I never thought of myself as demisexual until I started dating. When I was with my first boyfriend I was like, “Hmm, something is not adding up.”

I thought I was sexual. On the scale from asexual to sexual I thought I was right by sexual.

I have a high libido and I enjoy physical affection and so I just thought that was where I naturally stood.

However, when confronted with someone who was actually sexual I realised that that was not me.

I cannot be physically intimate with someone if we do not have an emotional connection. When I say I literally feel nothing unless I connect with someone emotionally, I mean it.

I always say that I didn’t feel anything for my first kiss. It felt like skin on skin. It felt scientific and not in a good way.

I started to think, wow, everyone is lying. Why are they lying? All those books that I read that talked about fireworks and butterflies were lying? How could they?

But then as time went on I realised there’s no way they were lying. I mean, if it was one book that claimed butterflies and fireworks I could say it was lying but multiple books have that. On top of that multiple people in real life also talk about how kissing the person they like made them feel fluttery.

Thus, they can’t all be wrong. If I’m the odd one out then perhaps I am the problem.

So, I was watching a BuzzFeed video and demisexuality came up. I had no idea what they were talking about so I looked up the term, not thinking it was real, only to realise that the description was me.

I sat there like, “Wow, that’s totally me.”

I can’t remember when I read the definition but I was with my first boyfriend at that time.

I didn’t think anything of it other than, “that’s so interesting let me look up more labels”.

However, after a while I started to examine my relationship. We weren’t connecting emotionally and it was affecting me. He would want to be sexual and I would not. I didn’t desire it. I honestly felt nothing and I finally knew why.

After we broke up I thought about it some more and I came to the conclusion that the best relationship for me would be with someone who is a friend first and a lover second.

This also explains my writing style! Most of my love stories start out with them being friends first and then transitioning into lovers. I didn’t clock it till I was editing them in bulk but when I did it all made sense!

Sometimes my writing reveals my character before I am aware of it.

Whenever I tell people I am demisexual they say, “Why is there a need to label everything?” They have a point. Sometimes we do get obsessed with labelling everything where there is no need to.

There are people who prefer not to label and that’s fine, I can understand them.

However, labelling does help certain people. It helped me to understand myself. It helped me to put a name to what I was feeling and to better explain myself.

Instead of going through a long explanation I can now just say, “I’m demisexual” and it’s up to them whether they google that or not. It saves time honestly.

Also, I believe demisexuality has always existed however in the past it was the norm and so did not need to be defined. Whereas now it is not the norm, the norm is to be sexual. Thus, people who are demisexual struggle to adapt to current society as they can’t do one night stands or they can’t fall for someone or sleep with someone based on their outward appearance and a shallow connection alone.

(By shallow I mean you haven’t made a deep connection).

There are people who can do one night stands and who don’t need an emotional connection to have sex with someone and that works for them. In the current society or at least in the West that is the norm.

I say demisexuality was the norm in the past because we were all expected to only have sex after marriage and to wait to have sex etc.

Although, I wonder how demisexuals in arranged marriages dealt with it. Would they wait to have sex once they had made a connection or would they have sex strictly for procreation reasons only?

So now that society is different it has opened our eyes to the fact that there is a spectrum when it comes to sexuality and that not everyone is sexual.

Speaking of a spectrum, not all demisexual people are the same just as not all asexual people are the same. We are all unique unto ourselves.

So yeah, it’s been a journey. A journey that I am still exploring but I am glad to have learned something new about myself.