The lovely Persephone Bell put up a post on her blog - http://mileagedoesvary.blogspot.com/ - about her own relationship with relationships, so to speak. She self-identifies as a demi-sexual, and - in her normal, very intellectual and detailed manner - described it and analyzed it... Rooted somewhere in the frustration of having to describe it repeatedly to people.
I self-identify as demi-sexual as well. I'll admit I don't know how long Persephone has identified that way - consciously, at least - but for me it's been a relatively recent thing. I wasn't incredibly conscious of the entire asexual spectrum until some time last year; well after I was living with Ash. I did quite a bit of research into it, following up on this suggestion she'd made that might help explain part of me. Persephone did an excellent job of a lot of the details around it, many of which apply directly to me... So instead of duplicating her work I'll simply steal it and take my post in another direction - or at least reflect more directly my own experience and beliefs.
Most people seem to differentiate between "friends" and "relationships"... And the shortest version to describe my relationships is that I don't. Everyone - to me - is some shade of "friend"; a positive friend or a negative friend, maybe, but always on the same scale. It's not a matter of type, but rather a matter of scale or magnitude.
Think of it this way; since I'm all mathey by nature, think of it as a coordinate plane - as a graph. On your X axis, you have "mental comfort"; on your Y axis, "physical comfort". The two are essentially independent. Many things can affect them, and they can sortof interact a little, but mostly they operate separately. My mental comfort's biggest component is always trust: if I trust someone totally (fairly rare) my comfort with them tends to be extremely high, while if I don't actually trust them much at all my comfort with them has a very definite upper limit.
Physical comfort is a bit more... Nebulous. It's not just a matter of attractiveness; it's a matter of body language, perceived safety, hygiene, and any number of other things. I can be very sensitive to crowds; I can be very sensitive to personal space and proximity; I can be very sensitive to some types of mannerisms and habits... And all of it together just sometimes means I'm perfectly okay hugging and cuddling and casually, no matter how little I'm attracted to them or how little I trust them, while at the same time I've had one person in the past where I trusted them implicitly, talked to them constantly and told them everything, but wasn't even comfortable being in the same room very often.
Combine that with the fact that my sex drive just isn't particularly high; the desire to get off simply isn't a driving force for me. Do I enjoy it? Yes, very much - at least sometimes. It can be relaxing, it can be extremely pleasant, and it's frequently a good way to help me go to sleep in the evening... But it's not a goal in life the way it seems to be for most people. If I get off... Sometimes good, sometimes meh; and generally incidental to the situation at hand.
Don't get me wrong, I still look at folks sometimes and think "wow, she's hot!" The difference, as far as I can tell, is that I never really progress that thought as far as the "...and I'd really like to fuck her!" which many people have implied in there. Someone can be hot without really engendering any form of desire in me... And someone not being particularly physically attractive is not necessarily a limitation on my desire to spend the rest of my time with them.
When it comes to my interest in fooling around with someone? It's mostly just a natural extension of some people that I'm particularly comfortable with. Hugging isn't very distant from cuddling isn't very distant from petting isn't very distant from kissing isn't very distant from... Well, who knows. My interest and willingness frequently top out below "sex", but with good friends my natural level of "okay" my natural level of physical intimacy is above average; since it's usually a matter of comfort and not typically desire, it seems natural to be intimate (to some limit) because the "friend" vs. "lover" differentiation just isn't mentally there.
The worst part of this was not realizing this for so long. I can see, looking back, how this has been true for better than a decade, including the entire time of my marriage and a number of girlfriends before and after. It took until just the last two years - since I started living with Ash and we discussed it pretty bluntly. Puts a lot of things into perspective.
I guess my conclusion here is, don't assume everyone sees relationships in general or your own relationship specifically the same way you do. Some of us are different enough that what seems so perfectly natural - even is normal, in society as a whole - just doesn't compute.
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