Asexuality as a sexual orientation reaches back to the first humans. But as an area of scientific study, it’s relatively new. And its orientation cousin, aromanticism, is even newer on the scene: The first documented references to asexual-related behaviors appeared in the mid-19th century.

One such reference came from Prussian human rights activist and journalist Karl Maria Kertbeny, in a 1869 pamphlet in which he coined the terms “homosexual” and “heterosexual.” He referred to people who pleasure themselves primarily as “monosexuals.”

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In 1884, American sexologist William Alexander Hammond published Sexual Impotence in the Male, writing of two longtime male patients with a condition he described as “original absence of all sexual desire.”

And in 1896, Magnus Hirschfeld, the German sexologist responsible for groundbreaking research on transgender identity, linked people without any sexual desire to the concept “anesthesia sexual” (or absence of sexual sensation). Hirschfeld’s contemporary, German activist Emma Trosse, came close around the same time to the term we use today when she described a “contrary-sexual” as “asensual.”

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It wasn’t until 1907, however, that the term “asexual” was recorded, when the Rev. Carl Schlegel, a German immigrant living in New Orleans, was found guilty by church elders of “homosexualism, so-do-my, or Uranism.” Schlegel was quoted in church minutes as advocating in his defense for “the same laws” for “homosexuals, heterosexuals, bisexuals, asexuals.”

Other terms followed: In the 1920s there was “anaphrodites,” from American author Jennie June, and in 1948, a simple “X”, denoting males who reported no socio-sexual contacts or reactions on the groundbreaking Kinsey Scale from American sexologist Alfred Kinsey.

The term “asexual”, along with widespread acknowledgement of the orientation, really caught on in the 1970s, with an explosion of identity movements.

Writing for the Asexual Caucus of the New York Radical Feminists in 1972, author Lisa Orlando published The Asexual Manifesto, describing asexuality as “relating sexually to no one,” and rejecting normative sexual behavior.

Sex, she asserted, would be “totally incidental and unimportant to our relationships.”

Academic and cultural touchstones for asexuality soon followed.

In 1973, the long-running radical feminist zine Off Our Backs at Barnard College featured “asexual” as an option for a “choose your own label” photo feature.

In 1974, David Bowie discussed asexuality with William S. Burroughs in Rolling Stone.

By 2001, David Jay had founded the Asexual Visibility and Education Network (AVEN), the best known of a profusion of online asexual communities made possible with the advent of the internet. The group’s advocacy in 2007 resulted in language acknowledging “self-identification as ‘asexual'” for the first time in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

AVEN “came out” as the first asexual entry in the San Francisco Pride parade in 2009.

But while it may be in the zeitgeist — even SpongeBob SquarePants has come out as asexual — navigating asexuality can be a challenge in a popular culture that prizes overt sexual displays (gay and straight), and relies on traditional conceptions of sex in forming intimate, loving relationships.

What’s an asexual to do when the culture constantly tells them that sex is where it’s at?

Don’t apologise, for starters.

That’s just one piece of advice from Cody Daigle-Orians, author of The Ace and Aro Relationship Guide: Making It Work in Friendship, Love and Sex, who shared his take on the ace and aromantic experience with LGBTQ Nation, along with tips for living a best life as either.

LGBTQ Nation: For our readers unfamiliar with asexuality and aromanticism, how do you define them?

Cody Daigle-Orians: So, asexuality is a sexual orientation that describes people who don’t or rarely experience sexual attraction. That includes a spectrum of experiences and expressions, and includes several different attitudes and practices around sex and relationships.

Aromanticism is a separate sort of experience. Aromanticism describes people who don’t or rarely experience romantic attraction. Similar in spectrum, there are many ways to be aromantic and many ways to express it. Aromantic people have a whole range of different attitudes and practices around relationships.

How does somebody aromantic express their sexual desire?

Well, that depends on how they identify sexually. Aromanticism and asexuality have similar constructs, but they’re entirely separate experiences. One can be aromantic and be gay, be straight, or be asexual. Those two experiences are not necessarily connected.

So somebody who’s aromantic could have a high sex drive.

Yeah, absolutely.

How are asexual and aromantic relationships similar or different from platonic relationships?

Asexual people have sexual relationships sometimes, sometimes they don’t. Aromantic people do engage in romantic partnerships; sometimes, they don’t. There isn’t something that is, in its essence, an ace or aro relationship. Ace and aro people exist in those relationships, in their bodies and in their experience.

Where does sex figure into an asexual or aromantic relationship?

That depends on the person. Some asexual people do include sex in their relationships. Those folks are called “sex favorable” ace folks, so they have sex just like other people have sex. Some, a larger number of asexual people, do not include sex in their relationships. It really depends on the person, what they are comfortable with, how they relate to sex in their own bodies and minds.

There’s no hard and fast rule to sort of say, “This is how ace people relate to sex,” or, “This is how arrow [aro] people relate to sex.” These aren’t monolithic experiences. They’re a spectrum of experiences and expressions.

What does intimacy look like in an asexual or aromantic relationship?

It looks like whatever they would like it to look like, just like in any other relationship. People decide for themselves what kinds of intimacy make them happy and what types of intimacy feel pleasurable, and they share that with their partner. If the partners agree, then that’s what that looks like in their relationship.

Is there something in our chemical makeup that affects where we sit on the ace or aro spectrum? For example, does a high or low level of testosterone predict sex drive or sexual attraction?

In the same way that we would not search for a cause of homosexuality, there’s no cause of asexuality or aromanticism. It is just how a person exists in the world. It’s one of a spectrum of experiences that are possible in relation to human sexuality.

What’s the relationship between sex drive and sexual attraction when it comes to aceness? Can you have one without the other? And how does that manifest itself?

Yeah, so a lot of people think that when we say “sexual attraction,” it is one thing that contains a lot of different elements, but it really is a little more complicated than that. I break it into three parts.

There’s arousal, which is the physical thing that’s happening in your body right now. So that thing that you’re feeling, that desire in the moment, the things that are happening in your body, that’s arousal. Asexual people can experience arousal just like anybody else.

There’s libido. You can think about libido as the frequency and intensity of one’s experience of arousal. People with a high libido experience arousal frequently and with intensity. People with low libido would not really experience it frequently or would not experience it at all. I often sort of talk about libido as the volume level of one’s experiences of arousal.

And then there’s attraction, which is the thing that defines asexuality. That’s about direction. Where is that feeling and experience and that pattern of experience going? Who is it directed toward?

So, for straight people, that’s someone of a different gender. For gay people, that’s someone of the same gender. For bi people, that’s more than one gender. For asexual people, that experience is generally not directed toward other people, and that non-direction can look like a lot of different things.

Asexual people may feel arousal, or they may have a high libido. It just isn’t directed at any particular place, so that puts them on the ace spectrum.

How have the internet and social media affected the lives of ace and aro people in finding community and building relationships?

Well, it’s really been instrumental in a lot of ways. The asexual community has been forming online as a community, really, since the early ’90s. The internet has been a way for asexual and aromantic people to find each other in the world. There aren’t ace and aro bars for us to meet each other. So the internet has provided a space for ace and aro people to connect, share their experiences, and build community.

It’s also been a potent education tool. So when people who are having ace and aro experiences don’t see any of that reflected in the world around them, the internet has provided a useful place to find meaning, give their experiences meaning, and give their experiences language.

A lot of ace and aro folks credit the internet for helping them figure themselves out. The internet is an enormously important space, not just for community, but also for our personal intelligibility.

How did it figure into your own asexual experience of finding yourself?

Oh yeah, I mean, it was Tumblr for me. I encountered asexuality on Tumblr, and I was in my 40s, and started to recognise lots of elements and pieces of my own experience, which I had for most of my life, just understood as being a bad gay person. And it was transformative. That gave me a language for myself that was affirming and positive and made sense for the first time.

How do you define being a “bad gay person”?

Oh, well, I had a really complicated relationship to sex, and I didn’t relate to sex in the same way that my peers did. It didn’t matter to me in the same way, and it didn’t seem like I was experiencing it in the same way. So I just thought I was bad at it. I came out as gay when I was 18, because that was the thing that fit the best. It just led me to conceive of myself as not being good at being gay.

How do you describe your identity now?

Now, mostly I use the word queer because that is easier. To be specific, I identify as asexual, but I date men, so I still see myself within the gay community, although queer is the word I tend to use. I have two partners, so I’m polyamorous, as well. I have been married to my husband for 11 years, and I have another romantic partner that I’ve been with for four.

You talk a lot about normativity in the book. Is it really news that relationships and sexual desire come in all shapes and sizes and have for millennia? And are you really talking about a white Christian fundamentalist vision of what’s normal?

No. I mean, allonormativity [the societal assumption that all people experience sexual and/or romantic attraction] is not necessarily connected to any white or Christian nationalism. Indeed, white supremacy and religious cultural dogma appear in a lot of American cultural ideas. The basic normativities — that sex is an intrinsic part of human experience, that romance is something everyone will feel — these are not necessarily connected to white supremacy or religious ideas. These are just common cultural ideas that we hold that ace and aro people exist in opposition to.

Any cultural norm exists because, over time, the culture decides that these things are most beneficial to the perpetuation and success of the culture. So, for sex and reproduction, marriage — all of those things that are useful for the Western culture we live in to continue — we create stories and norms around those things, to make those things seem good and to make not following and pursuing those things disadvantaged.

In the book, you compare your own experience building your asexual construct to Mary Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein, obsessed with your creation. The great philosophers of Shelley’s time, like Schopenhauer and Kant, gave rise to thinkers like Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. How did asexuality and aromanticism figure into their work?

Well, it really didn’t. Even the early sort of mentions of asexuality in work like Kinsey’s or the German sexologists’, they weren’t really talking about asexuality as we understand it. That’s a much more modern concept. I think it’s fair to say that historically, broadly, it was mostly pathologized. But to say, like, this is what they thought about it, they just didn’t.

How does the history of asexuality — the acknowledgement of its existence, its study, its place in the culture — compare to the evolution of homosexuality and trans identity?

They do follow similar trajectories. It’s at first marginalized, criminalized or pathologized. Although no asexual or aromantic experience has ever been criminalized, with a pronatalist policy, that broaches the idea.

Are there any cultural benefits to being asexual or aromantic when it comes to happiness and well-being?

I don’t know that I would say being ace or aro has any particular advantage. It’s just an experience that some people have. I think what stands in the way of many ace and aro people having positive experiences of their own identities is when the world doesn’t recognise that experience exists, or sees it only as some kind of brokenness. I don’t think there’s any inherent bonus to it.

One advantage could be that ace or aro people may be less likely to let their sexual desires and attractions get the best of them, because that happens a lot in heteronormative relationships.

I would never frame it that way. I think, just like I would say about any other sort of queer experience, ace and aro people have every potential to be a**holes like anyone else, and ultimately, relationships don’t succeed or fail based on the identities that people hold within them. It’s their relationship skills. It’s how you manage communication, how you deal with commitment. Do you keep your commitments? Are you good at compromise? Those things make relationships successful. I don’t think having a different relationship to sex or romance makes an ace and aro person more pure or more innocent or more good.

Is one of the intentions for your book to educate the broader population and normalise asexuality and aromanticism?

Oh yeah. I mean, education is the core of all the work that I do about these identities.

For ace and aro people, that education work is essential because it helps them understand their lives more fully and read their own experience in an affirming way, and that’s what everyone should have access to.

But I think for people who aren’t ace and aro, it is also helpful to learn and understand how ace and aro people live their lives and what these experiences are made of, because it helps non-ace and aro people better understand the reality of sex and relationships — that it’s more expansive. There are more possibilities. There are more ways of expressing connection to another human being than sex and romance. There’s a wide range of relationship possibilities that exist out there that non-ace and aro folks can learn from.

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