a very demisexual view on physical intimacy

i have never understood the logic of the stranger's touch.

the casual hand on the shoulder. the friendly hug from someone you met forty minutes ago. the expectation that bodies are public property, available for appropriation, available for the performance of warmth that has not yet been earned. these gestures baffle me. they are not malicious, i know. they are well meaning. they are the social glue that holds together a world that operates on the assumption that physicality is the default language of human connection. but for me, for the demisexual, the body speaks a different dialect. it is a language that requires fluency. it requires a previous conversation. it requires the slow, painstaking construction of a vocabulary that can only be built through time.

the term demisexuality was coined in 2006 on the forums of the asexual visibility and education network, by a user who felt neither fully asexual nor fully allosexual. it is defined as a sexual orientation characterised by only experiencing sexual attraction after making a strong emotional connection with a specific person. this is not a preference. it is not a choice. it is not a decision to wait until marriage or until the third date or until some arbitrary milestone. it is a hardwired, non-negotiable affective-sexual coupling protocol, as one rather clinical observer put it. the brain simply does not recognise the external stimulus of a stranger as a valid target for sexual energy. the system returns a zero-state. it is not a refusal. it is a deferral.

the demisexual experience is not a refusal of intimacy. it is a deferral. it is the recognition that the body, in its raw materiality, is not a vessel to be shared lightly. it is a text. and texts, as any scholar of the obscure will tell you, require interpretation. they require the patience of the archivist, the attention of the philologist, the dedication of the one who is willing to sit with the fragments until the pattern emerges. the demisexual does not reject the physical. the demisexual merely insists that the physical follows the psychic, that the body obeys the mind, that touch is the final sentence in a long paragraph, not the opening one. the emotional scaffolding, the deep bond, becomes the necessary unconditioned stimulus required to initiate the conditioned response we label as sexual desire.

this is not puritanism. let me be absolutely clear. this is not a moral position. it is not a disgust with the body or a fear of its pleasures. i have no objection to the flesh. i have no objection to its appetites or its complexities. i simply require that the flesh be accompanied by something more substantial than a passing impulse. i require the context of a consciousness. i require the architecture of a shared history. i require the evidence that the person touching me has seen me, truly seen me, not as an object of desire but as a subject of curiosity. without that, the touch is not intimate. it is merely tactile. and tactility, for the demisexual, is not enough. some demisexuals enjoy casual sex even if they don't feel sexually attracted to that person; others choose to only have sex with partners they are emotionally close to. both are valid. the orientation describes the mechanism of attraction, not the behaviour that follows.

i was not prepared for him. this is important to state upfront. he was not my type. he was not even in the same postal code as my type. my type, if i had one, was something like a gothic scholar with a collection of obscure manuscripts and a tragic backstory involving a victorian inheritance. he was not that. he was a physics student who wore hoodies that were slightly too large and had the kind of casual confidence that i found, quite frankly, suspicious. he was the sort of person who would say things like "it's not that deep" and mean it. i found this alarming. i found this fascinating. i found this completely, inexplicably, against all rational calculation, compelling.

it started in the university library. this is not a metaphor. this is the literal location of my undoing. i was tutoring him in engineering physics, specifically electromagnetism. maxwell's equations. the elegant symmetry of the electromagnetic field tensor. the way the electric and magnetic fields transform into each other under a change of reference frame. i love this topic. it is one of my favourite concepts in all of physics, second only to black holes, which are obviously the coolest thing in the known universe because they are the absolute limit of our understanding and also they eat light, which is deeply dramatic. i explained the divergence theorem. i explained the curl operator. i explained how a changing magnetic field creates an electric field, how the universe is fundamentally a place of mutual transformation, how nothing exists in isolation. he listened. he did not understand. he asked questions. stupid questions. smart questions. questions that made me realise he was not actually stupid, he was just pretending to be, because it was easier than admitting he cared.

this was the first crack. the first sign that something was wrong with my internal architecture. i found myself looking forward to the tutoring sessions. i found myself arriving early. i found myself explaining the biot-savart law with an enthusiasm that was entirely disproportionate to the pedagogical necessity. i found myself noticing the way his hair fell across his forehead when he was confused. i found myself wanting him to be confused more often. this was not normal. this was not my usual state of being. i am the one who deflected with dry humour and obscure trivia. i am the one who quoted foucault and made jokes about taxidermy. i am the one who kept people at a safe, comfortable, thoroughly psychoanalysed distance. he was not supposed to get through.

he got through.

and this was the problem. the problem was not that i liked him. the problem was that i could not understand why i liked him. he was not my type. he was not challenging in the way i usually required. he did not know the chemical composition of medieval ink. he did not care about the migratory patterns of arctic terns. he was, by all objective measures, a person i should have found completely unremarkable. and yet. and yet there was something about the way he laughed, this open unguarded thing that seemed to emerge from somewhere deep and uncomplicated. there was something about the way he asked questions, not because he needed to know but because he wanted to understand me. there was something about the way he looked at me when i was explaining something, like i was the most interesting thing in the room, like he was seeing something i had not shown anyone else.

this is the demisexual trap. we do not fall for people easily. we do not fall for people lightly. but when we fall, we fall into the architecture of a shared consciousness. we fall into the pattern of the conversation. we fall into the details. we remember the obscure thing you mentioned three months ago. we remember the way you pause before you speak. we remember the exact shade of your confusion when you encountered a concept you did not understand. the attraction does not arrive as a lightning strike. it arrives as a slow, creeping awareness that something has shifted. it arrives as the recognition that you have been seen. and you have been seen because you have been watching. you have been watching with the intensity of the archivist, the attention of the philologist, the dedication of the one who is willing to sit with the fragments until the pattern emerges. and suddenly, impossibly, the pattern is him.

the situationship lasted eighteen months. this is the part that i do not like to talk about. eighteen months of something that was not quite a relationship and not quite nothing. eighteen months of being seen and not seen, of being wanted and not wanted, of being the person who knew him better than anyone else but not in the way that mattered. he had different goals. he was not cruel. he was not dismissive. he was simply moving in a different direction, and i was not on the map. i knew this. i knew this from the beginning. i knew that he was not the person i would end up with. i knew that he was not the one. but i stayed. i stayed because the connection was real, even if the future was not. i stayed because the emotional scaffolding was in place, even if the structure was temporary. i stayed because, for the first time in a long time, i had been seen.

the people around me, the ones who did not understand the architecture of my orientation, had opinions. they told me that if you have a crush on someone for more than four months, it is true love. they told me that eighteen months meant something. they told me that i was in denial, that i was afraid of commitment, that i was sabotaging something real. they were wrong. they were wrong because they did not understand that i do not measure love in duration. i measure it in depth. i measure it in the number of conversations that have been had. i measure it in the number of obscure details remembered. i measure it in the weight of the silence that can be shared without awkwardness. eighteen months with him was not true love. it was true curiosity. it was true fascination. it was true, genuine, intellectually rigorous interest in a person who was fundamentally not meant to stay.

i am not looking for the forever person. i am looking for the interesting person. i am looking for the person who makes me curious. i am looking for the person who compels me to break my own rules, to question my own frameworks, to ask myseld why am i so inexplicably drawn to someone who is completely, demonstrably, unequivocally not my type. the attraction is not about destiny. the attraction is about discovery. it is about the slow unfolding of a person over time, the gradual revelation of their hidden architecture, the unexpected thrill of finding something fascinating in a place you did not think to look.

the situationship ended. as situationships do. it ended with a conversation in the same university library where it began, which was poetic in a way that i found deeply annoying. he told me he was leaving. he told me he was going to pursue his goals. he did not say he would miss me. i said something about being glad we had met, which is the thing people say when they are trying to be kind but also trying to leave. i said something sarcastic. i deflected with humour. i made a joke about the migratory patterns of arctic terns, which he did not understand and i did not explain. i did not tell him that he had been the first person who made me feel maybe dating isnt that bad. i did not tell him that the emotional scaffolding was so complete, so intricately constructed, that i was not sure i would ever be able to build it again. i did not tell him that the reason i stayed for eighteen months was not because i loved him but because i had invested too much of myself in the architecture of his consciousness to simply walk away.

i walked away anyway. i walked away to the coffee shop, to the fluorescent lights, to the familiar buzz of the library stacks. i walked away to the safety of the obscure, the comfort of the arcane, the predictable rhythm of the life i had built before him. i walked away and i did not look back. and this is the thing that i have learned. the demisexual is not afraid of intimacy. the demisexual is afraid of building an entire cathedral of emotional connection only to have the person walk out and leave the doors open to the weather. we do not fall easily because falling easily is a luxury we cannot afford. we fall once, maybe twice, in a lifetime. we fall into the architecture of another consciousness. we fall into the pattern of their thoughts. we fall into the shape of their silences. and when they leave, they take the scaffolding with them.

and yet.

and yet i am grateful. i am grateful for the eighteen months. i am grateful for the curiosity. i am grateful for the experience of wanting someone who was completely wrong for me, because it taught me something about the nature of desire that i could not have learned otherwise. it taught me that the demisexual is not limited to the predictable. it taught me that the emotional connection can emerge in unexpected places, in unlikely people, in the uncomfortable space between a physics textbook and a poorly timed joke. it taught me that the architecture of attraction is not a blueprint but a living, breathing, constantly shifting thing. it taught me that i can be surprised. it taught me that i can be wrong. it taught me that i can be right in ways i did not anticipate.

so i will continue to flinch at the hand on my shoulder. i will continue to deflect with sarcasm and dry humour. i will continue to quote foucault and make jokes about taxidermy. i will continue to be the aloof and observant, secretly affectionate. i will continue to remember the obscure detail you mentioned three months ago. i will continue to be the one who falls slowly, carefully, thoroughly, into the impossible shape of another person.

and it will mean something.

it will mean everything.

it will be the most honest thing i would have ever said.