Confuzzled.

[SpiralStatic]

I'm very confused by my sexuality. I ponder it quite a lot, because I know that I have to know myself to accept myself, but honestly the more I try and untangle it, the more twisted up it gets. I seem to find people of all genders potentially attractive, but it's all so neutral and there are things I despise about girl and things I despise about guys and things I despise about everyone in between, but at the same time they all have their balancing good points. I can't think about anything with my emotions: it's always too objective to actually be attracted to someone for more than a few days, because I always find something extremely unattractive about them that I can't stand; no matter what. It's like when you're trying to write an essay, and you have to find the evidence to support your claim, and evidence that would also disprove your claim. So I'll come up with my claim ("This person is attractive!"), and I'll see the supporting evidence ("They like the same music as I do and they're pretty cute!"), but then I see the bad parts ("They're pathological liars!/"They're failing four classes!"/ "It doesn't seem like they brush their teeth!") and everything goes poof, regardless. And the attraction was so faint and new in the first place, I can't actually tell if I was even attracted to them at all. It might have just been that I thought they were pretty cool and wanted to hang out with them. So yeah. Pretty confusing. I've had crushes in the past on boys, but by "in the past" I mean sixth grade, which I don't think even counted, because I just had this one crush for the entire year and it was pretty much just aesthetic. I sorta get friend crushes, where I really really really want to be friends with someone and spend a lot of time with someone, but no real sexual attraction.

But the thing is, I am sexual. Reading erotica turns me on. But I don't want to date, kiss, or go farther with anyone, even though it does feel like I could? Want to, I mean. I just hate everyone. I don't know. I guess it could be described as I can see myself having sex, just not with anyone else in particular.

I can't figure out what this means. Any advice?

[Heather]

I'm finding it a bit hard to know where to get started with this because of the "I just hate everyone," and "things I despise about ____" comments.

Can we perhaps start by seeing if that comment about hating everyone is in earnest, and things like never being able to even like someone for more than a few days without finding some sort of fatal flaw in them as a person, rather than overstatement or hyperbole?

[SpiralStatic]

I guess I mean that there's something that bugs me about everyone, regardless of gender and sometimes because of sex or gender, i.e. penises are really gross looking in my opinion, and extreme femininity really irks me most of the time. I apologize for the use of hyperbole, I'm an avid writer and sometimes my fictional/poetic writing style tends to leak into less formal works where isn't appropriate.

[Heather]

So, it sounds to me, especially given your age, that what's most likely going on right now is just that a) on your own developmental timeline, it may just be too early for you to be having these feelings about others, and b) you're in a headspace at the current time where you're just feeling so much bleck and loathing about other people that that is going to be a pretty obvious barrier when it comes to feeling anything positive about others.

Sexual orientation is about our sexual interest in and attraction to other people. Even asexuality isn't about thinking people suck, it's about a disinterest in sex with others. So, if everyone just seems to suck right now, and you're finding that no one is attractive to you, we can't really talk soundly about where you sit on a spectrum that's about being attracted to other people or disinterested, but is not about feelings of aversion.

I'd suggest you just leave this be for now, and stop trying to figure things out before you really have had any real time -- I'm talking years, at a minimum -- to have life experiences that actually give us the information to figure these kinds of things out. And of course, you also need to be in a mental or emotional place first where you're not feeling so much acrimony about others.

Mind, sexual attraction to someone isn't usually about them somehow being perfect in our eyes, or having no kinds of flaws. If people needed to have every single thing about them appealing to someone else, no one would be attracted to anyone, because no one is going to find another person without some things that bother them, especially over time. But again, some of getting there -- and perhaps some of this in general is about being a bit more accepting of others as real people, who are going to be someone who isn't you, and are going to have flaws -- probably involves giving yourself some more time, including time to just feel the way you do now about others.

Do you know what I mean?

[SpiralStatic]

Yeah.. I see what you mean. It's just .. I don't know. It really bothers me. I guess it's because I've always been ahead of the game around my peers, be it maturity wise, development wise, or intelligence wise (no insult intended -- I've just always naturally done well at school) and now there's this one thing that everyone understands except me -- and I mean that pretty literally. Two of my best friends were dating for a couple months and I had no idea they even liked each other until they broke up and my other friend told me about it. I generally don't get it. I read books featuring a love interest sometimes, and of course I observe it in the people around me, but it simply doesn't make any logical sense to me. I've certainly never felt that way about a person. Like, I don't understand how a person could make you so emotional and weird.

This ties into my sexuality in that perhaps I had just subconsciously peer-pressured myself into a mini-crush because I felt like I should? I do tend to do that. Like if you asked my favorite color, I'd say "blue" not because there's something about blue that I like more than any color, but because I've thought about my favorite color so much and I work with colors of all denominations so frequently that I've become too detached from the situation to make an emotional, irrational decision and blue is scientifically the most soothing color.

[Heather]

I think the idea of any kind of development as ahead of/behind is pretty problematic, and can really set people up to feel like any of this is some kind of race or competition. It's not. And all those kinds of development you described there aren't so simple that they really can be quantified like that anyway (intelligence, for instance, often is not measured well by academic achievement or a lack thereof), and sexual or interpersonal development is equally complex and also not something it makes sense to try and quantify that way.

So, I'd suggest seeing what you can do to work on letting go of thinking about this like that. Instead, think of this as simply having certain interests and opportunities at different times of life. When and if those interests and opportunities occur is just about all of us, and our lives, being different, not about some people behind behind and others ahead. It sounds like you understand other people not yet -- or period -- having interests or parts of life they are super-engaged in right now that you are, so perhaps you can try to apply the same understanding to yourself.

Lastly, please know the idea "everyone" is having certain feelings or experience is always off-base, and we know that with sex and romance particularly, pluralistic ignorance always looms large, with people frequently having off-base ideas about the wider range of people and their experiences. I can absolutely assure you that nothing close to every other 13-year-old but you -- nor every 25-year-old or 55-year-old -- is having sexual attraction to or desire for others right now, and that there is literally no age where everyone -- if anyone! -- somehow has some giant grasp on the whole of their sexuality that resembles a complete understanding.

[SpiralStatic]

Thanks... I promise I'll make an effort to let it go. It's odd that the more that I think about it the more I notice problems with the basic structure of my social and group and how I interact with my peers, isn't it funny how one thought leads to another? Like, my two closest friends? I actually strongly dislike them. Now, you seem to be a bit against linear progressions, at if you look at the next tier of friends, I don't really like any of them either. All of this seeking approval from people I don't even like? it's a bit ironic, consider I generally reject adhering to standards. Seriously. Thanks for writing at me.

(But about that whole "giant grasp on sexuality thing.." Thanks for pointing that out to me. I must interact with an odd handful of exceptions, because I always had it in my head that people always "just knew;" my friends are mostly very very very certainly straight and I have one pansexual friend who has never told me that they are anything other than cisgendered and pansexual.)

[Heather]

With that "just knew," for sure, that's true for some people. But if your friend group doesn't include people 5, 10, 20, or even 40 years older than you, know that the picture you are getting now isn't likely to be very accurate.

Some of your friends who "just know" they're straight this early in life, for instance, will likely later in life come to the conclusion they're not (especially given all the compulsory heterosexuality most people are raised with and exposed to growing up), while others may find that orientation is, in fact, something that feels like a fit for most or even all of their lives. But our ideas about our orientation very early in life, especially in advance of even exploring sex and relationships with others, more often than not aren't sound, especially if anyone has the idea that we can know much about our sexuality for our whole lives based just on how we feel about it in the past and present, and that past and present also hasn't been going on for long!

Human sexuality is highly fluid, and very much informed by all the other parts of our lives, and then the experiences we have with sex and relationships, so it's often more informative to talk about this with people who have been through a lot of life already or at least to look at broader groups than just your peers. (And that's true with anything to do with sexuality, not just orientation.)