'I'd like to be a dad one day, but I don't have sex'

Like a growing number of young people in the UK, Adam identifies as asexual

“I wouldn’t say I find sex off-putting, it’s more that there’s a complete lack of interest there. It's just like the way some people love a certain TV show while others couldn’t care less,” says Adam Thompson, from his Manchester home.

Adam, 27, his voice heavy with cold, is feeling a little run down. Alongside a buzzing social life - he loves finding new places to eat and takes part in pub quizzes - he also works two jobs. By day he's a waiter at a popular breakfast spot, by night he's gigging as a stand-up comedian in a couple of local venues. He writes sketches and performs at improv nights. He jokes about dating websites and writes nursery rhymes about modern life. But he never reveals his true identity on stage.

Adam identifies as asexual:, external a multi-faceted orientation, describing a person who does not experience sexual attraction. He shares his experiences in the new episode of BBC Three's Sex Map of Britain.

“I definitely still have romantic feelings for people,” he explains. “I still find people attractive – I find girls pretty – but at no point in my brain do I get to the point of wanting to have sex with them.”

Adam first began to identify as asexual seven years ago, after a terrible date led to a late-night self-diagnosis session.

“Even at 20, I wasn’t interested in masturbation, which was just a bit weird compared to my friends. I felt a bit outcast by it. In general, I just didn’t have any interest in sex talk, with mates, on the TV. I just thought, 'why?'.

“At the time I’d been in a relationship, and that pretty much ended because I wasn’t interested in sex. I thought I just wasn’t ready. I’d explained this to her, and when we did share a bed, it wasn’t good enough for her. It was just awkward and left me on a downer.

“I ended up sitting up late at night, feeling stressed and being really self-critical about every aspect of myself. I typed into Google, ‘What is wrong with me? Why am I not interested in sex?’.

“I found there were other people out there asking the same questions. So I just started looking through forums to figure out who I was in that sense. From that point on I started identifying as asexual.”

Adam is, of course, far from alone.

Asexuality is experiencing an increase in interest and awareness, external but it is by no means a new phenomenon. No one really knows how many people identify as asexual but the most commonly cited figure is 1% of the population., external

This number came from a 2004 paper by Canadian psychologist Anthony Bogaert. He asked a sample of people who they were sexually attracted to and the estimate was based on those who answered "no one".

Michael Doré is a member of the AVEN, external project team, an online space where people can find out more about asexuality and meet others who identify as such via its forums. It’s the same site Adam found all those years ago, which helped him make friends and meet up with other like-minded people in his area. 

“It’s hard to quantify the scale of the population who really are asexual because lots of people are not ‘out’ as such,” Michael says. 

“There is a difference between the asexual community and people who privately identify as asexual or haven’t discovered the term.

“Right now, we have more than 100,000 members registered. Not all are active. Some might have registered an account to discover it for the first time. Some might not stick around. But year on year, we see a huge increase in our numbers from just three in 2002 up to almost 105,000 in 2018.” 

AVEN has, Michael adds, been lobbying the Office of National Statistics (ONS) to include asexuality as an option in the forthcoming 2021 census where they are considering featuring a question on sexual identity for the first time. The ONS says its recommendations will be delivered in a government report later this year.

Professor Carrie Paechter, director of the Nottingham Centre for Children, Young People and Families - and expert in questions of identity and childhood - believes more people are noticing they are different "because sex is talked about more".

"If, say, you’re a lad in a group of teen boys ogling girls, and you don’t feel like that, you might notice you're different," she says.

“Society has changed, though. Partly since the pill, partly since feminism, everyone can now enjoy sex.

“This [asexuality] is another movement which identifies that actually some people don’t like sex and that doesn’t matter. People are experimenting with who they want to be and who they are allowed to be.”

Michael says there are still “common myths" surrounding asexuality, which include the idea "an individual just hasn’t met the right person, or they can’t get enough [sexual attention]".

“We get a lot of questions from people like, ‘my husband or wife doesn’t seem to like sex, is there something wrong with them?’, and, ‘can you cure asexuality?’. Asexuality is not a disease or a problem, it is just a sexual orientation.”

Coming out as asexual is one of the biggest hurdles. Adam shared his identity with his friends and family in his early 20s, to ease the pressure of feeling different.

“My dad was completely fine with it. He was like, ‘that makes sense’. My mum was hesitant - she was sad because she thought I might not be able to have kids.

"All the friends I have told just accepted it and are fine with it, which has been nice."

Some friends, like Kelsie, who also features in the documentary, even try to help Adam out with dating and to understand the different way he feels about intimacy.

"I get what you mean," Kelsie says. "So, you speak to friends as you're speaking to me but when you're on a date with someone, you feel like you've got a deeper connection."

And here it gets more complex. There isn’t one way to be asexual but a spectrum of ways people can identify.

“It’s not black and white,” Michael says. “Some identify as Grey-asexual, external or Grey-A, meaning they may experience sexual attraction sometimes but at lower intensity or on rarer occasions than most people.”

The community is also very gender diverse, with a much higher proportion of people who identify outside of the gender binary than in the general population.

The 2011 Asexual Awareness Week census, external suggested about 23% of people on the asexual spectrum are outside the gender binary of male and female.

“I would probably now describe myself as a demi-sexual,” Adam says. “That’s somebody who will happily have sex with a person they are in committed relationship with. But I don’t crave sex at all. It’s more of a disinterest.” After seven years of dating, he's more aware than ever of the complexities of his sexuality. But he also now knows what he wants from a partnership.

"I was trying to date someone who was also asexual recently but it didn’t end well.

"We met up and had a date, it went well. I went to an asexual meet-up in the city where she lives a little while after that. She was there and she hadn’t responded to my messages. She completely blanked me all day. So I've gone back to looking for girls on dating websites, not particularly looking for girls who are asexual."

And what about the future?

“I’ve been talking to a few girls online who are all really nice and that, so hopefully I’ll be meeting up with some for dates and getting to know them. Ultimately, I’d love to be a dad,” he concludes. “I really would love to be able to marry someone who I loved."