Thread by @stan_gaiman, Tweeting on this account, as family members follow my main.I’ve just realised [...]

Tweeting on this account, as family members follow my main.

I’ve just realised (while cooking rice) that a big part of while I’m sure I’m ace/demi, I’m not sure if i really am aro too or if my reluctance to seek romantic relationships is related to how my parents reacted to it +

while I was growing up. My mom, my dad and even some of my relatives were averse to me or my sister doing anything remotely romantic with boys. It probably wasn’t my mom’s intention, but she made me feel shame about the rare times I thought I could try dating, like a normal teen.

She laughed at me and said my dad would ‘freak out’ when I told her I asked one of my male friends to prom. She told me not to slow dance with him (likely because we had a small school community and People Would Talk.) I had no idea what she thought was going to happen tbh

when after all, I was ace (didn’t know it yet) and my date ended up doing the Harlem Shake with a paper bag over his head in the middle of the dance floor.
(But that’s another story)

In fact, any male friend of mine who I talked about was A Threat or a Possibility: “Does he like you? Maybe he likes you. What would you do if he likes you?”

Jeez.

When I started talking to boys in college she would ridicule me for being the first to message (Because I was and still am a soft bitch who isn’t good at hiding her feelings.) There was actually a lot of...shame related to me wanting to talk to boys?

It’s not that I wasn’t

allowed to date, in that regard I was mostly left alone (thank god) but there was always the pressure of a relationship somehow not being good enough for my parents. Because I grew up listening to them judging other people’s relationships, being told all the worst qualities of

men, and getting hit over the head with the expectation of sex and marriage (things I was not ever going to be ready for!) I had been conditioned to avoid relationships. To this day when I have a crush on someone I think “What will mum and dad say?”

It wasn’t till I was a bit older that I started catching feelings that I knew were real, and because I was already an adult I felt bold enough to go ahead if I wanted to— to flirt, to drink, to take long train rides home with boys.

I remember sitting in a train with this boy I was infatuated with and we were laughing and he put his hand on my thigh and didn’t take it off. I knew mentioning something as harmless as this would freak my parents out.

It was funny to think of going home and saying “He put his hand on my thigh and guess what?? I LIKED IT!”

(I didn’t do that lol)

But yeah I guess growing up in a society where sex is always an obvious component of romance made it even more difficult because there were things I

wanted from a relationship that didn’t include others, and I think my parents were scared of me getting into that (even when I was already an adult) because they are unable to see that romantic relations don’t necessarily have to include sexual ones.

And so I felt detached from other people because I thought that if I couldn’t experience sexual attraction, I could never really fall in love etc. That’s why I was really glad to learn about sexuality as a spectrum, and asexuality as an identity.

The degree and manner in which I am capable of loving is still valid, and I could touch and be touched on my terms, and mum and dad never had anything to be scared of because I never wanted to have sex in the first place.

Anyways, it took me a while and it is still taking me time to get used to the idea of being in a relationship with someone, minus all the extra hang-ups that I know aren’t mine, but my parents’. (My personal issues are a different thing altogether ahaha)

I’m still having a hard time finding someone and extricating my personal relationships from other people’s judgment. And I’m still trying to turn off my mum’s voice in my head with all her anxieties and warnings and ridiculing comments. It gets easier by the day.

So that, when the time comes and the right person asks me to be with them, I won’t hesitate to think what my parents will say and tell them what my heart tells me— even if that thing is, “Can I think about it?”

If you have made it this far, Thank you for reading this thread.

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