The Truth of My Love
Here’s a complicated thing about me. I am demisexual.
That is a truth that I have known for a while. I just haven’t known that I know that. Or, more specifically, I have not until recently been able to put a word to how I experience relationships, love and particularly sex.
I have always been a sexual being. I have also always been a kinky sexual being. As others in my life can attest, my interest in sex is not… casual.
However, sexual fulfilment has also been complicated. Partly that’s because of the kinky part. As a teenager and young adult, there was a great deal of social anxiety., shame and humiliation (not the hot kind) in wanting to ask the nice but confident girl to tie you up and hurt in you sweet and adoring ways. Being honest, it’s only something I have found confidence to truly express (about ALL the things; yes even those ones) in later adulthood.
The other side of the connection was that I discovered fairly early on that for me to experience sexual fulfillment, I needed to have a close emotional relationship with the person that I was having sex with.
I needed to be in love.
Love and Sex and Demisexuality, Oh My…
The formal definition of a demisexual is “A person who feels sexual attraction towards another person only after establishing an emotional bond with that person.” (Thank you, Merriam-Webster).
This is a relatively new term, apparently. Known first use was in February 2006, on an Internet forum belonging to the Asexual Visibility & Education Network. A poster (sonofzeal) coined the term to reflect his experience of being neither asexual or non-asexual, but instead living at a midway point where an emotional bond was a pre-requisite to sexual attraction.
Fumbling Towards Ecstasy
Given that my fumbling sexual experience pre-dates 2006 by some margin, I was without words to describe what was going on. I was also a teenager struggling with acne, facial hair and self confidence, so using my words to describe my sexual experiences wasn’t necessarily a strong suit to begin with.
As an obsessively-focused teenager discovering sexuality for the first time, you would expect that attaining the object of my desires (naked girl in my bed, who wants me!) would have been the height of pleasure. So the deflating realization of things not working the way they were supposed to was bit of a blow.
Given that I was well aware that all of my equipment was in good working order, this was a difficult thing to process. Performance anxiety begat performance anxiety, and my working explanation for a time was that I must be really kinky, because normal sexual explorations were just not doing it for me.
Kink as a Complicating Factor
I eventually found myself in a satisfying relationship with an early girlfriend that had both emotional intimacy and enough kink (if managing to persuade your partner to engage in some light bondage and tie you up counts as kink) to keep things interesting. All was well. Sex was relatively fulfilling, even if many of my deeper and darker fantasies stayed firmly locked away in their closet. Performance issues declined.
All was well and good until that relationship ended and I started to explore once again, and the same fundamental issues reared their head. Or, more to the point, the head didn’t necessarily rear much at all. I could force the situation with some healthy fantasizing, but I will entirely acknowledge faking orgasm (more than once, and easier with a condom than you might think). Because, well, this has been going on a while now, but I also in no way wanted my partner to feel bad about something that was mostly about me.
If love and emotional connection was a pre-requisite for sexual fulfilment, however, adding kink on top of that was a significant complicating factor. How do you go about telling someone you love that you want them to cuddle up and gleefully do painful, nasty, hurty things to you? My submissive desires in all their wanton depravity felt woefully out of place.
Couldn’t You Just Hire Someone?
I thought about seeking out professional help. No, the other kind of professional. With leather boots and whips and chains and latex and luscious lips and shiny red ball gags.
While it was an active consideration, it was one I never got the nerve to follow through on. Partly out of sheer embarrassment for asking what I want (I am fully aware that they have heard everything, and there is precious little that surprises them, but anxieties are anxieties).
The largest barrier, though, was the same fundamental recognition that for me, sexual attraction requires an emotional bond. I have absolute respect for sex workers, and wholly support what they do. I also knew that even being honest, I wasn’t going to find what I truly needed across a financial transaction.
I Want It Kinky, But It’s Gotta Be Love
This is the crater my kink found itself for an an extended period. Not feeling at home in my personal relationships. And also not really able to be explored outside of my personal relationships. Instead, it remained hidden away. The subject of furtive fantasizing, and more obsessive cycles of spontaneously acquiring toys and then shamefully discarding them than I would like to acknowledge.
That was its own complicated reality for me. While I would find ways to indulge in my cravings, self-bondage or simulated pegging or nipple torment or finding ways to torture my cock and balls frequently resulted in feelings of pointlessness and frustration. I would find myself coming down off of climax, alone, lonely, and feeling absolute shame and the complete absence of love.
I wanted the kink (I craved it sooooooo much), but for it to be meaningful it needed to be shared.
Finding My Bliss
Finding the intersection of love, kink and fulfilment wasn’t something that I ever expected to experience. That I have is beyond blissful to me. It has taken me more than five decades to get here, but I have finally found a relationship where my partner not only loves me, but also loves and gloats about all of the ways that she can intimately hurt me with glee. With a far greater degree of creativity and imagination and playful cruelty than I ever thought possible.
The reality of being demisexual is a difficult one to come to terms with. Sexual expression in kink has some complicated pre-requisites to begin with. Adding in demisexuality is a further challenge in what can already feel like a difficult and painful path to navigate. .The consequence of finding fulfilment as a demisexual polar bear, however, is incredible.
I am kinky. I am loved. I am in love. I am able to express all of that. And that is everything.