Melissa Delaney

I have struggled with my sexuality my entire life. I considered myself heterosexual, but struggled with desire, arousal and poor sexual experiences. I am 54 and spent a lifetime not understanding what all the fuss was about when it came to sex with a partner. I did just fine alone, but it was just me, a toy and a totally blank mind. People talked about fantasies and I didn’t have any - or if I did, they were more auditory or olfactory or tactile memories, not visual, and I never made up pictures in my mind…because I see blackness. I thought I was totally screwed up. Add to it that I am a sexual, emotional and physical trauma survivor and I thought I was just one messed up chick. This year, I stumbled across the term aphantasia and realized I have had it my whole life. I see blackness. I can’t even recall my own childrens’ faces without looking at pictures. Then, my husband recently told me he thought I was asexual and that I wasn’t screwed up at all, that this was just who I am. I rebelled against that of course because it also felt like it was just me being a total trainwreck and everything was my fault. But I started looking into it and found that demisexual is on the asexuality spectrum. I think that is me. I sue develop attraction for someone but only if I have a strong emotional bond with that person already. Also, as someone else mentioned, it doesn’t take much for that bond to break for me and once it does, I can’t get the attraction back no matter what I do. Now, today, I’ve come across information like this which shows that there is a far higher prevalence of aphantasics in the asexual population than in the normal one. In the population at large, aphantasia makes up only 2-3%. In the asexual population, it is as high as 47%. That is staggering and I have to think our inability to fantasize has a ton to do with our difficulties with connecting sexually. I’m not sure how I feel about all these discoveries yet. I know I’m lonely and feel like I’ve missed out my whole life, but sadly I don’t think finding out this information is going to improve that much. It just puts a label on my problems that I didn’t have before.