Where Are All the Boyfriends I Was Promised?
Love doesn’t come easily to me. Can I do anything about it?
I’m getting tired of the girlfriend drop.
You know what I’m talking about. That point in the conversation when a heterosexual man you’ve just met mentions his girlfriend to make it clear he’s not available.
I understand the person doing it is just being a good boyfriend—no crime of omission—and respectful of my time. But it always makes me feel embarrassed (should I have toned my friendliness down?) as well as affronted (you thought I was hitting on you?!). I’ve often wished that instead of being a woman, I could just be a brain on a stick.
The power move would be to respond with a boyfriend drop, but I never have that option. I haven’t fallen in love in over a decade. I’m 32.
The year is 2018. Lights come up in a tiny office near the Empire State Building. I’m asking my therapist if she thinks I’m a sociopath.
“If you were a sociopath,” she replies, “you wouldn’t feel bad about breaking up with him.”
I had just ended things with a guy I’d dated for months. His crime? Inviting me to go camping.
It wasn’t that I didn’t like camping. But the trip would take up an entire weekend. And if he got my weekend and my nine-to-five got the rest of the week, then when would I have time to do anything creative, let alone clean my room?!
So that was it. I didn’t have the kind of feelings that would make going camping with my lover sound more appealing than working on personal projects. I really wanted those feelings. And he deserved someone who had them.
I felt like a sociopath for not ending things sooner. But I also felt genuinely confused about how adult dating was supposed to work. I had only ever been in relationships with people I had feelings for before we went on a first date. When you started dating a stranger, how long were you supposed to wait for feelings to strike? And if you hadn’t fallen in love in a long time and knew it rarely happened for you, were you supposed to just abstain from doing any fun relationship-y things that might lead someone on? Were you never allowed to cuddle while watching a movie, or go to brunch and hold hands in the park after, or have sex with the same person for months so it actually got good?
My therapist was right. I wasn’t a sociopath because I didn’t lack empathy. But my sexuality seemed out of step with most people’s. It would be another year before I found the word for that.
Once, before I’d met the camping guy, my therapist had suggested online dating. I immediately felt panicked in a way I hadn’t since I was a kid, as if she could force me to online date against my will. Instead, she asked why tears were welling up in my eyes. I just really didn’t want to, I said. I did not want to find love that way.
But time went on. I got bored and increasingly lonely in New York, a city with so many romantic-looking restaurants. My roommate treated dating like it was her job and quickly found a couple guys she liked. A friend from college was doing a similar thing, describing it as her “own personal dating show.” Three dates a week, first date at the same bar every time, second date at a bar with a pool table so even if the date went poorly she’d get to practice.
“What do you do on the third date?” I asked her.
“The only two guys who’ve made it that far both invited me over and cooked me dinner,” she said.
That didn’t sound so bad. I decided to give it a shot.
Over the next couple years, I went on dozens and dozens of dates with people I met online. There were some I met in real life, too: a barker in Times Square, a Bedford Cheese Shop man, a subway admirer. A few were terrible, like the one with the guy who thought you couldn’t catch Covid during the day, or the one with the guy who told me a “funny story” so boring I felt depressed imagining his life. But most of them were fine, even good—there was just nothing compelling me to go on a second date.
Eventually I started to wonder, though: how could I meet so many people and not find a single one I was interested in romantically? Except for one measly three-month stint, I hadn’t felt anything approaching love in seven years. Meanwhile, I had friends who walked out of their houses and found boyfriends. One of my friends even found a boyfriend without leaving her house. What was I doing wrong?
I had crushes during my online dating blitz—on two coworkers and a roommate. All emotionally unavailable, unfortunately, but they were useful comparisons. Would their dating app profiles have blown me out of the water? No. Did I want to kiss them when I first met them? Hell no! Maybe I just needed to give these online guys more time.
My peers and the internet agreed—and disagreed. It could take two or three dates to get a good sense of someone. But you needed to trust your gut. However, “the spark” was a myth. Well, it was real, but it could take months to show up. It would fade anyway though, so was it really necessary? Wait, no spark?! Next!
There was also the “It’s just a numbers game” camp, comprised mostly of people who had met their significant others on their third or fourth online date ever.
Alongside all this was an undercurrent of women who whispered, “You might just need to sleep with him to see if there’s anything there.”
At the end of my rope, I began to consider it. Hooking up with someone can reveal cute and hot things about them. Maybe that was the side of these guys I needed to see. Plus, wouldn’t the flood of oxytocin that hits women’s brains after sex make me feel attached?
Turns out “Sex makes women attached” is a bunch of sexist crap.
I frequently complained to friends during this time that there was too much pressure in online dating. Theoretically, you could wait as long as you wanted to decide if you liked someone. But could you wait until you’d had dozens—or even hundreds—of hours of exposure to them, like you’d get at school or in another community setting? People didn’t seem willing to tolerate uncertainty for that long, and I couldn’t blame them. The only reason we were meeting up was to determine if we liked each other. To me, it felt like looking at the sun.
Sex without feelings could feel physically good, but it was mechanical, devoid of magic, no more than the sum of its parts—not at all like what I remembered from early relationships. Sometimes I could write it off as an anthropological study. More often, it sent me into a three-day depression attack.
This reaction seemed at odds with my beliefs. It was okay to get physical with someone while you were still getting to know them, even the first or only time you met them. So what was happening? Was the voice of an abstinence-only motivational speaker I’d seen with my youth group rattling around in my head shouting “NOBODY WANTS TO MARRY USED GOODS”?! Yeah, it was. But it hadn’t caused this kind of reaction before.
But before, I’d had feelings for people. Lots of them, from an early age. I used to run around my daycare proclaiming I was betrothed to my friend’s older brother. Throughout elementary and middle school, another friend and I would concoct elaborate PG-13 stories for each other starring our crushes du jour. (“It’s Night of the Notables and you’re dressed up as Catherine de’ Medici. Out of nowhere, someone pulls your French hood over your eyes and says ‘Guess who?!’ You whirl around. It’s Ethan.”) When a couple of my crushes finally blossomed into relationships in high school, my brain gave me the full-on natural cocaine experience. I couldn’t wait to fall in love about every other year for the rest of my life.
But in my late 20s, it seemed my heyday was already behind me. I cried out of my mouth Liz Lemon-style over the sink about it.
I learned about a type of grief called ambiguous loss, experienced by people whose partners are physically present but cognitively absent (for example, if the partner has Alzheimer’s) or vice versa (like if they’re stationed overseas); whose loved ones go missing but are never confirmed dead; or who want to but can’t get pregnant. Apparently it could also afflict single people longing for a partner but unable to find one.
Once, I got close. I went on a few dates with a comedian I matched with on Hinge. He was further along in his career, with some writing credits and a show he hosted. The texting was good: funny and just unpredictable enough to get me hooked. Never mind that he was looking for someone to laugh at his jokes rather than someone to build jokes with—we had a shared community! Maybe that was my ticket to successful online dating.
And then he went cold. And after weeks of finally getting my dating dopamine fix, I was in for a major comedown. I fled to an alley on my lunch break and sobbed on the phone to my mom.
“Oh, sweetie,” she said. “You’ll find love when you least expect it.”
That was how I’d found love in the past: by accident, while doing something else. But I had been least-expecting it for seven years before starting online dating, and love hadn’t shown up. Now the proactive approach wasn’t working, either. I was stumped.
The first time I read about demisexuality on the internet, I was sure it couldn’t describe me. It was on the asexuality spectrum, somewhere between complete asexuality and quote-unquote “normal” sexuality. My mind went to the one openly asexual person I’d seen depicted on TV: a magician named Evan on High Maintenance. He’d been spooked by a woman touching his leg, and sex was completely out of the question for him. That didn’t sound like me.
But after so many dating fails, I found myself back on demisexuality forums and Reddit threads. r/demisexuality (88K+ strong!) said:
In general, demisexuals are not sexually attracted to anyone…however, when a demisexual is emotionally connected to someone else, the demisexual (may) experience(s) sexual attraction and desire, but only towards the specific person.
So for demisexuals, an emotional connection was a prerequisite for sexual attraction. It wasn’t a preference. They weren’t walking around exercising Herculean self-control over their desires because they thought it was the right thing to do. They just didn’t desire anyone until they felt emotionally connected to them (and maybe not even then).
The Asexual Visibility and Education Network wiki framed things in terms of primary versus secondary sexual attraction. Apparently demisexuals only experienced the latter:
Primary Sexual Attraction: sexual attraction to people based on instantly available information (such as their appearance or smell).
Secondary Sexual Attraction: sexual attraction to people based on information that’s not instantly available (such as personality, life experiences, talents, etc.).
The floodgates really opened when I read Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex. The author, Angela Chen, described so many experiences that echoed my own. An early misunderstanding with a boyfriend about sexual attraction to people outside the relationship, for example.
I had never experienced “just attraction,” a physical impulse—only emotional desire that manifested physically. I wanted sex with someone only when I was already prepared to change my life for them, so I did not believe Henry when he claimed that wanting sex with others did not automatically threaten me. When he talked about how everyone was sexually attracted to everyone else all the time, I could not understand attraction as anything but how I experienced it: emotional yearning—love, really—overpowering and overwhelming, a disaster for our relationship if targeted toward anyone but me (12).
Both Henry and my ex were probably allosexual, meaning they were in the majority of people who experienced purely sexual attraction. Meanwhile, Chen and I only experienced attraction in the context of romantic feelings. I thought about how I’d once heard that bees can see colors we can’t. Was I also missing out on a whole dimension of constant sexual attraction between the people around me?
High Maintenance hadn’t been completely off the mark: some people on the asexual spectrum were sex-repulsed, like Evan the magician. But some were sex-indifferent or sex-favorable (25). Some even had high libidos, or sex drives—they just never felt sexual attraction, or horniness toward a specific person (21), so they might not be interested in partnered sex.
I didn’t know what I was anymore. A sex-favorable asexual? Demisexual? An allosexual with a low libido unless she was in love? I was leaning toward demisexual, but I wondered if that was because of internalized acephobia. I thought of one of my favorite comedians describing another woman as “having no sexual energy” to explain why she was creeped out by her.
In contrast, the end of Ace framed asexuality as simply a different experience, not a lack of some essential quality. The people Chen interviewed cited more time to be creative, more time to build community, and zero time worrying about the interpersonal dynamics that come with dating and having sex (182). Chen described how a person named Zee Griffler’s identity had helped them build more close friendships: “The path toward asexuality,” Chen wrote, “forced them to reject the idea that two people who were close should automatically try to date and have sex, as if that were a superior way of relating (182).”
It wasn’t just asexual people who stood to gain from this perspective shift. Compulsory sexuality, or “the idea…that not wanting (socially approved) sex is unnatural and wrong, and that people who don’t care about sexuality are missing out on an utterly necessary experience” (35) puts a lot of pressure on everyone to seek and maintain sexual relationships, no matter what they want in the short-term or over a lifetime. What if we stopped treating dating like it was on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and started treating it more like pickleball, or any other interest that some but not all people share?
Most internet sources will tell you less than 1% of people are demisexual. But I have a hunch the real number is much higher. A lot of people say things like “I need to be friends first,” or “I just can’t get excited about messaging a stranger.”
Whether they’d all want to embrace a label like demisexuality, however, is another story. Some people feel constricted or pathologized by labels. Others think increasingly specific labels are a snowflake thing or just a way for privileged people to claim marginalization.
All I can say is: this label helped me find others going through similar things. Eventually, it empowered me to shrug off societal expectations about dating and pick and choose only what works for me.
Here’s what works for me: participating in communities where I have repeated, unplanned interactions with people. Scientists say such interactions are critical for forming real friendships based on genuine connection—which are both valuable in their own right and my only hope of ever becoming attracted to anyone. But in this era of remote work, screens filling our leisure time, millennials opting out of religion and a host of other factors tied to American history and late-stage capitalism, it’s increasingly difficult to build a life full of them.
This fall, a guy I’d just met asked me out. I said no. Then I said: I don’t really date. I’m demisexual.
“Totally get that!” he said. “I’m down for friends too.”
So we got friend drinks. We performed in multiple comedy shows together. Then he invited me to a New Year’s Eve party, where we wore glasses that made little rainbow hearts appear around sources of light. After oohing and ahhing at the bonfire and nearby streetlamps, we counted down to midnight and hugged. ▩