324: The 82 Percent #1: What if you were asexual?
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This Is Actually Happening features real experiences that often include traumatic events. Please consult the show notes for specific content warnings on each episode and for more information about support services. Hi listeners, I'm thrilled to announce that today we begin our six-part miniseries called The 82% Modern Stories of Love and Family.

The title of this series, The 82%, refers to the fact that currently in the U.S., only 18% of households are defined as a nuclear family, which is a two-parent household with one or more children. This means that 82% of U.S. households are living in a family or relationship structure that resides outside of what is considered the normative ideal of a nuclear family.

From single parenthood, to alloparenting, to polyamory, to aromantic co-living, in this series we'll explore life in the 82%, featuring six stories of people who are living in family and relationship structures that challenge some of our deepest societal norms by reimagining what love and family can be. The series was created in collaboration with Drs. Heath Schesinger and Lily Lamboy from the Modern Family Institute.

The Modern Family Institute is a nonprofit devoted to improving relational, mental, and physical well-being by ensuring that everyone has access to resources and systems of care supporting their unique family and relationship structures through research, storytelling, and policy advocacy. The series will run from this week through the end of the season in late July, and will also feature bonus content conversations between me and several experts in the field, including Jessica Fern and Alex Chen.

This coming Thursday will feature the first of those bonus interviews in a conversation between me and Heath and Lily from the Modern Family Institute, in which we discuss a wide range of topics, from the historical roots of monogamy in the nuclear family to legal advances and protections for diverse relationship structures.

Of all the series we've done on the show, this one has been the most meaningful for me personally. And I'm so honored to be sharing these stories with you all. So without further delay, here is the first episode of our 82% series, What If You Were Asexual? It starts as a feeling of a lack. It starts as feeling broken. It starts as feeling shame about feeling broken. It starts as this, for me, really deep fear of being alone forever.

The response to that is a kind of experimentation. And out of that experimentation comes a skillfulness to push back against a narrative of compulsory sexuality that says the only relationships that really matter are the ones that are sexual and romantic. From Wondery, I'm Witt Misseldein. You're listening to This Is Actually Happening. Episode 324. What if you were asexual?

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My maternal grandfather, he grew up in Buffalo and early on developed this really deep love of physics and went to the University of Chicago during World War II. He actually almost got recruited into the Manhattan Project and then went on to teach solid state physics at the University of Illinois.

And when I was born, I would go visit him. I grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, so just a few hours south of Champaign-Urbana, Illinois. And he would put me on his lap and explain the universe to me and explain the speed of light and how nuclear reactions worked and how stars work and how black holes work when I was like four and five. It just created this real sense of wonder and

about the universe and also this sense that there were things that we were learning, there were things that could get explored, that I think has followed me ever since. One of the things he told me before he died in 90 was that the most important thing in his life had been family. The most important thing had been raising my mom and my aunts and my uncles, and that he really wanted that for me.

I remember driving back from visiting my grandparents with my dad shortly before my grandfather passed away. And my dad really describing how my grandfather and also he and my mom had prioritized us kids above everything else.

My parents were both architects. They met in architecture school, had amazing careers. They were really impactful. They'd been very active in the community. They'd been on boards. They'd been working to revitalize the city of St. Louis. And so I had experienced them, I think, as always showing up for us.

Being there, playing, like taking us to sports practices. I was a speed skater in middle school, which meant that I was driving 45 minutes to skating rinks multiple times a week. My dad would always be driving with me. He started speed skating with me. So there was this sense that they would make space for us and kind of meet us in whatever we wanted to pursue.

There was a lot about my childhood that was really sweet and really amazing. And I think that my family was pretty emotionally functional compared to many of the families of many people I know. I've never felt like I had to prove myself or prove that I was worthy of their love and affection. Like it always felt like it was there.

Around, I don't know, fifth or sixth grade, I think was when my friends started to process their sexuality. And they were starting to have crushes on people and started to become clear that sexuality was a thing that was taking up their time and attention, if only because it was something that they were told they were supposed to be experiencing.

But through fifth grade, sixth grade, it started to become real. I started to have my first sex ed classes in sixth grade. And the sex ed classes made it really clear that sexuality was a thing that everyone would be experiencing and be the source of a lot of joy and a lot of pain and a lot of upheaval. And that this joy and pain and upheaval was going to be core to how we became adults, right?

There was this sense that sexuality in adolescence was sort of a rite of passage. In sixth grade, I haven't felt this thing yet, but I have to get ready because who I am now is going to be really profoundly transformed. And I remember waiting. I remember having this sense of like, this thing is coming and it's going to upend my world.

Some people in my grade were starting to kiss people. People were talking about having crushes. People really wanted to know who I had crushes on. I didn't have a felt sense of what a crush was. And there's a moment where I was just reflecting on this waiting. I was sort of like, okay, I've been waiting and maybe waiting is the thing I need to get used to. Maybe the state I'm in now of not feeling this thing is something that I should start thinking about rather than something I should be getting ready to get over.

The waiting gave way to a sense that there was something wrong with me. I am missing something fundamental, and I don't quite know what that thing is. At first, I assumed that I was broken in some way, because sexuality felt so central to how people connect and therefore how people are human.

But I really wanted connection in my life. I really wanted to know that I wasn't going to be alone forever. And part of what I was waiting for was the starting moment of getting to figure that out. Getting to figure out how I was going to not be alone forever, how I was going to have people in my life. I remember going to this summer camp and learning about the range of sexual orientation.

There were lots of ways to be sexual, and I remember wondering if there was room for me in that. I experienced masturbation. I realized that it was nice, but it didn't feel like I was getting in touch with my sexuality because it didn't have anything to do with my relationships with people.

It was like a thing that I did by myself that felt kind of nice, but it wasn't like I was thinking about exploring feelings I was having about people I knew in my life. It wasn't like I was masturbating and thinking about things I might do in my relationships with people. It felt very neatly disconnected from my social reality.

The thing that I felt like I was not experiencing that everyone else was experiencing was crushes. Like everyone was having crushes. Everyone was talking about them. Everyone was talking about what movie stars they thought were hot. Like that was a really big part of middle school life. And that was something that was completely a foreign language to me. And there were a lot of things I needed to learn about how sexuality worked in order to fake it effectively that I didn't know.

Like what was considered hot? Like what were the nuances of how I was supposed to feel about someone who was hot? Sometimes I could fake, but I couldn't fake convincingly. So I just try to avoid those sorts of conversations. So by seventh and eighth grade, I sort of been waiting to start feeling this thing that everyone around me had been experiencing. And it wasn't happening.

And that started to get really scary because there wasn't really a model for me of people who weren't sexual.

And I didn't know what that meant at first. I didn't know if that meant that I wasn't interested in physical touch at all, that I wasn't interested in emotional intimacy with people. Like all of those sexuality, touch, intimacy, love, humanity, all those things were tied up in a knot that I had to kind of pick apart. I also remember making a few friends and really just talking with them for hours about their experiences of sexuality.

I had a few relationships initially with queer women because I couldn't relate to other straight men because the other straight men were bonding too much around sexuality. And I was afraid to connect with straight women because I was really afraid of them being attracted to me. And I didn't yet know enough about attraction to know how to navigate the experience of someone being into me. But queer women felt safe.

So I started having all these conversations about like their early girlfriends or crushes on girls in our grade to try to map for myself what sexuality was and try to find a place for myself in it. Because I had all of these questions. Like I really wanted to know what it was like to have a crush on someone. I wanted to be able to understand these things that felt like they were having such a profound impact on my world but were a foreign language.

trying to understand what they were feeling and trying to sort of compare that to my own experience and say like, okay, what is different? Like for you, this feeling of desire and this feeling of sexual arousal and this like desire for connection are all mixed together in an inseparable bucket. And for me, they feel really different.

Right? Like, I can feel sexualized in my body that has nothing to do with my relationships. I can feel this deep desire to be connected with people. I can see people and I can think they're really cool and I can want to spend more time with them. But that doesn't mean I want to kiss them. And it doesn't mean that I want to do all these other things that are dating with them. But maybe that means we're just friends and just friends don't matter as much. But why do friends not matter as much?

I definitely asked myself if I was gay because I had this question of whether I was repressing my sexuality, and that could have been a reason why. It was so distressing for me to not be experiencing attraction that had I experienced it with other men, it would have felt relieving. And I wasn't experiencing it with other men. And I also didn't know if I was feeling sexual attraction because I didn't know what sexual attraction felt like. So if I found someone aesthetically pleasing, does that mean I was sexually attracted to them? If I...

If I thought someone was really cool and want to spend time with them, did that mean I was sexually attracted to them? There were several years of trying to scan my internal experience to see if there was something that might be a very quiet sexual attraction that was there. But it was also pretty clear that from the way that my friends were talking about it, like when they experienced sexual attraction, they did not have to like stop and meditate for 10 minutes to realize it was there. Like it was loud for them.

I think for a few years, I assumed that this was a psychological disorder.

I had this sense that like, for some reason, I must be not letting myself be sexual. Like there must be a sexuality in there and I got to kind of dig to find it and figure out what's blocking it. So there was this sense that I had a problem to fix. And so I spent several years really holding that question of like, is this okay? And I can just accept it and move on with my life. Or is this a thing that needs fixing? In which case accepting it could really hold me back.

There were 180 kids in my entire middle and high school. So my grade was about 30 people. It was really fortunate that I was in this high school, figuring this out, that really prioritized young people understanding themselves and figuring out who they were. So there was queerness in my school in a really powerful way. And they kind of helped me figure out my own identity.

And I think it was because of them and because a lot of the reflection that I was doing that I was able to move from, I think I'm broken, to I think this is like a sexual orientation. It was around that time that I started using the word asexual. At that point, there wasn't really any asexual community out there. I'd made up the word asexual to describe myself.

But unbeknownst to me, there were thousands of other people also making up the same word at the same time, almost none of whom had been able to find one another. Part of why I was craving finding other asexual people and asexual stories was I wanted to hear how the connection that I wanted deep down could be possible.

When it came time for me to apply to colleges, I sort of had this sense that I had been growing up in the Midwest, like St. Louis is not a small town, but it's, you know, not the center of queer culture. And I was like, I'm going to go somewhere and try to find other asexual people and try to find this community that I'm sure exists.

So I went to the queerest school that I could find, a university called Wesleyan that just chalked queer slogans on all the sidewalks when I was visiting. Because I wanted to go somewhere that understood more about queerness and hopefully understood more about this identity than I did. And exploring this felt like the big work I had to do.

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I get to college and I'm super eager to find other asexual people. Relationships are still a thing I want to do. Emotional intimacy is still a thing I want to do. Even physical touch is still a thing I want to do. But where I don't have to engage in all the sexuality that doesn't feel right to me.

So I arrive on campus. I go to the first meeting of the campus Queer Alliance. And activism is really big in the school. And Queer Alliance is kind of the central hub of that. And so I started just showing up and doing work and building trust with people. And I made a fake new email address so that I wouldn't be identified. And then emailed the head of Queer Alliance and asked if they knew anything about asexuality.

And they wrote me back and said they didn't. And so here I was like expecting to finally find this community to take me in and nothing was there. I knew that I couldn't be alone. Like I couldn't really be the only one. So I decided to start trying to find other people like me. My first semester, I spent looking and not finding anyone.

barely finding evidence that the possibility of asexuality existed. There were a small number of academic papers that kind of hypothesized that there might be people like me. There was no community I could show up to. There were no people even talking about having talked to other asexual people. And the fact that the only thing imaginable, the only future imaginable for me was one of isolation was really terrifying.

And that's kind of what made me feel like I was broken. Like, I wanted proof that connection was possible in a way that felt right for me as an asexual person. And I didn't see that proof around me.

When I started coming out to people, one of the things that I'd hear was like, oh, you know, that's okay because some people just want to be alone forever. And there was equivalence between a lack of sexuality and a lack of connection and intimacy. And I was like, I'm not drawn towards sexuality in the way that everyone else is, but I definitely want connection. I definitely want intimacy. I decided to start a website called the Asexual Visibility and Education Network, AVEN, because I wanted to find other people like me.

Just as I was starting the project, my best high school friends had gone to Stanford. And they said, hey, there's this thing that recently started up on the Stanford campus that you've got to check out called Google. And it's a really good search engine. It's way better than all the other search engines out there.

My first thought hearing that was, I need to go and look for asexuality here. Because I'd been going on all of the, on Yahoo, on AltaVista, on all the old search engines, and just finding papers on plant biology when I searched for the term asexual. But I looked for the term asexual on Google and found one zine article about actual asexual experience.

That was the first time I'd ever seen a story about anyone like me. And it was really validating, really transforming. I remember kind of pausing and having to walk around campus for 45 minutes. It was so emotional to feel not alone for the first time.

I came back and saw it had a comment section just filled with people sharing the same experience I was having, saying they felt asexual and they'd never been able to find another person to talk to about it. And so that finished spraying my motivation to put up this website called Avon. And the website was really simple, like a hand coded with HTML. It just sort of had a definition of asexuality and an FAQ and it told people to email me.

I started getting emails from people. They were people, you know, they've been on their own journey, but that real sense of being alone, that sense of grappling with whether or not they were broken was really deeply shared. And we would exchange these like page long emails about all of these experiences that people in our lives had not been able to relate to about the experiences of like being really curious and fascinating with what sexuality was and,

And how to navigate this thing that permeated our world, but not knowing how to ask that question without outing ourselves. Like this really felt like I had a foundation to say I was not broken for the first time. And so because of that, I started coming out to other people.

That's when I came out to my parents. And that's when I decided to come out to the head of Queer Alliance. And I remember going and sort of knocking on the door of Open House, which is the big queer house, and going to this very intimidating dorm room of the head of Campus Queer Alliance, who's also the captain of the women's rugby team, who's ripped and politically radical and badass.

explaining my identity and sort of saying like, hey, you know me, I've been showing up. I wanted to explain where I'm at in my journey, which is around asexuality. To her, radical sexual freedom was the goal. And there was a moment where she was like, wait, are you on the other side? Are you like against sexuality? And I had to be really clear about, no, no, no, no, no. I'm like, I'm for sexual freedom.

I just think that should include people like me who don't want to be sexual. That like we can't have sexual freedom if sexuality is compulsory, if everyone needs to do it. There was kind of a, I think, a hesitant acceptance of that. Like, okay, our main agenda is fighting back against forces of sexual oppression. And if you want to keep showing up and like helping distribute sidewalk chalk and photocopy flyers, feel free. Yeah.

And so I kind of had a tentative home in the queer community. As I put this website together, I started trying to fill this gap of visibility that had been such a struggle for me. Like the fact that no one was talking about sexuality had been so central to my own struggle that I wanted to change that.

I bought a domain name. I bought asexuality.org. I set up an online forum. And around the time that I was doing that, I got an email from this other community. And it turns out that just a few months before I started my website, someone started a Yahoo group called The Haven for the Human Amoeba. And that Yahoo group was really the first time that asexual people had ever talked to one another on the internet. When I found it, there were about 18 people there.

So new people coming in to my website, new people were coming in there. And every other week or so, we would have a new person show up and there'd be this whole big emotional process of helping them realize they weren't alone and validating their experience. And it was something that we'd all been through. So we knew how important it was.

Like, you only wind up here if you have been on a pretty hard journey. Like, at that point, everyone who was arriving at the community had invented this word from scratch and then typed it into Google because they were profoundly questioning whether or not they were broken. We were there because we were in a society of compulsory sexuality that did not make room for us.

So we're seeing this community emerge. And it's really, I think, profound to see so many people showing up in their own versions of that struggle. And so there was this experience that was profound and life-changing. And it kind of blew me away that I could be part of a community that offered that kind of transformation to people. And it felt like that was the most important thing for me to be doing.

So it's college. I'm like out and proud. And the question I'm really exploring for myself is like, OK, how do I do a relationship? I was really grappling with this question of like, what makes sexual relationships different? Why are they considered so much more important? I remember going to a lot of parties and like college parties with a lot of sexuality going on.

and just reveling being in this space where sexuality was happening. And like some of the sexuality was pointed at me and touch was the thing I wanted. I wanted to be able to cuddle with people, but it was really hard to talk about that and do that in an environment where there was an assumption that physicality would escalate to sexuality and that interest in physicality meant interest in sexuality. So figuring out how to explore touch and,

without being perceived as initiating sexuality was something I was grappling with. There was a way in which I was kind of pushing myself to be more comfortable with sexuality, like navigating the sexual world that was really, really liberating.

So college for me is really this time of exploring what intimacy is and how to be in relation with people and how to navigate the sexual world and finding other asexual people and seeing the seeds of this community grow in a way that is very deeply validating to my own experience. And as the community is coming together, this question of intimacy is really central for a lot of us. A lot of us are grappling with the fear of loneliness. Yeah.

So I remember I wrote my senior thesis. I was a physics and sociology double major. And for sociology, I wrote my senior thesis on the social distinction between sexual and non-sexual relationships. I was really fascinated with this question of why we treat sexual stuff differently than other stuff. And when I graduated, that question, along with the emerging community, was really central to me.

So, an article had come out about us in the United Kingdom in a magazine called New Scientist. And this was the first article in any kind of a major publication that talked about the existence of the asexual community. And so, this article sort of hit a world that had assumed forever that asexuality was impossible, that sexuality was an intrinsic part of being human.

It made this real splash as this fundamental assumption was challenged.

The day it came out, I had a dozen interviews on the BBC for various British publications. They flew me out to be on British television. I was in London for 20 hours. There was this big moment. And because we had this leadership basis in the community, I had mobilized people in the UK, various people in the States. We had a media group that was responding to this. And that's a

initial wave of press kicked off a sort of rolling interest in asexuality. We were in the New York Times, we were on CNN, we were on The View, we were on 2020. And every time one of these stories would come out, there would be a wave of dozens and dozens of new people showing up in the community.

As new people showed up, the community became more and more diverse. And so the word asexual stopped being sufficient because some people were saying, no, I don't identify with, I don't experience sexual attraction. I identify with, I experience a low level of sexual attraction, low enough that it makes sense for me to be here, low enough that I feel different from the world around me, not asexual. And so people started identifying as gray asexual.

Some people said, I come here because I identify as asexual, but sometimes when I'm in a really intimate emotional relationship for like six months or nine months, then I start experiencing sexual attraction. But not at the beginning, not like on the first date when everyone tells me I'm supposed to. Those people started identifying as demisexual. So we started having a range of identities emerging in the community that

The word aromantic emerged in our communities as people started talking about romantic attraction and sexual attraction as distinct things. And so all of these words were emerging, and then the term ace emerged because it no longer made sense to call ourselves the asexual community. Asexuality was becoming one of several identities, not the sort of central identity. And so ace emerged as an umbrella term to describe asexual, gray, and demisexual experience.

I moved back home to St. Louis, then shortly after I moved out to the Bay Area to work at a nonprofit. And here I was in this new city,

I was starting to make friends and I really began to feel the ways in which people who had romantic partners could fill up their time with someone and like really get to know someone in a way that I would see people much less regularly. And I was much less of a priority in their lives. Even if we really loved one another, even if we played a really important role in one another's life, they could kind of disappear at any time and I was supposed to be okay with it.

And that created a real sense of instability for me. So it's going to take a lot of work to have a community that's always around. And I need to figure out how to do that because I knew that that's what I would have to depend on. I began to slowly focus a little bit more on my local activism and on the local relationships that were coming out of that.

In those relationships, this question I've been asking about what makes a sexual relationship, what makes a romantic relationship different from a friendship? One of the things that I came back to was it's okay to talk about commitment with romantic partners and with sexual partners in a way that we don't have a script for talking about commitment with friends. And because we don't talk about commitments with friends, when those friendships disappear, there's

There's no promise being violated. There's no expectation that's being overcome because we don't have permission to create that expectation in the first place. And I wanted to understand in my relationships how I could do commitment, how I could have that expectation in place that we were going to be there for one another. At the very least, if someone was going to stop it in my life, we were going to sit down and talk about it and not just let it happen. I remember I would go to this karaoke bar in Berkeley and

It was a great karaoke bar because when one person was singing karaoke, everyone else would be on the dance floor. So it was like a karaoke dance club. I remember dancing and sort of having this vision of this cycle come into my head, which was time, feelings, and promises. Time was the time I spent with someone. So it was the question, how do we spend time together? And when I spent time with someone...

That would create feelings about that time. So after we spent time together, I could express the emotions that that time made me feel. After I'd had experience with people that generated shared feelings was the time to introduce touch. And it gave me this appreciation of when and how to bring emotional expression and affection into my relationships.

And then after feelings was promises. So after a shared, powerful emotional experience that had been emotionally expressed was when it was okay to say, like, if we both feel this strong shared thing about the time we're spending together, then maybe we should commit to spending more time together. Like, I couldn't date people. I couldn't go through the script of dating. But I could gently add time, feelings, and promises to my relationships.

And even though that was an intellectual realization, it transformed my experience of intimacy. Like suddenly I could have conversations talking about the role that we played in one another's lives and what the future was of that. And so what had been some very close friendships that had kind of like flitted in and out of my life as they were convened, it began to become committed relationships and began to feel more like partnerships than I'd ever been able to feel before.

Like that was the first time I got broken up with, which was actually a really incredible experience because it meant that my relationship was seen as important enough to warrant a breakup.

I was learning these things about how to do intimacy that my younger self had been really terrified I wouldn't be able to learn. And I was going back to the ace community and I was talking about them with all of these other people who are doing their own experiments. And there was beginning to be this really rich set of stories about how to do connection outside of sexuality that created a sense of possibility for the people who were just arriving.

As I learned to do intimacy, the real central question for me was whether or not I could become a parent. I remember being, I don't know, 22, 23 and getting on a BART train on my way home from work and seeing an ad for queer adoption service, like two men holding a baby and just having this real gut sense that I knew I wanted that for myself and I had no idea how to get there.

I knew I wanted kids in my life. I knew that because I'd grown up around all these kids. And I knew that that was going to be a thing that would make me really happy. And so I started this project of figuring out how I could become a parent. And as I was exploring commitment, what I now call aromantic escalation, I realized that I could form committed relationships with couples really well. Because I would meet one half of a couple, we would really hit it off.

And I would start escalating not just with one person, but with both sides of a couple. There were kinds of intimacy they couldn't do with one another they could do with me. And so I would kind of stabilize their relationship by being this extra outlet for their emotional needs.

That started working really well. I started doing that with different people in my activist world. When I went to grad school, I started doing that with that kind of triangulation with people in grad school. And then I found this couple named Avery and Zeke.

Zeke was and is a climate scientist. Avery is the serial entrepreneur. And when I met them, I felt a lot of resonance. We really hit it off. We spent a year getting to know one another. And then I went through this now familiar process of escalating my relationship with them, talking about our lives and how we wanted to fit into them. I think some people react negatively to that kind of a conversation. Avery and Zeke really found it liberating.

They really appreciated that and started taking my relationship with them very seriously. And so I really wanted to show up for them.

In 2011, when I'd known them for two years, I met another asexual person who lived in New York. And I'd say for the only time in my life really fell in love, like had a fully romantic relationship, which was powerful and terrifying. But I wound up moving to New York to be with this person. And when I moved to New York, I approached Avery and Zeke and said, look, I want to stay in a long distance committed relationship with you. I want to fly back multiple times a year to visit you.

I want to keep a hold of this relationship even as I explore this other one. They got married and they had me play a role that often a pastor will play where I advised them leading up to their marriage on how they wanted their relationship to evolve. And I talked openly with them about wanting to co-parent, about really wanting kids in my life and about wanting ideally to raise kids with a couple, even though I didn't name, like, I want to do that with you.

Because it felt like I needed to be invited by them. After that had been going on for several years, after they got married around 2015, during one of my trips out to visit them, they said, look, we've been talking about how we want to start a family. And when we start a family, we really want our community to be involved. And we want you to be involved most of all.

And we don't know what that looks like, but we really love your help in figuring it out. And we don't plan on getting pregnant for two years. We've got some time to figure it out, but we wanted to let you know. We wanted to create a place to talk about it.

That was really powerful for me because here was this thing that since high school, I had been holding this fear of being alone. I'd been holding this fear of not being able to find a partner that I could be deeply committed to because the world around me had told me so many times, this is not a thing you get to do. And so suddenly I had these people telling me that we got to do this together. And I almost wasn't certain if I could trust it.

And so I said, look, that could mean a lot of things. Like on one end of the spectrum, when the baby cries, I get the baby back. And on the other end of the spectrum, I'm changing diapers at three in the morning. I'm as close to an equal parent as we can manage. What are you interested in inviting me into? And they said, we're interested in as far towards equal parenting as we can get. And so we started talking about what that meant.

might look like. And we started talking about using a lot of these tools of intentional intimacy that I had been developing over the years. We talked about our families of origin. We talked about what about those families we wanted to recreate and what about those families we wanted to depart from.

We talked about all the scenarios that would be hard. What if one of us got a job offer in another city? What if we ran into deep financial distress? What if there was a major health crisis? What if our child had intensive medical needs? How did we want to navigate that as a family?

Through all of those conversations, we sort of landed on the idea that I would move in during the second trimester. So that was a hard decision because I was in this relationship in New York. And I kind of had to decide between my romantic partner and this possibility of family. And after talking about it with my partner and going back and forth, decided that family was what I was going to prioritize, was this dream of being a parent.

They got pregnant pretty shortly after they started trying at the very end of 2016. And I started packing up my life. I started getting ready to move. And I landed in San Francisco.

six months before this baby would arrive and really got to figure out how to integrate myself in their marriage, how to like go to birthing classes together, like figure out the actual work of caring for newborn and just prepare for this really profound transformation in my life.

I was also moving from a non-parent to a parent, you know, a thing I'd been dreaming about and this really profound and scary transformation. I was like, I'm someone who thrives through community. I don't know how community is going to fit in my life with a kid. I don't know how I'm going to have the kind of time for people that I want for people. I don't know what kind of relationships I'm going to have room for, but I know I want to try this hard thing and find out.

So our daughter, Octavia, was born in August of 2017.

I remember that first night in the hospital, Zeke and I figured out how to trade off. So the baby, Tavi, was there, was newborn, was learning to latch with Avery. And then Zeke and I each spent half the night sleeping and half the night kind of getting up to help. And that meant that we collectively got to have more rest as caregivers. And Avery got to have fresh people helping them in Avery's

A way that I think is rare for a lot of new parents. And that sense of trade-off sort of continued. When we went home, we would split the night. Pretty quickly, we got to a place where we just had more spaciousness in our lives as parents than a lot of new parents do, like more sleep and more spaciousness.

And that sleep and spaciousness meant that I got to start inviting my community back in. I got to start inviting intimacy back in my life, I think, earlier than I otherwise might have. Because we had a weekly family meeting and we would divvy up our schedule. We'd figure out for the next three weeks who's watching the baby at what times and therefore who can make plans.

So, that's been going on for six years. We just welcomed our second kid. So, we're back in newborn phase. But even now, it feels like, unlike the first time I had a kid, now I've had years to build this community of care. So, all of these people I know are showing up so that I'm not isolated.

We've started having all these people reach out who are curious about how to not be isolated as two parents and how to build communities of care around family. And it feels like once a week or twice a week, I'll go on a walk or I'll have a call with someone who's on their own journey toward expanding their family structure. Sometimes they're people who are thinking about how to have a relationship with a sperm donor.

Sometimes they're people who are thinking about being a sperm donor and being a known donor and thinking about how they would show up in a child's life as a non-parent but important person. Sometimes they're normative, straight couples who are trying to think about how to have an establishment with their friends so that their friends know how to show up when a baby comes home.

What I've seen is an untapped groundswell of interest in shifting how families operate. I feel the sense of isolation, unnecessary and heartbreaking isolation, that so many parents are feeling. So I'm really asking myself, what does it look like to invite people to talk about that experience of unnecessary isolation and talk about the paths out of it?

There are tools to be deeply committed in what we'd otherwise think of as friendships. There are tools to think about how to invite people in to a chosen community of care, whether they're full co-parents like I am, or they're people who are just showing up on a weekly basis, a monthly basis to help out.

I think we really need those tools, not just to raise kids, but to help people who are raising kids, people who don't have kids in their life, but could benefit from having kids in their life. Like we need those tools to feel more rooted in a society that's grappling with a crisis of social isolation.

This way of thinking about family, the notion that family is more than two people and maybe biological abilities raised in a kid is not new. It is far and away the norm throughout all of human history. And what's new and strange is that we've forgotten that, that we have a society that sort of rendered that really, really

rich lineage of how to build family invisible to so many people. And so I think that part of what I'm excited about doing is inviting people to peel back that veil of invisibility and saying, look, I have some tools. Here they are. You're welcome to use them. And there's a lot of other tools. And there's probably tools in your lineage.

a cultural lineage that includes communities raising kids together. There's probably tools there too. Unearth those tools alongside the tools that I happen to have unearthed on my journey, because there's a lot there. And I think we need that richness and that diversity to deal with the richness and diversity of the circumstances under which kids are raised.

I think the biggest challenge is learning this skill of commitment outside of a romantic script. It's not a lack of desire. It's not a lack of intention. I think it's people saying to their friends, I really want you to be around. And the friend saying, I really want to be around. And then not knowing what to do next. Not knowing how to really get into discussions about how they spend time and how they might spend time differently.

Another challenge, which I think thankfully we were able to navigate, but one that's complicated is grandparents. Grandparents have a lot of strong, justified, strong feelings about grandkids. And I think we were really lucky in that my parents were quickly able to see themselves as grandparents and Avery and Zeke's parents were able to recognize and respect my parents as grandparents.

But I think there's a lot of ways that that might not happen. And if that doesn't happen, then relationships with families of origin can become frayed when someone pursues family non-traditionally. And those families of origin are also a really important source of care. And so having to choose between a chosen family and a family of origin can be really hard. I think I'm at a place now of feeling really grateful about the family I've been able to build and feeling there's real sense of possibility there.

There's ways in which we're doing something that doesn't have a roadmap. But there's a lot of ways in which there's sort of more road there than I thought there might be. We learned pretty early in the process that a law had just passed in California that made third-parent adoption legal. And that law had passed because of decades and decades of advocacy by queer parents,

So it used to be that if a lesbian couple had a baby, the non-carrying member of the family was considered a legal stranger. And if it was identified that this child was being raised by two moms, that was cause for the child to be taken away and given to the state or to members of the extended family.

And so there was advocacy building off of that really horrifying place to the place where both parents could be legally recognized, to the place where sometimes there would be a sperm donor who would also play a really active role in the child's life who would want to be legally recognized. And because there were so many sperm and egg donors who wanted to play active roles in a child's life, the law in California was changed to allow for three parents. And it was changed just before we had Tavi.

So here we were, like, trying to do this, to us, really new thing. And this queer movement had, like, put a piece of road right in front of us, like a stone that we could stand on. And so I was able to adopt Tavi, which was huge. Now that our second son, Xavier, is born six years later, there's a new legal mechanism available called parental judgment. So with Xavier, I was legally a parent from day one.

And I think we experience a lot of gratitude for all of the work that has cleared a path for us. My experience of aceness, which is very similar to many other forms of queerness, is that it starts as a feeling of a lack. It starts as feeling broken. It starts as feeling shame about feeling broken. It starts as this, for me, really deep fear of being alone forever.

The response to that is a kind of experimentation that most people don't do nearly as intentionally because they don't need it as much. And out of that experimentation comes a skillfulness to push back against a narrative of compulsory sexuality that says the only relationships that really matter are the ones that are sexual and romantic.

We have developed an understanding of the world that is liberated from that false belief more thoroughly than many other people I know, even in movements of sexual liberation. My aceness has sort of evolved from this feeling of being broken to a story of liberation and a skill set. And I see that story of liberation and that skill set being really needed in the world of parenting and in the world of family creation.

Today's episode featured David Jay. David is the founder of asexuality.org. David's new book titled Relationality, How Moving from Transactional to Transformational Relationships Can Reshape Our Lonely World is available for pre-order on Amazon or wherever books are sold.

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