I realised I was asexual

Anwen, 20, is confident that sex will never be part of her life. Olivia Gordon talks to her and other asexual women looking for love when love-making is strictly off the agenda.

Most people never forget the time, usually in adolescence, when they feel the first buzz of sexual attraction. But other people never forget the moment they realise they don’t experience sexual attraction – the moment they discover they are asexual.

For Anwen Hayward, a 20-year-old student at Aberystwyth University, it was when her twin sister got her first boyfriend at 17 that she thought, 'Hang on, I’m a bit different here.’ She explains: 'When you’re in school and university, everyone’s really focused on relationships. I never wanted that at all.’ At first she thought she was a slow developer, or a lesbian, but then she heard about the global online community for asexuality, AVEN (the Asexuality Visibility and Education Network).

Anwen defines herself as a romantic asexual and says she would be open to a romantic relationship with a man or a woman. So far she has had two relationships, both with 'sexuals’, which didn’t work. A recent date 'ended awfully when I told him that I was asexual’.

She explains: 'Holding hands is as far as I would ever take anything. For me [sex is] just revulsion, it really is. Just, ugh, no. [Cuddling] – that’s OK. Not kissing.’ She does not want to marry or have children because of the sex involved.
AVEN now has about 50,000 to 60,000 members around the world, who chat on its online forums as well as meeting up in person, and even dating through the site. The founder, David Jay, a 30-year-old scientific researcher from San Francisco, says that human asexuality started to be hypothesised by scientific researchers in the 1970s and 1980s, but that it has only been in the past decade that a community of people started to identify with the term. 'It’s still something that’s expanding,’ he says. 
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/9651265/The-moment-I-realised-I-was-asexual.html