Am I valid?

I feel the need to give my 2 cents here.

I read through the response and thought it was very nicely said. He said it as it was needed to be said. There is really no need to seek validation or put labels on yourself. You could also have said: "thank you for your response and advice, but this isn't really what I was looking for." And moved on. He took time to answer you in hopes that this will help you and others somehow.

 

You aren't directly saying it, but you're effectively bringing up the tired trope of "Well, the DSM classified homosexuality as an illness until 1973" and the implication is that since science is constantly changing, that we may not know the truth."

However, with regard to the 1973 thing... we have to keep in mind that the first anyone actually studied sexual orientations and relationships in any meaningful way was Kinsey, in the 1940s. Then there was a gap until the mid 1960s when Masters and Johnson unleashed a flurry of studies. Thus, it was really only about 7 or so years from the time the major studies started coming in until the DSM removed homosexuality as an illness.

We now have close to 60 years worth of really solid research, by thousands of authors, peer reviewed and published in the best journals in the world. And we have actually been looking at things like sexual attraction, love, romance, and so forth for even longer than that. These studies are still ongoing.

And no credible studies suggest any evidence for discordant sexual and romantic orientation. Furthermore, while there are some therapists that will literally affirm anything a client says, because they are afraid of confrontation (which often does them a huge disservice), again, the majority consensus of competent professionals matches the literature on this topic.

Additionally, we have an absolute epidemic, especially in the US, of childhood family-of-origin issues including attachment and bonding failures, trauma and other adverse experiences, which influence the child's capacity to experience and process emotions. This results in record numbers of diagnoses of various mental health disorders in children and teens, including depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, OCD, and many other disorders. These disorders manifest as neurochemical and in some cases morphological adaptations of the child's developing brain. All of these commonly impact one's ability to feel and understand emotions... which in turn influences how people see the world. The result is an epidemic of people who have difficulty understanding their emotional selves.

But this does not affect sexual orientation.

What it does is affect how people interact, because of the trauma and experiences they have had. Trauma does not change sexual orientation. If it did, then we could do the opposite things to change sexual orientation (such as converting someone from gay to straight, as the religious crazies have been trying to do for decades.) And guess what? Those sixty years' worth of studies prove definitively that sexual orientation cannot be changed. It's hardwired.

On the other hand, our capacity to experience emotion can and does change over time. Thus, someone who is "demi-something" is someone whose experience is, from all the data we have, influenced by their family-of-origin issues, and this is tied to emotional expression. We solve that issue (through therapy or, sometimes, through self-work) and the individual can suddenly experience the emotions that they previously weren't able to experience. Thus, what was going on was not a hardwired sexual orientation, but a byproduct of a lack of emotional expression or capacity.

And then we add to that the widely variable ways in which adolescence and puberty express in individuals (and this, too, can be influenced by childhood trauma, according to some of the newest studies.) So one adolescent might have strong sexual feelings at 9 years old, while another might not experience strong sexual feelings until their early 20s. Thus, when we are talking about so-called "demi" identities, which are entirely a byproduct of diminished capacity for sexual feeling, or "aromantic", which is not a thing because there's no data whatsoever to suggest any discordant separation between romantic and sexual orientations, not only are these most likely a result of emotional development and thus changeable, they are completely unreliable during the adolescent years because of the enormous variation in pubertal development.

When we promote the idea that an emotional development/trauma issue is a sexual orientation, we do an enormous disservice to the individuals, because people are taught that sexual orientations are stable. These emotional/developmental issues, especially among adolescents, but even among adults, are entirely changeable. Thus, unless we're completely throwing away the idea that sexual orientation is hardwired and stable (which there is literally 70+ years of research that is pretty unequivocal about), we have to acknowledge that this simply isn't a credible thing. And that's why there's no literature supporting the idea. You cannot prove a negative. But you can show, with 70+ years of research, that something doesn't exist, and that's a pretty close second to proving a negative.

Thus, science is our friend. If we don't rely on it, if we say "Oh, well, there's this-or-that reason why we can toss science in this case", we get to a place where nothing in society is stable. This is why you have ridiculously ignorant people who honestly believe the world is flat.

So... to sum up:

There is no evidence to support a discordant separation of so-called romantic and sexual orientation. Thus, you can't be something-romantic and something-sexual. You are something-sexual.

Asexuality is absolutely something that exists and is well documented for some 70 years. But it is rare, and the term has been hijacked to mean something other than what it actually means, which is a hardwired lack of any interest in sex. Someone asexual can feel a connection to someone, but that's emotionally intimate friendship, not some ridiculous made-up word.

Demi-anything is essentially a lack of access to the kind of emotional expression ("love at first sight" is one example) that someone with full access to their emotions experiences. This experience aren't hardwired; thus, not a sexual orientation.

Now, with that said,

Anyone is absolutely free to describe themselves in any way they like. I can be unicornsexual or sky-romantic, or blonde-o-sexual (attracted only to blondes) or aquasexual (I only am sexually attracted when in water) or anything else. But these are not studied and validated terms. If I use them, it might be fun, it might make me happy, it might identify me... and that's fine. But if words and labels are to mean anything, they should have a consistent, replicable, verifiable meaning behind them.

It doesn't mean someone can't use an unrecognized label. It doesn't mean the person using the label is invalid. What it means is, an unrecognized label is likely not a scientifically accurate and consistent term. Different people will use the term differently, which dilutes its meaning, and ultimately, degrades the accuracy of labels and language. But if none of that bothers you, there's no reason you can't use any label you wish.

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