Asexuality or demisexuality: orientation or symptom

Asensa and demisensdemi: orientation or symptom

An anonymous account describes what many experience without ever naming it: an entire adolescence with no sensual awakening, failed attempts to feel something, and the conclusion, in its author's words, that sens «is something absurd». The conversation it sparked lays bare the two camps on the issue: asensa as a legitimate orientation or as a symptom of something else.

The thread argues that this is a spectrum, not a switch that turns on or off with age.

What asensa is and how it differs from demisensdemi

One participant defines asensa as the absence of sensual attraction to other people; it does not imply rejection of affection or an inability to fall in love. Demisensdemi, according to the same participant, describes someone who only feels desire after a strong emotional bond has been built. The account that opens the topic would fit the second: its author says his first erection came at 15, when he met the woman who would become his partner, after years in which neither boys nor girls around him stirred anything in him.

At the opposite end comes another contribution: someone who identifies as asensa, who generally feels no desire, and yet acknowledges episodes of intense desire when an emotional connection arises. According to another participant, that would be the textbook definition of demisensdemi, and it shows how slippery the labels are.

Is asensa an orientation or a hormonal disorder?

Here any consensus breaks down. Some in the thread argue it does not exist as a normal orientation and that behind it lie hormonal or psychological imbalances. Others reply, also in the thread, that by narrowing the list of what is «normal» you would leave out a large part of the population. The question about testosterone levels serves as a diagnostic shortcut; in the case that opens the topic, the answer is that it has never been measured.

Added to this is a suspicion raised by one participant: that the lack of desire actually hides an orientation its bearer has not recognized. No one offers any proof of this.

Desire that only appears when there is a bond

The most uncomfortable part of the account is not the lack of desire, but its persistence. Its author, nearly 40, has been with his partner for 20 years and still describes sens as an obligation he fulfills «out of obligation». He is drawn to who she is —«she makes me laugh»— and admits she is very attractive physically. The desire, quite simply, is not there.

The detail of how he reached that conclusion, with the full sequence of attempts and ages, is told with far more bluntness in the original material.

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On that basis, the label matters little. What is unsettling is not the absence of desire, but twenty years of relationship sustained without it.