There was a period of your life when you weren't interested in dating anyone, weren't interested in sex, the opposite or the same sex - maybe up to the time you were 11 or 12. Can you remember (not) feeling that?
That period of your life ended when you went through puberty, I'm sure.
It hasn't ended for me.
I don't know why, but 12 or 13 years ago now, when I went through puberty, I got all the physical changes (no need to describe them to you - unless you're a 5 year old who's somehow stumbled across this blog, you'll know what they are), but pretty much none of the mental ones. You might not realise, but it's actually pretty hard to notice when something doesn't happen.
One day a week at school we'd go play sports for the last few periods of the day, and I can remember thinking about it quite a lot, wondering why I wasn't interested in people like everyone else seemed to be.
For a while, maybe I thought I was just one of those late bloomers, but it's been more than a decade now, and I've still not bloomed, so I'm fairly sure now that it's never going to happen. But, at the back of my mind, sometimes I think "maybe I've just not met the right girl, and when I do things will be different then", but, still, I've met a lot in the last decade, no dice. Has it not happened because it can't happen, or because I have a really specific type? Who knows.
It feels really weird and sleazy to write this out explicitly, but I look at women, and that's enough, I have absolutely no desire for or to do anything else, and zero for men, too.
On a night out with two of my (female) friends a few years ago, we got talking about it, and one of them said I gave off a vibe of not being attracted to women. Maybe that's why so many of my friends are women now (though that might have something to do with the charity I volunteered at, it was heavily staffed by women, and let me tell you, generally the friends you make at a charity tend to be pretty good people who know some good ones themselves. If you want more good people as friends, I'd recommend charity volunteering!).
And more than anything, it's just odd.
I can't really relate to the vast majority of you when you talk about this type of love, something that's obviously so important to most people. I'll apologise in advance if I don't treat it with the gravitas it deserves.
I understand intellectually why my friends are dating their boyfriends and girlfriends, why they'll someday in the future propose or get proposed to, why they live together and why they'll continue to live together for years, but, emotionally, I don't really get it. I've never felt the way they do about their partners, never felt whatever it is people feel when they're single and want not to be. A yearning, an urge for deep connection with another person? I'm sure you'll know what I'm trying and failing to express here. Notice how I can't express it properly.
Even having to share a bed and bedroom with another person, I can't say I get. To not have a private space that's your own, so that someone else can and will come into it at any time, you don't have a place where you know you can retreat to when you want to be alone, people seem to not mind that, or even want it?
And the vast vast majority of people don't mind that, want that? I really can't empathise.
And it tells me quite a lot about what the rest of my life will be like - I can be fairly sure that I won't have children (more on that below), that I will live alone, won't come home after work to a partner that I'll spend the rest of the day with, that I will be alone a lot more than most people (note, I did not say "lonely"; thankfully, I'm happy being solitary, I like being by myself for a while, though everyone tells me I'm actually very sociable), that I won't have someone else to lean on as much as you will, to help me live, that I have to rely on myself more, that more of the activities I do I'll be doing by myself - I've already gotten used to going to restaurants, watching films in the cinema, things like that, by myself.
Because of that, I think friendship is more important to me than will be to you, I don't have that person in my life that sits above all my friends - Robin Dunbar, in his paper "The Anatomy of Friendship", talks about how when people fall in love, they normally kinda-replace one of the 5 most closest friends people tend to have (page 38).
A few months ago I think it was, a good friend hadn't seen her boyfriend in-person for a few months, she had just went to see him for a few weeks, and she was telling us how happy it made her to see him again, to spend time with him, to live with him, even if just for a while. To you, I'm sure the reason why is obvious, it doesn't need to be said, but my first thought wasn't anything like what you're thinking now. I don't remember exactly what it was, but it was something really stupid like "now you have someone to proofread your coursework".. Now it wasn't just as blindingly unempathetic as that, but it was along those lines.
But, even if I can't relate to you on this one (very important) dimension, there's still every other human experience and emotion up for grabs.
You can imagine what I think about sex (or don't). I just don't get the appeal (how bloodless an answer is that!), and it makes me wonder if they keep putting sex scenes in TV shows because everyone else gets something out of them, enjoys them somehow (not to suggest they do it make to make the viewers horny!). I'm just bored and slightly uncomfortable, though I'd imagine that's not uncommon. To be completely honest, I don't get why it's so important to people, so much so that people will pay someone for it, you're doing something physical with someone else that seems like just fitting legos together, almost on the same level of importance as scratching an itch - why are you drawn to do something so physical? (I know the evolutionary reason, obviously) It wouldn't surprise me if you just got really mad when you read that, but I just can't empathise here. I think I understand the emotional side of it (since I do have friends I'm very close with!) far more than the physical.
I don't do what apparently 94% of men and 70% of women do, according to this book I picked up from the one book sale my local library has ever done (if you've clicked on that link, I can be fairly sure what you're thinking - "he can't be serious! He bought that?", but, really, I have, I was curious, I'm quite a curious person). It was great, £5 for as many books as you could fit in one of their big cardboard boxes, I got loads. I'm sad they've never had another one.
After reading all that, you'd probably be surprised to hear that I've asked someone out once, but I have. It wasn't just some random woman I met at a coffee shop that I thought was cute, either. Worse, it was a good friend of mine, whose country I'd flown to the Summer before so we could go on holiday together. The way we'd been talking recently, I wasn't sure if we were flirting, and one night after going out for dinner with some mutual friends (who knew about the whole thing), I asked her if she wanted to go out on a date. She turned me down, and to be completely honest, looking back on it, I think I'm glad she did. I've never had feelings for anyone else the way I did for her, but I'm not sure that they ever actually amounted to what you'd call a crush, or that I ever had romantic feelings; there definitely were never any sexual ones. I'm fairly sure that I'd make a terrible boyfriend, that I couldn't possibly give someone what they need or deserve in a relationship - that if we did actually go on a date, it wouldn't have worked out in the end, or we'd inevitably break up because I don't feel what I should, or can't do what I need to. I've told some of my friends this, and they disagreed pretty strongly and thought I would be a great boyfriend, but I think they were thinking of my personality when they said, not in the relationship sense (it's not the first place you'd go when thinking about friends relationships!).
I don't want to be crude, but I strongly doubt a relationship would work if 1 of the couple isn't interested in sex, and the other needs it, like most people do. Like if your partner absolutely needed both of you to do karaoke at least 2 nights a week, and you had no interest in it or were slightly repulsed by the whole thing, and if you didn't belt out a tune every Wednesday and Friday, you'd break up (I apologise for that analogy, it's a hard thing to analogise).
Then there's my parents - they have a 20-something year old son who's never brought a girl home (when both of his (older) brothers are married with kids), or even mentioned going on a date. They must worry, and wonder. I've told them I'm perfectly happy being single, and luckily they're ok with that. Though, my mum has complained that my female friends are all either in relationships or are gay. Last week, she said "Does [friend] have any single friends you could hook up with?" :) Sad to say, she does not.
I've been like this for so long now, my parents seem to be wondering if I'm gay - quite a few times they say things along the lines of "we don't mind who you bring home. be it man or woman". Though, we did have this conversation last week, so they're not completely accepting:
I don't care if you bring home a black, blue, or pink woman
What if she's an alien?
Then you'll have to go to her home planet.
I'm not really bitter, or sad, either. Are you sad you have no interest in collecting stamps, or running up mountains backwards? You can't really miss something you've never had or wanted to have; if anything, it's more an abstract sadness, knowing I won't experience something that's clearly incredibly important to almost everyone else. Imagine everyone you know regularly goes to this party they think is incredible, or wants to go, and is really downtrodden when they can't, but you, you just don't see the appeal of the party. Maybe you wonder what you're missing, not wanting to go. I don't want to, but sometimes I want to want to.
The validity of "better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all" is a bit of a null question for me.
I think I've made my peace with it now. All that thinking about it has got me used to the whole thing, okay with it. Occasionally that abstract sadness pops back up. A while ago I'd get sad/angry, convinced I'd never had kids of my own, because who would let a single man adopt? Turns out, it happens fairly often, so if I really wanted to go for it, I could.
I'll never know how many other people that I see on the street are like me; how do you notice when someone isn't interested in something? Maybe there's loads, and we just skirt through life, silently not making waves, unnoticed by most people. Sometimes I wonder if my cousin is the same: she's a bit older, maybe 28, just bought her own house, and I'm fairly sure there's never been a boy or girlfriend in her life, either; not even a rumour of one. It's not something I'd ever ask about, obviously. Even our nieces had more romance when they were 13 :).
And as to why, I have no idea at all, and I imagine I never will know. Just one of life mysteries. Recently I realised there's one thing that makes me different to every other person I've met, in another way - I was born more than 16 weeks early (yes, really!), extremely prematurely. Maybe that's why. But as I say, I don't know.
I have no interest in joining a club for people who don't collect stamps, or don't run marathons. It's pretty hard to build a political constituency if the thing that ties you together is people not doing or being interested in doing something.
The quality of my analogies here, comparing the love you have for your girlfriend/boyfriend/fiancé/husband/wife to collecting stamps or running marathons, probably shows you by itself my inability to relate. Maybe you got angry that I compared the feelings you have for your husband or your wife to stamp collecting, and to yourself you're probably right to be. But there's a pretty vast chasm to cross here.
It's not something I bother telling most people, explicitly anyway. There's not really a reason to, most of the time, "not doing something" isn't really much of a big deal with my friends or family. I'm quite lucky that nobody presses me, I don't get any furious "why don't you have a girlfriend yet!? You're x years old!!" interrogations. It might help both of my brothers are a fair bit older, normal, and each have sons now, so the grandchild-pressure is off me.
You're probably wondering "why all the circumlocution?" - shame, maybe, but (knowing this is the easier answer) more that it's hard to express something that's pretty central to your ... "personality" is the wrong word. As is "character". "Being"? To who you are? Maybe "pretty central/important to how everyone else sees you".
