Or, Actually It’s called amatonormativity for a reason dude 🤦‍♀️

As someone who used to not get demiromantic/demisexual and questioned the labels with “but isn’t that just how everyone is though??”, I feel like writing this out can maybe help other people understand who and what allosexual actually describes.

And yes, I was partly inspired to write this after reading the comics where Gwenpool discovers her asexuality, why do you ask?

Love Stories

Within media portrayals, there is a very particular way in which romance and attraction are shown – there’s that “love at first sight”, the idea that people immediately get a spark and know they want someone. There’s also the parallel idea that everyone must have their “other half”, their lover, their pair. Ergo, one will find their pair and one will know immediately who their pair is.

Now, as a critical thinking enjoyer I always treated media depictions of relationships as more akin to something idealised rather than examples to emulate. But you can’t help but internalise some things when everything around you blares them into your brian.

As idealised depictions, it’s pretty reasonable to assume that it’s not how it actually works out in real life, there isn’t some spark that can immediately happen. Other than seeing someone and wanting to be like them, but that’s just a trans thing. Love at first sight? That one is just a bit of a romanticisation, right?

Right?

The wrongly assumed normal…

Okay I wanna preface this with a bit of an “in my defence”, but, no one actually told me until like, 3 months? ago at time of writing that other people aren’t like me and I had no reason to assume that I was wrong to extrapolate my own experiences to other people. Anyway.

I have long assumed that there are actually very few people who match the vibe of media depictions of love at first sight and that labelling ““““normal”””” people who need to get to know someone first before falling for them is silly. Like, what the hell even is demisexual and demiromantic? That’s just allosexual bro…

Author’s Note: Riley holy shit my dude you dense bitch

The more accurate normal

So turns out that people who just fall for others without getting to know them first are not actually hypersexual. I guess that’s what allosexual actually is… and most people are like that, they do actually randomly fall for people and are attracted to people just like that.

It may be a bit embarrassing to admit this, but I partly found out I’m demisexual by talking to a friend and realising that it’s actually not the norm for stories of a particular persuasion to only hit right if it’s involving characters I already care about, and that basically exclusively falling for friends is perhaps not as common when considering it’s happening almost exclusively with friends…

I never really questioned whether I was on the a-spec because being someone who does experience attraction despite it having some pretty important asterisks often gets simplified down into just “experiences attraction” which is obviously the prevailing norm within our society. And those asterisks for me were long assumed to just be part of my transness if I recognised them at all.

So yeah, fuck that. I’m not going to let those asterisks be erased anymore. I’m not allosexual and even though I hate labels, I proudly sit under the ace umbrella.

And I mean, the demisexual flag goes pretty hard, can’t argue with that 🔥