The Pressure to Perform Sexuality
Part 5 of a Series on Asexual Relationship Formation and Maintenance
There's a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from performing a version of yourself that doesn't fit.
I don't think I fully recognized it when I was doing it. At the time it just felt like trying — trying to be a good partner, trying to meet expectations, trying to make things work. It was only later, when I had more language for my own experience, that I could see the performance for what it was. And that recognizing it as a performance didn't make it feel less real. It made it feel more costly.
This post is about that cost. Specifically, what happens in asexual relationships when accommodation isn't mutual, when compromise becomes silent, and when what looks like stability is actually something more damaging — for everyone involved.
When Strain Becomes Pressure
In the last post I wrote about redefining intimacy — the deliberate, ongoing work of building closeness outside of dominant sexual scripts. That work is real, and for many couples it is genuinely transformative. But it doesn't happen in a vacuum. And it doesn't always work cleanly.
My research found that even in relationships where both partners were trying, the pressure of sexual essentialism didn't disappear. It showed up inside the relationship itself — as strain, as tension, as a quiet accumulation of unspoken expectations. As my manuscript describes:
“Relationship maintenance for couples featuring an asexual partner was not without strain. Across studies, participants described persistent tensions that emerged from navigating sexual asymmetry within broader allonormative contexts.”
What made that strain particularly difficult was that it was often felt on both sides simultaneously — and for different reasons. For allosexual partners, the absence of sexual desire could feel like rejection, like evidence that something was missing or wrong. For asexual partners, the awareness of that pain created its own pressure — a sense of responsibility for a hurt they hadn't intended and couldn't fully resolve.
That combination — two people in genuine distress, both trying, neither fully able to reach the other — is the specific emotional terrain this post is about.
The Performance Nobody Talks About
One of the findings in my research that I think about most is what I call performative sexuality — the pattern of asexual individuals engaging in sexual behavior not out of desire, but out of a felt need to be accepted, loved, or seen as normal.
My manuscript describes this as a pressure that resulted in:
"Performing sexuality, 'because it was the only avenue to acceptance and love that they saw open to them at the time.'" (Batchelor, 2024, as cited in Hall et al., 2026, Manuscript in Preparation, p. 21)
It showed up across multiple studies — not as an isolated experience but as a recognizable pattern. Participants from Agrawal et al. (2025) described similar experiences, with the authors characterizing these performances as acquiescing to partners due to:
"External pressure or internal assumed responsibility." (Agrawal et al., 2025, as cited in Hall et al., 2026, Manuscript in Preparation, p. 21)
That phrase — internal assumed responsibility — is the one that stays with me. Because it names something that isn't coercion in the conventional sense. Nobody may be demanding anything. The asexual partner may be making what feels like a free choice. But underneath that choice is a belief: that this is what is required to be loved. That without it, the relationship won't survive. That their authentic self is not enough.
My research suggests that this pattern may function as a minority stress response — the internalization of stigma and social pressure producing behaviors aimed at conformity and acceptance (Brooks, 1981; Meyer, 2003). In other words, performative sexuality is not just a relational dynamic. It is a response to living in a culture that has told asexual individuals, repeatedly and from every direction, that who they are is not quite right.
The Other Side of the Same Pressure
It would be incomplete to talk about performative sexuality without acknowledging what drives it on the other side of the relationship.
Sexual expectation strain — the tension that builds when one partner's sexual expectations consistently go unmet — was one of the most persistent findings in my research. As my manuscript notes:
“The primary source of relational insecurity and partner tension could be explained through sexual expectation strain and conversion-oriented practices.”
For allosexual partners, this strain is real. It is not simply entitlement or selfishness. It emerges from a lifetime of being told that sexual desire and romantic love travel together — that being desired by your partner is proof that you are loved, that the absence of that desire means something is wrong with you or with the relationship. When an allosexual partner feels rejected, they are often experiencing the same sexual essentialism that burdens their asexual partner — just from a different angle.
Understanding this doesn't mean that the pressure allosexual partners place on asexual partners is acceptable. It means that both people in a mixed-orientation relationship are, in different ways, casualties of the same cultural script. And that script needs to be named and examined — not just inside the relationship, but as the external force it actually is.
When Pressure Becomes Coercion
My research documented something harder than expectation strain and performative sexuality. It documented what happens when pressure crosses into coercion.
Some participants described allosexual partners expecting that their asexual partner's orientation would simply go away over time — that it was a phase, a block, something that could be resolved. Others described partners who attempted to identify a cause as though asexuality were a symptom to be treated. As my manuscript describes:
"Asexuals suppress their identities or 'accommodating their partner's efforts to identify a cause' through medicalization or pathologizing the asexual's orientation." (Mitrofanis, 2022, as cited in Hall et al., 2026, Manuscript in Preparation, p. 22)
This is worth pausing on, because it speaks to a confusion that runs very deep in how we understand asexuality: the conflation of libido, sexual behavior, and sexual attraction as though they are the same thing. They are not. Libido refers to a drive toward sexual activity. Attraction refers to who — if anyone — that drive is directed toward. An asexual person may have a libido. They may engage in sexual behavior. What they do not experience is sexual attraction to another person. When a partner or a physician suggests hormone therapy, libido-enhancing medication, or other medical interventions to address asexuality, they are treating the wrong thing entirely — attempting to increase a drive that may already be present, in the hope that it will produce attraction that was never there to begin with. It won't. And the message it sends to the asexual person is clear: who you are is a medical problem. That message has a cost.
At the most extreme end, my research encountered accounts of corrective rape — sexual assault motivated by the belief that the victim's sexual orientation could be changed or cured (Doan-Minh, 2019). Two participants in Mitrofanis (2022) described experiences of rape or attempted rape within their relationships. My manuscript names this clearly:
“Experiences like these create another layer of fear and mistrust within asexuals in forming intimate relationships with allosexuals, making relationship maintenance more challenging.”
I include this not to sensationalize but because leaving it out would be a form of erasure. The continuum from unspoken expectation to overt coercion is real. And understanding where it begins — in the cultural assumption that asexuality is something to be fixed — is part of understanding why the pressure to perform is so much more than a relational inconvenience.
What Silent Compromise Actually Costs
Not all of this is dramatic. Most of it isn't. Most of it looks like ordinary relationship life — two people making small adjustments, choosing their battles, letting some things go.
The problem is that when accommodation is uneven and unspoken, it accumulates. My research found that what looked like resolution was often avoidance — both partners operating around a tension rather than through it. As my manuscript observes:
“Patterns of relational insecurity, partner tension, sexual expectation strain, and conversion-oriented practices reflect sustained disruptions to relational processes, rather than temporary instability.”
In other words, the turbulence didn't resolve. It became the background condition of the relationship.
For asexual partners, silent accommodation often meant gradually losing ground — performing more, saying less, shrinking the space available for their authentic experience. For allosexual partners, it sometimes meant suppressing needs until resentment built into something harder to name and harder to address. Neither outcome is sustainable. And neither is visible from the outside, which is part of what makes it so easy to miss until the cost has already accumulated.
What my research points toward — and what I have found to be true in my own experience — is that the only way through this is explicit. Not a single conversation, but an ongoing, honest, sometimes uncomfortable willingness to name what is actually happening. As my manuscript concludes:
"These processes often require additional layers of reflexivity and dialogue, as partners must engage with asexual-specific discourse and develop shared understandings of boundaries, consent, and intimacy that may not align with normative expectations." (Hall et al., 2026, Manuscript in Preparation, p. 29)
That reflexivity is hard. It is harder when the culture you live in keeps telling you that what you're negotiating shouldn't need negotiating — that desire should just be there, that love should just work. But it is the work. And for many couples, doing it honestly is what makes the difference between a relationship that holds and one that quietly hollows out.
What This Means
I want to be clear about something before I close.
Performative sexuality, silent compromise, and sexual expectation strain are not evidence that mixed-orientation relationships can't work. They are evidence of what these relationships are up against — a cultural framework that makes honest negotiation harder by insisting it shouldn't be necessary.
When asexual individuals and their partners do the explicit, ongoing work of naming their needs and limits, something shifts. As my research found:
“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.”
That is not a small thing. It is, in fact, the whole point.
If you or someone you know has experienced sexual coercion or assault, the RAINN National Sexual Assault Hotline is available 24/7 at 1-800-656-4673 or online at rainn.org.
In the next post, I'll zoom out from the relationship itself and look at the broader cultural landscape that shapes it — how hook-up culture, sexual scripts, and the norms of contemporary dating were built around allosexual assumptions, and what that means for anyone trying to navigate intimacy outside of them.
References
Agrawal, N., Shainy, M. R., Sebastian, J., Srivastava, A., & Scoats, R. (2025). "Sex without sexual attraction?": Perceived sexual experiences of Indian sex-favourable asexuals. Psychology & Sexuality, 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/19419899.2025.2518977
Batchelor, L. C. (2024). Beyond "The Whole Sex Thing": Co-Constructing Fulfilling Asexual/Allosexual Relationships [Doctoral dissertation]. ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global.
Brooks, V. R. (1981). Minority stress and lesbian women. Lexington Books.
Doan-Minh, S. (2019). Corrective rape: An extreme manifestation of discrimination and the state's complicity in sexual violence. UC Law SF Journal on Gender and Justice, 30(1).
Hall, D. L., Randall, A. K., Boyles, J., & Miller, N. A. (2026). 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
Meyer, I. H. (2003). Prejudice, social stress, and mental health in lesbian, gay, and bisexual populations: Conceptual issues and research evidence. Psychological Bulletin, 129(5), 674–697. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.129.5.674
Mitrofanis, C. (2022). Asexual experiences of negotiating intimacy in romantic relationships — A qualitative study [Doctoral dissertation]. ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global.
Przybylo, E. (2019). Asexual erotics: Intimate readings of compulsory sexuality. The Ohio State University Press.
