Romantic partnerships often act as a buffer against loneliness for most people, but this protective association does not universally extend to asexual individuals. Asexual adults report similar rates of loneliness regardless of relationship status.
Asexual adults report similar rates of loneliness regardless of relationship status
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**Asexual adults report similar rates of loneliness regardless of relationship status**
Romantic partnerships often act as a buffer against loneliness for most people, but this protective association does not universally extend to asexual individuals. New survey data show that being in a romantic relationship is not linked to lower levels of current loneliness for asexual people, challenging long-held assumptions in psychology. The research was published in [*Social Psychological and Personality Science*](https://doi.org/10.1177/19485506261437286).
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/19485506261437286
This is an intriguing finding. I can’t seem to get into the article to read it, but do they say or suggest what might instead lead to lower loneliness in asexual people?
Seems like a thought provoking start to further research. I would be interested, for example, in more data on how asexuals in relationships with allosexual partners feel vs asexual/asexual relationships.
This makes intuitive sense to me…
The interesting finding here is that they still report being lonely in a satisfying romantic relationship. This is a dark thought but I wonder how much of that is just self-reporting bias. As in, my partner knows I am asexual and supports me, but are not asexual themselves so this isn’t really what I need. They might still call that a satisfying relationship just because that validatipn is so precious, even if the relationship itself is not satisfying their needs.
I would also like to know the relative prevalence of autism among asexual people. That could be a confounding factor is anecdotally a huge percentage of asexual people are autistic. I imagine there are a lot of people in relationships that do not satisfy them and where they don’t either have the intuition or a lot of help culturally in how to navigate the complexity of it.
Reddit, you aren’t going to like my suspicion here: This is autocorrelation. Could this be because being in a state of “asexual-ness” is actually a symptom of mental disease that broadly impacts happiness?
If you don’t find happiness from a relationship of the type you want and generally are unhappy, you are probably not in a “normal” mental state.
I think we’ve become over accepting of what people tell us about themselves. There certainly may be people that just are asexual and can achieve happiness like that, but I would suspect there are also people that just report being asexual or act asexual only because they already have some other problem going on, can’t find sexual desire because of it, and the confounding of the two types is essentially leading for self segregating yourself into the unhappy bucket.
Isn’t oxytocin released during sex and during palpation of erotic areas? That has an effect on the emotional connection.
It is all about sexta then, always has been
How do Asexual people even have relationships, do they have to find another Asexual?
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Who pays for a study like this . What was the point of this study
Maybe living in a culture that ignores and mocks people like us could have an effect? I dunno, I find the study suspicious, but I can’t know enough if there’s a flaw in it or not. But if true, it’s interesting.
What kind of asexual people? Like, all of them?