Inspired by Lissa Rankin’s amazing post on the topic of vulnerability vs. neediness, I wanted to reflect on the issue of being vulnerable in relationships because it’s one of those areas where I know I really need practice. It’s such an important skill to have in intimate relationships; if we can’t be vulnerable enough to express our needs and desires, we have little chance of experiencing satisfaction or feeling truly loved and cared about. However, being vulnerable to anyone is also hard as fuck for the very reasons Rankin outlined: there’s always that chance the other person will choose not to meet your need, which will hurt and may even embarrass you. That choice can erode trust in the relationship, breed resentment, etc.
I realize, at this very early stage in my life, that as a child and teen and more recently as a young adult, I almost never deliberately chose to make myself vulnerable in the context of straightforwardly asking the people I loved for what I really needed and wanted. I don’t have a lot of practice with this. No one taught me how to do it, and as someone who’s always been highly perceptive, I also figured out early on that most of my deepest needs and desires in my nonsexual, nonromantic relationships with friends and/or family members would be considered misplaced in such relationships by romantic-sexual people.
Basically, I didn’t ask for what I wanted and needed because I knew I’d get rejected. Not to mention judged. Maybe that makes me a coward, maybe that makes me someone with common sense. Either way, the result was the same: I grew up with an empty love tank. I grew up with an intense yearning for some special relationship I didn’t have–for a while, I assumed it had to be a traditional romantic relationship–and never found it. I grew up loving various friends and family members with unbearable passion and intensity and suffering tremendously for it because I wasn’t getting even a quarter of my major needs met by any of those people and couldn’t even effectively communicate, whether to them or others, what I wanted and how I wanted it and what it meant. When I was 12 or 14 or 16 or even 18, I didn’t have the sophistication–or the courage–to attempt telling an allosexual friend with absolutely no knowledge of asexuality, passionate friendship, alternative nonsexual love, etc what I wanted from them and what it meant (i.e. I want this level of intimacy and this level of touching and this level of involvement but I don’t want to fuck you or conventionally date you). Maybe that was a blessing because I don’t think I could’ve coped with constant rejection.
I can so relate to the fine line separating vulnerability from neediness. I was a very needy kid, and no wonder: I never had any of my needs met. I’ve since grown up and grown out of that, due to simple choice and developing self-love and self-esteem. I was always unusually independent in the first place, and that independence and self-reliance has only ballooned as a result of my self-love and self-esteem. What I’ve discovered, though, is that all my core needs are the same as they always were. The only difference is I no longer feel desperate for someone else to fill them. I have to admit that I sort of don’t know if that lack of desperation is solely because self-love has taken away the desperation or also because I’ve spent so much time without these needs met by anyone outside of myself, that I’ve become anesthetized to the actual feeling of wanting or needing certain attention. Intellectually, I know what I want and need. Emotionally, I spend most of my time not really tapped into those wants and needs, which is primarily a positive thing because it means I don’t walk around in painful hunger.
I take pride in my level of independence and self-reliance. I take pride in NOT being needy. I take pride in my comfort with solitude and emotional detachment from others, in my ability to spend so much damn time by myself and never really get bored or lonely, let alone sad about it. I take pride in my self-love and my ability to take care of myself so well. Rankin’s right: our culture praises and encourages independence, self-sufficiency, strength and discourages neediness, weakness, vulnerability, etc. I love how independent and strong and self-reliant I am. I love how much of a loner I am, by nature. I wouldn’t trade these qualities for anything. I would never choose to be needier.
But at the same time, I have no choice but to acknowledge that no matter how much I love myself, how independent I am, how cool I am with flying solo, how good I am at entertaining myself, how strong I am emotionally….. I want to be loved by other people. I want those people to take care of me. I want those people to touch me the way I want to be touched. I want those people to support me emotionally and physically when I need it. I want someone to be waiting in the wings in case I need them for some reason, even though I don’t actually want to need them to step in. My whole life, I’ve been totally fixated on love and passionate friendship. It’s one of two major interests I have, the other being creative writing. I study love, I write about love, I think about love all the time. My desire to love and be loved is colossal. It’s been building and building all these years. It’s now an impressively specific and detailed desire: I know what I want, how I want it, and why I want it. I know what’s important to me in relationships, and I’m no longer willing to settle for ones that fall short.
If I could go back in time and do my childhood friendships and family relationships differently, I don’t think I would’ve been any more vulnerable or made my needs and desires known, even with the adequate vocab and clear conceptualization of passionate friendship. I think my reading of allosexuals was accurate all along and still is: I think ten times out of ten, had I been courageous enough to ask a friend or family member for what I really wanted and needed, they would’ve shot me down without hesitation because they have no capacity to understand what I mean or even who I am. Passionate friendship is alien to contemporary allosexuals. Intense, passionate, nonsexual love, especially of a nonromantic nature, is beyond them. Furthermore, I can’t express my needs and desires to allosexuals without first giving a lecture on what asexuality is, what my asexuality is, what passionate friendship is, the fact that not all touching/intimacy/emotional passion means sex (and romance), etc. (And then, after explaining all of that, they’d have to actually believe me!) I feel confident now about my ability to eloquently express myself and my needs and desires, but my total lack of faith and trust in allosexuals to come through for me hasn’t changed at all. In fact, it’s worse today than it was several years ago: as a kid, some small part of me must’ve hoped some allosexual somewhere could be the kind of friend I needed, but now, I would sooner believe in unicorns ice skating on the ponds of Hell.
For me, vulnerability in relationships highlights the visceral difference between interacting with other asexuals vs. interacting with allosexuals. My fellow asexuals, I trust. I know they can be trusted. I know they can relate to me the way I want and need. I know they are all capable of passionate friendship, of the kind of nonsexual and/or nonromantic love and connection I desire, even if some of them never actually get into passionate friendships because they elect to have traditional romantic-sexual relationships and common friendships instead. I know I can talk to an asexual about passionate friendship and my own personal needs and desires in relationships, and the odds are good that they’ll understand where I’m coming from easily, whether they share my desires or not.
I can be vulnerable with other asexuals (and aromantics who are on the same page as me, relationship-wise). I can dare to be vulnerable with them because I feel safe with them by default. I know I can talk openly and honestly about my ideal of passionate friendship, and whether they want exactly the same thing or not, they’ll get it. They’ll be supportive and accepting and maybe even excited by what I describe. So many of them will respond by saying, “I want that too!”
What I want, what I need, is an asexual community in my physical life. I need asexual friends, I need asexual partners, I need the people in my relationship anarchist family to be asexual (or aromantics who reject traditional couplehood and prize nonsexual/nonromantic love). I only want to form close relationships with other celibate aces and aros for this precise and significant reason: they’re the only ones I can be safely vulnerable with. They’re the only ones I can trust. They’re the only ones who can love me the way I want and need to be loved.
I want to be vulnerable with people. I do. I want to be someone who’s brave enough to have those moments of putting my needs and desires out there on a regular basis. But they have to be people I can trust. They have to be other asexuals.