I used to go to church four or five times a week: Sunday morning service, Sunday evening service, praise band practice, youth group, youth group bible study, and whatever weekend events were going on. In February, the youth minister’s bible study topics revolved around Love. We all sat in metal folding chairs, trying not to make eye contact with each other while listening to a man tell us how to keep our body holy. Masturbation and make-outs were forbidden; gateway drugs to coitus. “There are three kinds of kisses,” he said, then illustrated with enunciation. “Peeeea-ches. Pruuuuunes. And AL-fAL-fa.” Peaches and hand-holding were most accepted, as long as we shut it down if we “felt the juices flowing.”  

I’d already alfalfa kissed a boy, of course. Danny, a seventh-grader, who’d kind of pinned me up against a door and tongue-kissed me for 10 minutes (my friends timed it), but not that it mattered. By Monday, he’d held hands with a prettier, taller eighth-grader in the hallway. It’d be another few years before I branched into the heavy-petting. By my senior year of high school, sex had spread through my group of friends like chicken pox. Eventually I’d have to go through it.  

From a male’s perspective, intercourse seemed more “like sticking your finger up someone else’s nose,” the way Minnie Driver’s character in Circle of Friends described. Over time, I learned how to get myself off, and grew addicted to what my body could do to a male’s. I craved not so much the sex, but the attention. Them wanting me meant I was pretty. Special. Beautiful. A sexually excited male in my presence turned me into every female lead in romantic comedies. I was Pretty in Pink and Sleepless in Seattle. I was Buttercup.

Over two decades, I sort of always had a regular partner, or a willing participant. When I found myself without either, I went out with guy friends on weekends looking to get laid, trying to cover my reeking odor of desperation for love. Most often I defined my worth by partners spending the night with me. I fell into several abusive relationships. I faked a lot of orgasms. I had sex without wanting it, and a couple of times without giving consent. It didn’t occur to me until a few years ago that this was wrong. I’d always thought having sex both fulfilled my role as a woman while satiating my need for acceptance. I needed those few minutes of after-climax sweetness, hoping they’d let me sleep nestled in their arms for most of the night.  

At 35-years-old, halfway through my second pregnancy alone, I stopped wanting all of it. I couldn’t even imagine doing it. I hadn’t kissed anyone in months. Conjuring an image of a penis made me nauseous. While I slept, my raging hormones flashed sexual scenes with women so much that I talked to friends who identified as lesbian about when they realized they were gay. But even those thoughts faded. For the first time in 25 years, I didn’t have a sexual partner by choice, and that was okay. It was too much work.

I started telling friends I was going through an asexual phase.

Every desire for closeness shut down. I didn’t get myself off, I didn’t think about sex, and seeing people kiss made me cringe. The sound made me nauseous. It went on for six months, until I had the chance to test it, shocked and thrilled at the same time that kissing a man didn’t make me throw up. That excitement soon faded, and sex fell back into its category of something I had to do in order to get some sleep. Plus it kind of terrified me. That shit gets you pregnant. Not only did I not want it for attention or affection, a year without making out, and I no longer gave a fuck (pun intended). I didn’t blame him for ending it, really, but still mourned the loss of the possibility. In a short couple of months, a spot had been filled without it first being empty. Now I had to readjust back to not having a partner, but the sex part I was happy to do without. Or, to quote a friend of mine, “The fucking you get isn’t worth the fucking you get.”   

My older daughter sometimes asks why I don’t have a boyfriend, and I tell her I don’t want one. She tells me about the boys at school with “annoying crushes” on her and I fight the urge to give her a fist pump for thinking of them that way. I’ve always been age-appropriately honest with her about male and female parts and how they work together to make a baby, but I haven’t told her that it’s something people do when they’re in love because it’s enjoyable. It’s more important that she knows how to love and please herself first. My daughters will grow up knowing that sex is something they can choose to do because they want it, and not something they have to do because it’s expected. I got sermons and a virginity ring as a teenager, and they’ll get books about their bodies and vibrators.

Calling myself an asexual as a mother makes me uncomfortable. Like a living oxymoron. Do I really qualify? There have been dozens of times that sex was mind-blowing, and all the things I wrote poems about for months. Maybe it’s just postpartum hormones, or I’ve finally become too jaded. But the more I learn about asexuality, and the more time that passes without any urges whatsoever, the more it fits. My purpose in life is no longer to please the male species, or be their momentary object of affection. I’m just here to work, write, love on and raise my kids. Right now, that is more than enough. Maybe, someday, we’ll get a dog.

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Hear Stephanie Land in The Mamalode Podcast, Episode 1, from March 2016

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About the Author

Stephanie Land

Stephanie Land's work has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Vox, Salon, and many other outlets. She focuses on social and economic justice as a writing fellow through the Center for Community Change, and through the Economic Hardship Reporting Project. Her memoir, MAID: A Single Mother's Journey from Cleaning House to Finding Home, is forthcoming through Hachette Books. She writes from Missoula, Montana, where she lives with her two daughters.