Dear Elsa,

I am having a bit of a crisis with what I want and with what I outwardly project. I feel like I’m a fairly happy individual, except when I think about love. You see I’ve never been in love or in a real relationship. When I was in high school, the guys never presented much of a challenge so I wasn’t interested in the whole teenage f***athons (screwing whoever you could get your hands on).

Then when I went off to college, the men that pursued me or found me attractive were men I couldn’t have a relationship with (they were off limits). I kept telling myself I was too busy to focus on relationships and school at the same time (and there were also very few men who caught my interest). Finally, I met someone that really made me want to let my guard down, sparked me intellectually, emotionally and physically. But then he moved abroad, and I died inside because I finally let someone see my vulnerabilities and in the end whole thing was just aborted, the death of a potential is the worst.

I find that men like to look at and play with pretty things, but nothing that takes time to actually figure out and put together (except if it’s an electronic appliance). And I can’t accept being played with then discarded. And now I’m in a graduate program with plenty of men. A fellow graduate student (male) says I can have any guy I want: he say I have the body, the looks, and the brains to attract anyone. But I don’t see myself the way he sees me. I feel physically awkward, socially reticent, and mentally reclusive. Add to that a strict and demanding upbringing, and I have a whole value system that I want to shrug off but I can’t.

So you see, I’m mentally promiscuous, and physically disciplined. Sex to me is not a physical act: it really comprises everything I do. All energy is sex energy to me, I was aware of this when I was a child. But I was made to feel so ashamed of it. And now I just feel like I want to die, then be stuck in this sexual vacuum. Perhaps, I’m asexual because all the women I known who are single are desperately trying to pair off and here I’m having gone through life without ever being in one and the sad thing is I could probably be writing you 5 years from now with the same complaint. I just don’t know what’s wrong with me, love seems so accessible to everyone, relationships so common, so easy to enter into and out of for everyone around me. Perhaps I’m just not meant to experience the common denominators of life: love, relationships, true intimacy. I want these things and yet they bypass me or I them and I can’t figure out whats wrong. Maybe my chart isn’t a very sexual one. Maybe I internalized sex so much, that I have physically stunted my sexuality. Perhaps I radiate a persona that repulses others and makes them want to keep their distance. Or perhaps I’m so sexually messed up, that the universe has intervened and is keeping me from entering into relationships because I lack what it takes to make it work….

Loveless
USSR