I used to be incredibly homphobic, which occasionally - when it comes to mind - I'm still ashamed of. My parents are unfortunately rather more homophobic than I (even then, let alone now) and it's very easy to sortof default to their beliefs when you never stop and think about it; and the first time I was ever actually confronted with it and forced to consider it was graduate school, after I'd moved out. Even after that, for my marriage and divorce, I had an odd and kindof silly dichotomy internalized; the idea of a bisexual (primarily female, of course, since I'm not attracted to men) was totally okay with me, but the idea of a homosexual (male or female) bothered me. This stupidity on my part proceeded to not be helped by my now-ex-wife; I spent longer than I probably should have associating my pain caused by (and hatred towards) her with the fact that she was gay, not the fact that she was just a selfish bitch.
Since then I like to think I've come a long way. I spent a lot of time reading on sexuality in its various forms, and as I moved away from my ex and my parents my circle of friends has drifted far more to the less vanilla (e.g. more accepting) side. It's easy to keep up that kindof prejudice in isolation; it's much harder to do so when actually exposed to the people you're demonizing, and you realize that they're just as loving and human and normal (or not!) as everyone else.
The realization I've made more recently - in just the last couple of years - is that my misunderstanding was much more basic; relationship and sexual preference is not a dichotomy, no matter how much people want to make it look that way sometimes; it's a spectrum. Or really, it's multiple spectra, all crammed together in a confusing mass that makes me occasionally amazed it works at all. At the very least, though, there are four separate but related spectra: sexual preference, relationship preference, sexual drive and relationship drive.
Sexual preference is the one that most people are familiar with. I'm a fan of the Kinsey scale myself (I'm somewhere around a 0 or 1), as it pretty well captures my views on it. I know some people object to it based on the bisexual/pansexual differentiation, but I don't think it necessarily excludes it; the argument for bi vs. pan seems to be more based on gender duality vs. gender spectrum, and - for the moment at least - I'd prefer to acknowledge it's not a closed discussion and move away from it.
Relationship preference spectrum is something I never seriously considered until relatively recently, but now that I have I'm a big fan of the concept. You can arguably also say there's a third one here - "friendship preference spectrum" separate from "relationship/romance preference spectrum" - but I don't personally differentiate strongly enough to call them different things. Of course that could be an artifact of my own nature; I don't particularly differentiate between friends and girlfriends, either, for the most part... So I'm sure someone'll read this and call me out on it. Either way, your relationship preference is just as real as your sexual preference. Some folks interact most well with the same sex (homoromantic) and some with the opposite sex (heteroromantic), while some really work fine with both (bi/panromantic).
The other two I mentioned, of course, are drives - sex drive and romantic drive, or the sexual/asexual and romantic/aromantic spectra. For one reason or another (and I've gone into this in a previous post) some people
simply don't have the same drive for it. Obviously, if you're low on the spectrum you're going to fall into the asexual/demisexual/greysexual area; but it's sometimes not that simple. The nature of the interactions between your positions on the various spectra can put you in an unenviable - and confusing - spot.
What I mean here is that those spectra, unfortunately, aren't necessarily tied to each other and that can lead to a number of conflicts. A simple example - someone with a very high sex drive but a very low romantic drive. This is the person your mother warns you about - someone who isn't interested in a relationship, isn't interested in friendship, but has a strong need to fulfill their sexual drive. And the thing is, this is actually a large group of people; it covers people who are just totally uninterested in friendship or romance, but also could cover people with severe anxiety, medical problems or other conditions that make friendships and relationships problematic or undesired by the person in question.
I think, though, that a far worse situation is something where their sex drive is high and romance drive is high, but their relationship spectra are in sharp opposition - homosexual and heteroromantic or heterosexual and homoromantic. Friends are a part of most peoples' lives... But someone who is romantically attracted to men while sexually attracted to women really has the worst part of both worlds. It can be exceptionally difficult to built a sexual relationship around one sex when you have trouble relating romantically to them - and in the two cases I know of who I'd classify in this situation, they ended up dealing with it by essentially trying to become asexual. No matter how high their sex drive was, their sexual interests conflicted so much with the rest of their relationships that they only way they were able to really handle it was by suppressing it.
And me? On the sexual spectrum, I'm essentially all the way over on the "hetero" side. For sex drive? Pretty low - down near the bottom. For romantic drive? Very high - that's what I do. And for romantic spectrum? I'm still trying to figure it out, but somewhere in the middle.
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