What is demisexual, and is it bad to be one?

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A2A, calling something a sexual orientation rather than a sexual preference generally means that you can’t experience sexual pleasure in any other way than the way you’re oriented. Demisexuality, I just learned from searching Google, is when you can only experience sexual pleasure in the context of a strong emotional bond.

This doesn’t seem ‘weird’ enough to me to be considered a wholly different sexual orientation. In fact I’d say probably most people only want to have sex with someone they have a strong bond with someone. In fact a lot of mating strategies used by the aggressively promiscuous involve getting around this preference. Demisexuality would therefore be considered to be a preference rather than an orientation.

But the site I read asserts differently. It paints a picture of a person who simply does not experience sexual attraction, towards anyone, until they have an emotional bond with that person. It then goes on to state that it presents these people with problems making friends and romantic partners.

I don’t disagree that these social dynamics exist among people with these kinds of preferences, but I don’t really see any of this as deserving of the framing of sexual orientation. I will go on to assert that you can’t possibly know your own sexual orientation until you’ve actually experimented with it and understand thoroughly how your mind responds to certain situations. If you keep experimenting, you will be discovering things about your sexuality for your entire life.

I daresay that you won’t know if you even have a sexual orientation at all until you’re in your thirties. Yes, I believe “no sexual orientation at all” is a thing, this means that none of your sexual patterns rise above the level of preference.

If you had caught me 5 years ago with this concept, I’d have sworn up and down that I was demisexual. In reality I was just extremely sexually awkward. I’d had just enough sexual experiences to know that I just wasn’t going to be able to find satisfaction the way it seems other people do. As I grew and matured I lost enough of the awkwardness to understand my earlier experiences better. I am still experimenting and exploring and plan to keep doing so until they put me in the dirt.