This is a hard one that I’ve struggled with too, because as demisexuals we know that our experience is fundamentally different, but often times harder to pin down than saying we’re strictly asexual.

Here’s how I explained it to my mom. I’m not sure how useful this is, especially since it’s about how *I* experience demisexuality, which might be different than how you or others do, but maybe it’ll help.

So imagine that sex is coffee right? People love coffee. Coffee is everywhere. There’s a Starbucks on every corner, coffee drinkers in every TV show and movie, and billboards and ad spots about coffee all the time. People who like coffee might be peculiar about how they want their coffee— maybe they like it with sugar or soy milk, or only in the mornings before 10, or only when they’re studying, only from Starbucks or only from their local coffee house, etc. Or they might not care— they might like coffee no matter when or how it’s made. They’ll buy it from anyone and take it in whatever form because they really like coffee. But they all agree that in general they like coffee.

And then there are people who don’t like coffee at all. They can’t stand it. They don’t want coffee at any point of the day, no matter how it’s made or who makes it. Nothing you can do makes coffee in any way appealing to them. Coffee lovers are generally baffled by this, and some might insist that people who don’t like coffee just haven’t had the right cup, but the fact is that people who don’t like coffee simply just don’t like coffee.

And then there are people like us: we don’t generally like coffee, and we wouldn’t choose to have coffee on our own. Like the people who don’t like coffee, we can go years without a cup of coffee and it doesn’t bother us at all.

But we have a friend who loves coffee, and we love that friend. And the longer we’re friends, the more we want to have coffee with them. Not because coffee has suddenly become our favorite drink, but because we love our coffee-drinking friend and THEY make us want coffee. So we go out for coffee with them, and we enjoy having coffee because we’re having coffee with them. If we weren’t with them, we wouldn’t want coffee.

“But everybody feels that way” isn’t true. Coffee lovers still want coffee even when their conditions for having coffee aren’t met. Just because they’re not drinking coffee right now, or because they might have preferences for when & how they drink coffee, doesn’t mean they stop liking coffee. But for people like us, if we’re not having coffee with that specific person, then we don’t care about coffee. It holds absolutely no appeal or value. We have to have that connection before we ever want coffee. Coffee lovers might want that connection when they have coffee too, but they also generally want coffee as a thing in itself.

That’s the difference between being demisexual and being an allosexual who likes to have emotional connections with their partners. An allosexual person still likes and wants sex as a thing itself, even if the conditions for having sex aren’t being met. They think about and desire sex outside of the conditions they set for engaging in the actual act. A demisexual person doesn’t care about sex as a thing in itself, because sex is inherently tied to emotional bonding for them. We don’t think about sex as an act involving us unless it’s under those conditions.

That may or may not be the worst analogy ever, I honestly don’t know, sorry. It seemed to work for my mom, but that might be because she really likes coffee *shrugs*

If anyone following this blog has any resources on how to respond to that type of response they’d like to direct the anon to, please let me know so I can post them!

Hope that helps!