Tossing together thoughts on the ever-present “I wish I was asexual because my love life sucks” and “I wish I was asexual, you must have so much spare time” sentiments.”
Because the thing about those comments, even if the people who are making them don’t realize it, is that they’re hurtful—they imply that I don’t experience relationship pain, for example. Or that the things I get done are somehow easier for me to accomplish because I’m not distracted by sex/romance so I have more time to do them in. Which, no, I just have different distractions.
(Exactly how much procrastination/distraction time do allosexual people spend on dating/thinking about sex/etc.? Because most of mine is spent talking to friends or playing Spider Solitaire or reading blogs and Cracked articles or knitting or doing other stuff I find interesting and mindless. I have never really had the impression that most allosexual people spend a drastically different time messing around on similar kinds of things to me, and while I am usually fairly productive, that’s a facet of work ethic and organizational skills. I know a lot of allosexual people who are similarly driven and organized who accomplish similar things. So if I’m not noticing a difference in either the kinds of procrastination I share with most of the rest of humanity or the kinds of things that people do manage to get done, how much of a timesuck can this actually be?)
I don’t know if some of these people who say these things to aces are doing it out of a desire to be supportive (I’ve had this vibe occasionally when friends say it to me) or just as out of a desire to whine about how much their lives suck. It’s certainly a very common phenomenon, and I’m trying to think about why it happens and how it happens so I can try to explain effectively why it’s hurtful and why people should stop doing it.
