idk how many ace people are in this chat but to those who are, do any of you also wish you weren’t as well? like idk, i just wish i could connect to people that way but i’m just kind of repulsed by it. obviously its completely valid to not want a relationship that doesn’t have sex but i just wish it wasn’t like that. i know that one day i’ll find the person for me but its a really sucky feeling that i have to leap through an additional hurdle that’s essential to most people
idk whether i fall within "ace people" (as far as 'identity' my answer tends to go back and forth from one day to the next, and thats more j definitions than anything) but yea i feel that ~ tho i also suspect that maybe this is an "additional hurdle" for many people who arent ace too, perhaps even for most
there are a million variations of practices that might be grouped within "sex" (depending on your definitions lol), and any relationship with a romantic or sexual component is going to involve some level of people exploring what they do and dont like and particular preferences that are not 'completely aligned'.
at the same time, one of the roles of the romantic and sexual spheres is (hopefully) to 'shatter the ego', ie to break down the preconceptions etc that we entered an encounter with (rooted in the values of the society we live in, ie white supremacy patriarchy and so on); sorry for the tangent but my point is, even if people enter a romantic or sexual encounter with somewhat different preferences, they/we might choose to push our limits and enter into something that we "wouldnt have planned" to. [which could go very well, or very badly, or anywhere in between.] id even suggest that itd be boring/stale to have identical preferences, that a crucial part of interpersonal experience is opening up to ~something new~ which in turn leads to change(s) in ourselves.
so i think we all have to negotiate this dynamic of on the one hand wanting to stay within the comfort of the ego-system, and on the other seeking out the ~edge or 'limit experience' that carries the potential for the ego's unraveling. this dynamic is fundamental to interpersonal life i think, and whether in romantic or sexual spheres or otherwise, we all will have interpersonal situations where we are drawn toward something that we "wouldnt have thought we would be", and hopefully at least sometimes we have the level of safety necessary to get to test our limits.
bc to have an interpersonal life without any limit experience, would basically be like being on twitter: we would no longer be seeing or experiencing people's subjectivity and instead everyone else just becomes a projection of our own ego-systems, we assume we know what someone is thinking/feeling before they even open their mouths, we ignore everything that doesnt fit our preconceptions and twist the remainder into whatever it is that is most comfortable for us to believe about them. and thus "i like pancakes" becomes "omg why do you hate waffles".
'limit experience' (or something in that sphere, obv whatever wording ppl might prefer to use is fine) is necessary to not have our interpersonal life be reduced to [twitter], bc contact with our limits is precisely how we disrupt the ego's drive for stability and coherence above all else. for both people who "are" and people who "arent" ace, and across 'romantic' 'sexual' 'platonic' spheres
i definitely do agree (i think this is agreement lol) that limit experience can be less accessible for those of us who are ace and/or whose sexualities operate in ways very 'outside the norm', because sexual life is by far the area in which limit experience is most normalized in the world we live in. so we may end up stuck within our egos 'more often', if our (interpersonal) attempts to touch the edge go unrecognized bc they do not take a 'typical' form ~ (tear hug). limit experience surely isnt "easy" for anyone tho, bc it necessarily involves a risk to the ego, even for people whose sexuality "most closely matches the norm". and while limit experience may be less accessible to us, we also might be more willing to take the risks that the limit involves, bc we dont have any illusion that we can meet our needs without doing so
(i perhaps come to this from a v particular perspective but figured my pov was worth sharing anyway. also jsyk i dont follow this thread, so feel free to msg me if u write something that u want me to read/respond to or such)
