example of someone being happy in a relationship that you kind of have and like being happy in I don't know, in their 60s in a relationship that you have, then it's kind of hard for you to know for sure if this is the right thing to do or not.

Of course, it's not that deep, but it's a fear that you have. Even if, you know, it's not really very rational. Sometimes it is, but sometimes it's not. I hope you enjoyed this video.

I hope you learned something from it. I hope this clears up a lot of the questions that you may be having. And if it doesn't, then I'm open to communicating in the comments and answering any of your questions. I will also want to open it up to you and share your thoughts about this and your relationship if you're ace or not ace or like if you ever met an ace person and you kind of want to share your experience with them.

I would love that. Honestly, I would love to create a community where this is a space where we can talk about anything and everything and not judge each other for it. Um Of course, we can also judge each other for it because like criticizing is also a part of growth, but yeah. Hope you enjoyed this video.

And if you did, then I made a lot of videos on sexuality recently, so this is the playlist. Love you guys. Have the best day of your life. Kisses.

Bye-bye.