When I was younger, I always assumed that someday, sex would just happen, when I was with the right person and when I was ready. In high school, I never dated anyone, and sex was really a non-issue. I was aware of its existence, and that some people were doing it, but none of my close friends were having sex, and it wasn’t at the forefront of my consciousness. In college, I was much more aware of sex. I still never dated anyone, but I was surrounded by a lot of people who were sexually active, much more so than in high school. Some of my friends had sex and some didn’t. It still wasn’t a big deal to me or anyone else that I wasn’t having sex (in fact, I was very proud of my ridiculously high purity test scores), and I didn’t really worry about it. Even after college, when my now-husband and I started dating, I wasn’t too concerned. We didn’t have sex, but we did other sexual things, and I just figured that eventually it would happen. But at some point, a shift occurred in the way I thought about sex. Literally overnight, I went from being proud of the fact that I hadn’t had sex yet to being ashamed of it. I started to worry and wonder, what if it never did happen? How would that affect my future plans? I knew how babies were made, so how could I ever become a mom if I didn’t have sex?
Once I got married, the pressure grew exponentially. People started asking when we were going to have kids. I didn’t know what to tell them. We kept trying to work on having sex, but I was never in the mood, and it just wasn’t working. I was getting more frustrated and anxious by the day. Eventually, it got to the point where we had pretty much stopped trying altogether, and I was really worried that we would never have kids. Then I finally discovered the asexual community, realized I was asexual, and slowly got around to admitting that to myself (and explaining it to my husband). At first, we tried to keep working on having sex. I thought that maybe if I made it part of my schedule (I’m very routine-dependent!), I would actually work on it even if I didn’t feel like it. That didn’t work. We talked about adoption, and agreed that we would be open to it, but we would prefer to have our own kids if possible. IVF was never really an option for us, for financial and other reasons. At a loss, I turned to my friends. I had only told a couple of people that I was asexual at this point, so I had a limited think tank going. They gave me a few ideas, but I didn’t feel like any of them would work for me. I was really getting desperate.
Then, one day, I was bored at work and decided on a whim to google the “turkey baster” method. I’d heard about it in theory, but never as something people actually did. What I found surprised me. Apparently, it’s fairly common for people to use one of those oral medicine syringes for infants instead of an actual turkey baster. I immediately sent the link to my husband, saying “we should try this!” A few weeks later, we were watching a movie, and one of the couples in the movie (a lesbian couple) used this EXACT method to get pregnant! It filled me with so much hope, knowing that other people had actually done this AND been successful. Once I knew that I had found a method that could work for me, it was like a huge weight lifted off my shoulders. I even told my husband that once we finished having kids, I would be open to continuing to work on trying to have sex for him. It might even work, because the pressure of sex feeling like a prerequisite for having kids is gone.
When I tell people I’m asexual, one of the first questions they usually ask (after, “how does your husband feel about that?”) is something about having kids, and whether and/or how that’s an option for me. I tell them that we do want to have kids, and that we’re working on it via alternate methods. They’re usually surprised and/or skeptical, because apparently there’s a myth that, as my friend put it, asexual = no babies. But it is just that, a myth. So if you are asexual, and you’re worried that it means you’ll never be able to have kids, fear not! Where there’s a will, there is always a way!
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