my boyfriend thought asexual meant I couldn’t be touched

So the question that I get kind of all the time and it's everywhere in my comments, in my DMs, in my friendships, in my day-to-day life. A lot of people ask me if my boyfriend knows that I'm asexual. And a lot of people don't really understand how he chooses to stay with me in the case that he knows and generally how he feels about it. So I kind of want to tell the whole story and also how I told him and how this relationship started to be and why it works because I feel like in a lot of my past relationships, the people did not know that I was asexual and definitely not from the beginning of the relationship.

So it was kind of a hard conversation to have later on and it was also the reason why a lot of my past relationships didn't really work. And not necessarily on their side, mostly on my side because I had made some assumptions about the person that were not true after I had a conversation with them >> >> and after I realized that the assumptions were not true, I would just break up with them. So most people who watch my videos don't know that me and my boyfriend used to be super close friends before we even started dating. And I feel like this is one big reason why for us it was so easy to have this conversation even before we got into a relationship because we were basically helping each other get relationships or like we were giving each other relationship advice.

And so of course he knew from our friendship that I was asexual. So I told him way before we had any kind of romantic feelings towards each other or we realized that we had some connection towards each other. And I mentioned it very casually because for me, for my friends, I just tell everyone that I'm asexual just so that we can have kind of the conversation early on as sometimes opens up very cool conversations about relationships and how we experience life. And yeah, there were basically no stakes when I had this conversation with him.

So I told him without any stakes whatsoever. I didn't like him, sexuality was not involved in our relationship whatsoever that time so like that didn't really matter. He wasn't really evaluating me as a potential partner at all. He was just a friend hearing something from another friend about them and he just like accepted it and asked some questions and yeah, that was it.

His reaction I'm pretty sure it was like, oh, okay, sure. How does that work? Like and then I explained it a little bit and then that was it. And I mentioned it quite a couple of times during our relationship because especially before we got together, I was actually looking for a boyfriend.

And so I was like kind of struggling finding someone. And he was kind of helping me or like more making jokes about me and he knew that I was asexual so that conversation opened up a lot of possible jokes that he could make. But yeah, it wasn't a constant topic and it was kind of just random. So he already had the best line of knowing what asexuality is, maybe not in detail.

He had a lot of assumptions about it, but like it wasn't something that I had to open up about during our relationship. And I think I do really think that this is why our relationship works so well and it was so easy. Like it was insanely easy to talk about this stuff because he already associated asexuality with me. I was probably the first person that he ever talked about asexuality with.

So he just like took it as it is, like took it as a part of me and never questioned it basically and then that was it. Because he didn't really have to learn what asexuality was during the time that we decided to like he was also deciding if he wants to date me or not. And then we started like realizing that we had feelings for each other and then we started talking more in depth about asexuality because it would become question that is very big in any relationship, right? But the thing that surprised both of us when we were having those conversations in the beginning was that his assumptions of me being asexual were so different from like my experience of being asexual.

And I don't blame him because there's very little representation and information out there about us. And this is why I'm making these videos because I feel like it's so important to share it out there. And I'm so glad that I have this chance. But yeah, he basically just thought I was like a robot that didn't like to be touched and that like basically just likes to have like deep conversation with their partners.

And while that has like some truth to it, it's not like the full experience of being asexual, right? He thought asexual meant that I cannot touch romantic partners like anything physically, like not even holding hands. He imagined that I would flinch when he was trying to hug me. Although I was hugging a lot of my friends, so that doesn't really make sense anyway.

As a friend, I'm also quite affectionate, but in a relationship, I'm quite very affectionate because I just value that in relationships. I hold hands, I like hugging people. I I'm very very very affectionate and I do appreciate affection, especially in the physical form in romantic relationships, too. There's like a very weird animal somewhere around me.

And I think the way he thought I was asexual was not actually the way that I was asexual. That moment he realized that it would be actually probably not a problem for our relationship because although yeah, I don't have sexual attraction, I'm also very physically affectionate. And after that, it wasn't as big of a problem as we thought initially cuz like when we first got together, we thought it would be a huge problem in our relationship. We thought it would be quite the biggest problem we ever encountered.

Like how is this even possible? It's like completely not compatible at all. Like that's what we were thinking. And we were talking about this so openly.

And this is also one of the reasons why we didn't even think of like kind of being together in a relationship because I knew him and he knew me and we knew that we could not be compatible in the sexual life of a relationship. But it turns out we can because we both had huge assumptions about each other and about each other's needs and that didn't turn out to be as true as we thought they were. I mean, for us it was kind of easy to even have the conversation of oh, we want to become a bit more than friends and see how we would be like dating because we were very close friends before, so we kind of knew that even if the dating situation didn't work and we didn't really take the dating situation that seriously, especially in the first month. We were just acting like friends, basically.

We were just like more closer friends, closer and closer and closer. And we realized that a lot of our lifestyles were matching, a lot of our values were also matching, and a lot of our needs in a relationship were matching, so that's why it kind of turned into a long-term relationship, but in the beginning we were just friends, and we weren't really scared of kind of like that breaking our friendship at all, which I think is also another unique thing in that specific time, because we didn't think that trying out a relationship for like a month or two will impact our dynamics, and it actually didn't really end up impacting our dynamics. It made us way, way, way, way, way closer, but even now I still consider him one of my closest friends. But I wanted to talk about this because I feel like we had the friendship baseline of communication, and we were communicating so much about anything without any filter before we even noticed that we have feelings for each other, so this is why it was so easy to just spend like 3 hours on a bus, because that's what it was.

Like I remember we were talking about asexuality on a bus going place from like a beach. I don't even know where we were. Anyway, and we were talking about asexuality on that bus, and we were talking about like any assumptions and every assumption, and because we were so open before, and because we built this foundation of trust and >> communication even before we got into a relationship, that 3-hour conversation flew so easily. And of course it was a bit hard because we were both kind of a bit scared of how it was going to go, and not getting too, I don't know, intimate with each other too fast, or like talking about too intimate stuff too fast, but at the same time it was way easier than I ever had like a asexuality conversation with anyone else, because usually when you get into a relationship and you talk about asexuality or sexuality in the first few weeks, both people get a little bit you know, and you're also kind of having this huge pressure of I still want this person to like me, and I still want this person to continue to like me, and I don't know if I will make that for sure if we have such a huge not compatible part of our lives.

I hope you enjoyed this video. Hope you learned something from it. I hope this can open your mind to how our relationship started and how we talk so openly about this sexuality and the fact that he knows that I'm asexual. And if it did help you, then I'm sure you're going to like this playlist.

I made quite a lot of videos on love and sexuality and relationships and stuff like that from my perspective. So, I'm sure you're going to enjoy it if you enjoyed this video. Love you guys. Have the best day of your life.

Kisses. Bye-bye.