Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
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Notes -
This is probably not the answer you want, but I've simply stopped putting people into binary gender buckets when it comes to dating and relationships. I think the more that you affirm your partner's values and ambitions and hopes and dreams, and in turn openly share yours, the more intimate and meaningful your relationship will be.
Dating and relationships over the years have confirmed for me that—not only do binary gender buckets work well—they are pervasive and persistent across time, space, and cultures, and contain tremendous predictive and prescriptive power.
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How's does that work exactly? Are you gay or bisexual?
I'm struggling to envision what genderless dating looks like, at least between a man and a woman. I'm not talking about hopes and dreams or whatever, I mean that mundane stuff. Like do you ask him/her out? Do you go in for the kiss?
I am a cis male, asexual. My partner is a cis female, also asexual.
If you'll forgive the assumption, the asexual nature of y'all's relationship probably means that your approach and opinion is correct for the two of you.
I think sexual couples have to cut through some more bullshit to get to that point.
Yes, if the relationship is based mainly on exclusive access to sex (for men) or exclusive access to stability in exchange for sex (for women) and involves the requisite prostitution-exclusivity arrangement for it (most people call this a "marriage"), then it's going to be qualitatively different than one where both participants are aware they're interested in something else. Ironically enough, this happens because sexual relationships are the room temperature, but unless you're aware of what that room temperature even is you're (only figuratively) fucked.
I will admit that I don't fully understand those [sexual] relationships, but I have also noticed that for marginal people, or for normal people in marginal conditions, this default orientation actually works pretty well. It does generate some underlying resentment on people who are conflicted about wanting this, or who might be ace-curious but fundamentally can't handle it, and probably explains why certain kinds of men would rather hang out at the bars than with their wives. If the relationship runs on sex-for-security, that's all it's ever going to be; I am constantly amazed at the number of people who don't actually like their wives/husbands but put up with them for this reason. When these sorts of people say they love each other I am, to a point, baffled that when they say this they aren't lying. "Lie back and think of England" only makes sense under these relationship conditions, and the traditionalist-progressive (feminist) agreement that having to have sex with men is bad is trivially derived from this too.
If you're in it for other reasons, it's... well, it's not really a sex-based relationship then, is it? This is the "marrying for love" side of this, which I guess technically asexuality qualifies as; more concerned about someone you don't need [which then becomes someone you don't want] to protect your psyche from- the "building a life together" sort of thing to which sex is... mostly a nice-to-have accessory rather than the foundation on which the relationship is based. Not that it isn't very important, of course; this is pretty far from the bare-metal "need sex/security to live" but it obviously isn't divorced from it (which is why "asexual" is really not that great a word, since people assume it applies to 'well obviously they don't feel sexual attraction or want to have sex', which is not quite what that means anyway, or it's a woman falsely claiming to be this as an excuse to pre-emptively stress-test [men say 'shit-test', but perhaps it should be considered neutral since it's obviously in the statistically-mean woman's best interests to do this] how stable the man she's dismissing is; they also use 'enby' like this too).
The problem with the model asexual union is that that's basically just how gay unions work (to the point that, just like every other 'got the wrong brain/software by mistake', I think grouping them together is more valid than anyone really wants to admit... which is probably why they're grouped together in the first place anyway), with failure modes more common to those relationships (so you can get one partner exercising destructive levels of openness in this kind of partnership and the other partner not meaningfully able to push back on it, which is how I hear Dan Savage's union is going at the moment). So you're not exempt from problems, you just get different ones (though it's not like marriages can't take on these characteristics anyway).
The other problem with asexual relationships, which nobody talks about, is that just like all non-traditional relationships they're best kept protected or private because their Pride in those worldviews (and I'll argue the sexual revolution was caused by asexual Pride, but in fairness technology had just made it possible at that time) has a corrosive effect on the normies, since they'll just take the tools the [gender-]space aliens left lying around and use them as weapons and in other similar ways in which they were not intended to be used, like the demolition of physical male intimacy because "haha that means ur gay". There was a point made that, for traditional relationships, the junior partner coming to resent being the junior partner in a relationship destroys it, and I think a lot of the ace stuff when it enters the ears of those people prompts that resentment, and because the relationship was built on nothing else it is destroyed. Senior partners can be made to resent their own position, too, which is [though by no means the only reason] why when they know they can just say "honey, I'm a woman now, deal with it" and make a massive mess some of them are indeed choosing that option.
All that to say that yeah, I do agree that a lot of the dating advice that comes from asexuals is not applicable to sexuals, it's very hard to tell which is which, that knowing not to take asexual advice when you're not asexual is very much an asset (which is partially why women freaked out about PUAs, because even if that wasn't a weapon some asexual left laying on the ground it very much had the character of one that was, and was unique in that it's the only one of the sort in the last 40 years that men could actually use against women).
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That is correct, and I agree.
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[Edit: moved to a sibling thread]
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