I recently reposted an article I wrote a while back about asexual polyamorous people. This led to a good reader question about whether it was possible to be aromantic and polyamorous (the short answer is yes).
I heard from a number of demisexual readers after that piece came out who said, “I would love to read an article like this about polyamorous demisexual people.”
Here’s the thing: I thought FOR SURE I had written one. I looked and looked. And the closest thing I found was this article about a friend who is semi-demisexual.
Wow, I thought. Why the heck haven’t I written about this before?
And then it hit me: I often don’t focus on demisexuality much at all. But it’s not because I don’t know any demisexual polyamorous people. It’s quite the contrary, rather — looking around at the polyamorous people I know most of them are some degree of demisexual.
Demisexual People Only Feel Sexually Attracted to People When They Have an Emotional Connection With Them #
For those who haven’t heard of the term, demisexual people only feel sexually attracted to people when they have an emotional connection with them.
As I said at the beginning of this piece, most of the polyamorous people I’ve known have been demi. There are plenty of monogamous demisexual people, too, of course as well as ambiamorous demi folks. (Any relationship structure can coexist with any romantic or sexual orientation.)
I’m not demisexual myself for what it’s worth, but I’ve had many partners and close friends who are.
(If you’re wondering about my orientations, I’m hypersexual and hyperromantic.)
I do tend to get mistaken as demisexual sometimes by other people because I tend to move slowly when I’m in relationships and don’t jump into bed until I’ve had time to observe someone and build some sense of trust and suss out overall compatibility. But I don’t consider myself demisexual because I can 100% be attracted to someone I don’t know or have a bond with, even if I don’t act on that attraction for other reasons. I have experienced the famed love (or at least lust) at first sight _many _times.
I Wonder Why So Many Polyamorous People Are Demisexual #
But yeah. I’ve found in my own social life that a really high portion of polyamorous people are demisexual. And once I got all the reader letters, I started to wonder — why? Why are so many polyamorous people demisexual?
Is there something about polyamory that makes it a good fit for demi folks? Or does polyamory have a way of bringing out the demi side in people? Or something else? Here are some weird spaghetti against the wall ideas (I am NOT invested in any of these, just being wildly speculative for kicks):
- The polyamorous communities I know tend to be interconnected in a way that makes it fairly easy to know someone for a while in other ways before dating them. Like, for real, even though I’m not demi myself, I find it easy to take my time dating people because there’s no real pressure to jump into things, I know people as friends or metamours, etc., for a while and it’s no big deal.
- Polyamory explicitly focuses on making emotional connections with other people, as opposed to other forms of open relationships like swinging that are predicated more on physicality. It would make sense to find demisexual people opting for polyamory over swinging, for example.
- Honestly, polyamorous people as a population tend to find new labels and descriptors interesting. They might just be more likely to know the concept and the word than other populations, which would lead to explicitly identifying as demisexual at greater rates.
Most of the Polyamorous People I Know Are Some Degree of Demisexual #
Anyway, I’ll go on the record: Most of the polyamorous people I know are some degree of demisexual.
I’m a little scandalized that I haven’t written about it on this blog before. But I think I hadn’t because it was so omnipresent and obvious — you know, like the proverbial fish surrounded by water.