Intimacy without the Script
Part 4 of a Series on Asexual Relationship Formation and Maintenance
There's a moment I remember clearly from early in my relationship — before I had the language for any of this — when my partner and I were sitting on the couch watching a movie, and I thought: this is it. This is what I want.
Not because anything particular was happening. We were just there, close but quiet, half-paying attention to whatever was on the screen. And it felt complete to me in a way I couldn't fully explain at the time.
What I didn't have language for then was that I had already been redefining intimacy for years — building a version of closeness that didn't center sex, without knowing that's what I was doing. I just knew what felt right. What felt like us.
It took understanding my asexuality, and then sitting with the work of four scholars — Audre Lorde, Kristina Gupta, Sherronda J. Brown, and Ela Przybylo — to understand why that version of intimacy was not a lesser one. Why it wasn't a workaround or a compromise. Why it was, in fact, a refusal.
The Script We're All Handed
Most of us absorb what intimacy is supposed to look like long before we ever experience it. Movies, conversations, the quiet assumptions of the people around us — they all point in the same direction. Intimacy is physical. It is sexual. And a relationship without sex is, at best, incomplete.
Scholars have spent considerable time naming this pressure and what it costs us. Przybylo (2019) calls it sexusociety — the way sexual norms saturate culture so completely that they start to feel like nature rather than script. Gupta (2015) calls it compulsory sexuality — the unspoken cultural expectation that everyone experiences sexual desire, and that failing to do so means something is wrong with you. Brown (2022) puts it most plainly: we live in a sex-obsessed culture that pathologizes and dehumanizes those who don't fit its sexual norms. And Lorde (1978), decades earlier, had already identified how dominant culture collapsed the full range of human erotic experience into a single channel — sexual desire — dismissing everything else as lesser or incomplete.
In my own research, I bring these frameworks together under a single term I call sexual essentialism — a conceptualization I developed to capture something that runs through all of their work but that hasn't yet been named this way in the existing literature. Sexual essentialism describes not just the cultural centrality of sex, but two very specific and damaging assumptions that follow from it: first, that sex is necessary for a relationship to be legitimate — that a partnership without it doesn't fully count; and second, that sexual desire is a necessary part of the human experience itself — that to not feel it is to be somehow less than whole. As my manuscript puts it, sexual essentialism describes "the centrality of sex within the allosexual world. Specifically, the idea that sex is not only central within society, but that sex is deemed an essential part of human experience and nature" (Hall et al., 2026 (Manuscript in Preparation), p. 23).
These aren't just cultural opinions. They function as assumptions so deeply embedded that most people never think to question them — and for asexual individuals, they show up everywhere.
What Sexual Essentialism Actually Does
My research found that sexual essentialism wasn't just a background pressure. It was a structural force that shaped asexual individuals' relationships at every stage — from the first attempt to date, all the way through the ongoing work of maintaining a partnership (Hall et al., 2026 (Manuscript in Preparation).
One of the places it showed up most clearly was in what my manuscript calls invalidation and interpretive erasure — the way intimacy without sex gets rendered invisible or dismissed as not quite real. Some participants described being told flatly that a relationship without sex simply wasn't a real relationship (Van Houdenhove et al., 2015, as cited in Hall et al., 2026, Manuscript in Preparation, p. 25). Others described having their identity treated as a phase, a deficiency, or something that would eventually be resolved — as if the absence of sexual desire was a problem waiting to be fixed rather than a genuine orientation.
The internalization of these messages was one of the harder findings in my research. Participants described the emotional weight of absorbing a culture that positioned sexual desire as essential to the human experience — producing not just interpersonal friction, but guilt, shame, denial, and in some cases, self-loathing (Higginbottom, 2024, as cited in Hall et al., 2026, Manuscript in Preparation, p. 24). Claire, a participant from Glass (2022), described the particular anguish of this clearly:
“(Sex) is one of his core needs. I want to say it is his love language, the way he receives love, he really, really, really needs to be desired and that is essentially the one single thing that I can't do for him… that is the one piece that is never not going to hurt” (Hall et al., 2026, Manuscript in Preparation, p. 25)
The pain in that quote is not just relational. It is the pain of someone who has absorbed a cultural message — that desire is love, that sex is closeness — and is now measuring herself against it. That is sexual essentialism at work inside a person.
And it didn't operate the same way for everyone. One participant, Greta, described the particular complexity of navigating sexual essentialism as a Latina woman — where cultural expectations of hypersexuality collided with her identity as a sex-repulsed asexual, intensifying her experiences of invalidation and contributing to a concealment of her identity through self-erasure (Valley et al., 2025, as cited in Hall et al., 2026, Manuscript in Preparation, p. 25). Sexual essentialism, in other words, doesn't press down on everyone equally. It intersects with race, gender, and culture in ways that make some people's experiences of it significantly more layered and more costly.
What the Erotic Actually Is
Here's what I keep coming back to: the problem isn't that asexual people experience intimacy differently. The problem is that we've been handed a definition of intimacy so narrow that anything outside it gets erased.
Audre Lorde named this in 1978, in an essay called Uses of the Erotic. Her argument is deceptively simple: the erotic is not the same thing as sex. The erotic is a source of deep internal knowledge — an awareness of what feels authentic, fulfilling, and genuinely alive in us. It is the feeling of being fully present, fully engaged, fully known.
What sexual essentialism did, Lorde argued, was take that vast capacity and collapse it into a single channel. And in doing so, it didn't just constrain asexual people — it constrained everyone. It narrowed the possibilities for what closeness could look like, what connection could mean, and what a relationship was allowed to be.
Przybylo (2019) builds directly on Lorde to develop what she calls asexual erotics — a framework for understanding the intimacy that asexual individuals and their partners actually build together. Not intimacy in spite of the absence of sexual attraction, but intimacy through something else entirely: genuine knowledge of one's own needs and limits, attunement to another person, and the deliberate, ongoing cultivation of closeness on their own terms. As my research reflects,
“Asexual relationships do not represent an absence of erotics; rather, they highlight the limitations of sexualized models of intimacy by demonstrating that closeness, desire, and meaning can be expressed in ways that are not organized around sex”
Reading Lorde was one of those moments where something I had felt for years finally had a name. Because what I experience in my relationship — the closeness, the ease, the feeling of being genuinely seen — isn't the absence of the erotic. It is the erotic. It just doesn't travel through sex.
Intimacy is not a quantity. It is a quality of knowing and being known.
The Act of Refusing
Brown (2022) takes this further. In Refusing Compulsory Sexuality, she makes a case that is political as much as personal. The pressure of sexual essentialism isn't just a cultural norm — it is a system of power. And it doesn't press down on everyone the same way.
For Black individuals, compulsory sexuality collides with a long history of hypersexualization and the violent denial of bodily autonomy. To be Black and asexual is to live at the intersection of two forms of erasure: a culture that insists on hypersexuality and simultaneously refuses to recognize asexuality as real. Brown's work makes clear that the personal experience of asexuality is always also a political one — and that the stakes of refusing sexual essentialism are higher for some than for others.
But her core argument applies broadly. When asexual individuals and their partners build relationships outside the dominant script, they aren't just making a personal choice. They are refusing. Refusing the idea that a real relationship requires sex. Refusing the assumption that desire is proof of love. Refusing to let someone else's definition of intimacy determine what their relationship is allowed to be.
I find that framing clarifying. Because the pressure my partner and I have navigated wasn't only internal — it came from a culture with strong opinions about what our relationship was supposed to look like. Naming it as a structure, rather than a personal failing, makes it easier to resist. As my research concludes,
“Sexual essentialism functions as a persistent structural constraint through which asexual individuals and their partners must navigate relational expectations, while simultaneously demonstrating resilience in adapting to and resisting these normative pressures.”
The refusal isn't easy. But it is a choice. And it belongs to both partners.
Finding the Words
One thing all four of these scholars point toward, in different ways, is that reclaiming intimacy requires language. And for a long time, asexual individuals haven't had much of it.
The dominant vocabulary around sex and relationships was built to describe allosexual experiences. Trying to articulate something different within that vocabulary often produces what scholar Angela Chen (2020) calls a "language of lack" — framing asexuality as the absence of something rather than the presence of something else. When the only words available describe what you don't feel, it's hard to explain — to yourself or anyone else — what you do.
What I found across my research was a different kind of language emerging from within the asexual community itself — new words, new frameworks, new ways of describing experiences that existing vocabulary couldn't hold (Batchelor, 2024). And when that language made its way into relationships, something shifted. Couples could stop talking around what they meant and start talking about it directly — developing, as one participant described it, "new ways to experience, connection and intimacy together" rather than measuring their relationship against a standard it was never meant to fit (Batchelor, 2024, as cited in Hall et al., 2026, Manuscript in Preparation, p. 15).
Even consent looks different through this lens. As one participant explained:
"Asexual consent is not allosexual consent. Even sex favorable aces have a fundamentally different sexual experience than their allosexual counterparts because they do not experience any particular attraction to the person… Often, our wants, [needs], and boundaries are different than what people are used to, and we have to be our own advocate when pursuing romantic and/or sexual relationships." (Higginbottom, 2024, as cited in Hall et al., 2026, Manuscript in Preparation, p. 15)
Language isn't incidental to intimacy. It's part of how intimacy gets built.
What It Looks Like
In practice, redefining intimacy isn't a single conversation or a grand declaration. It's small and ongoing and often quiet.
Participants in my research described it as learning to ask different questions. Not are we doing this right? but what actually feels right for us? One participant put it simply: finding what's intimate between the two of you, and prioritizing it — a conversation, a game, an activity, cuddling (Batchelor, 2024, as cited in Hall et al., 2026, Manuscript in Preparation, p. 19). Another, Kiya, described it as genuine collaborative exploration:
"It was like, 'Okay… what do you want?' … I want you to be happy, and I want me to be happy, and we need to figure out what we want… how can we experiment or try different things, think outside the box." (Batchelor, 2024, as cited in Hall et al., 2026, Manuscript in Preparation, p. 16)
What made the difference, across study after study, wasn't whether a partner had read all the right books or knew all the right terminology. It was whether they showed up willing to listen and adapt. One participant described her partner simply: he didn't fully understand what asexual meant, but he understood when she needed space, and he found other ways to be together (Valley et al., 2025, as cited in Hall et al., 2026, Manuscript in Preparation, p. 17). Another reflected that her partner acknowledged sex was important to him, but made clear it wasn't the only thing — and that he was willing to work through it (Mitrofanis, 2022).
That willingness — quiet, consistent, unglamorous — is what Lorde's erotic knowledge actually looks like inside a relationship. And as my research concludes, it reflects
“resistance and resilience, as asexual individuals challenge sexual essentialism and other allonormative expectations that position sexual activity as necessary for relational legitimacy, while continuing to find, define, and sustain love on their own terms”
In my own relationship, it has looked like exactly the kind of moment I described at the beginning of this post. Not absence. Not compromise. Just a different architecture of closeness — one we built ourselves, because the standard blueprint didn't fit.
Why This Isn't Just About Asexuality
I want to end with something that I think gets missed in conversations about asexual relationships.
The pressure of sexual essentialism — the idea that sex is what makes intimacy real — doesn't only burden asexual people. My research found that "sexual essentialism functions as a lens through which intimate relationships are interpreted and evaluated… [applying] not only to asexual relationships, but also to allonormative relationships, where sexual behavior is frequently treated as a necessary indicator of intimacy and relational health" (Hall et al., 2026, Manuscript in Preparation, p. 31). Allosexual couples negotiate mismatched desire, experience sex as obligation, and sometimes find themselves trapped by a script that doesn't reflect what either partner actually wants (Muise et al., 2016; Impett et al., 2013).
Asexual relationships make this visible in a way that's harder to ignore — because the gap between the script and the reality is wider and more explicit. But the underlying question is one every relationship eventually faces: are we building intimacy, or are we performing it?
“Asexuality isn’t a deviation from the norm of intimate life. Asexuality offers ‘a critical lens for interrogating the centrality of sex within dominant relational paradigms and for expanding how intimacy is conceptualized across relationships more broadly’”
The script was never the only option. It was just the only one most of us were handed.
In the next post, I'll turn to something harder: what happens when the work of redefining intimacy breaks down — when accommodation becomes silent, when compromise stops being mutual, and when what looks like stability is actually something more damaging.
References
Batchelor, L. C. (2024). Beyond "The Whole Sex Thing": Co-Constructing Fulfilling Asexual/Allosexual Relationships [Doctoral dissertation]. ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global.
Brown, S. J. (2022). Refusing compulsory sexuality: A Black asexual lens on our sex-obsessed culture. North Atlantic Books.
Chen, A. (2020). Ace: What asexuality reveals about desire, society, and the meaning of sex. Beacon Press.
Glass, V. Q. (2022). Queering relationships: Exploring phenomena of asexual identified persons in relationships. Contemporary Family Therapy, 44(4), 344–359. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10591-022-09650-9
Gupta, K. (2015). Compulsory sexuality: Evaluating an emerging concept. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 41(1), 131–154. https://doi.org/10.1086/681774
Hall, D. L., Randall, A. K., Boyles, J., & Miller, N. A. (2026; Manuscript in Preparation). Coloring Outside of the Lines: A Systematic Literature Review of Intimate Relationship Formation and Maintenance Featuring an Asexual Partner (Manuscript in preparation).
Higginbottom, B. (2024). The nuances of intimacy: Asexual perspectives and experiences with dating and relationships. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 53(5), 1899–1914. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-024-02846-0
Impett, E. A., Le, B. M., Asyabi-Eshghi, B., Day, L. C., & Kogan, A. (2013). To give or not to give? Sacrificing for avoidance goals is not costly for the highly interdependent. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 4(6), 649–657. https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550612474673
Lorde, A. (1978). Uses of the erotic: The erotic as power. Crossing Press.
Mitrofanis, C. (2022). Asexual experiences of negotiating intimacy in romantic relationships — A qualitative study [Doctoral dissertation]. ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global.
Muise, A., Schimmack, U., & Impett, E. A. (2016). Sexual frequency predicts greater well-being, but more is not always better. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 7(4), 295–302. https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550615616462
Przybylo, E. (2019). Asexual erotics: Intimate readings of compulsory sexuality. The Ohio State University Press.
Valley, S. N., Mollet, A. L., & Fitzsimmons, B. (2025). "There's no roadmap for this": Asexual and aromantic students' healthy intimate relationships. Sexuality Research and Social Policy. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13178-025-01083-x
Van Houdenhove, E., Gijs, L., T'Sjoen, G., & Enzlin, P. (2015). Stories about asexuality: A qualitative study on asexual women. Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy, 41(3), 262–281. https://doi.org/10.1080/0092623X.2014.889053
Vares, T. (2018). "My asexuality is not a phase": Asexual identities and intimate relationships. Sexualities, 21(4), 509–526. https://doi.org/10.1177/1363460717709096
