Love Shyness and Involuntary Celibacy

Love Shyness and Involuntary Celibacy

Just to note: This topic is not strictly related to autism, but many autistic people happen to be affected by love shyness and involuntary celibacy. I will also post this in the loneliness and social and anxiety forums, since this topic is related to those issues as well.

Love-Shy is a subset of Social Anxiety Disorder, this is the wiki definition: love-shy people find it difficult if not impossible to be assertive in informal situations involving potential romantic or sexual partners.

Celibacy (from Latin, cælibatus") is the state of voluntarily being unmarried, sexually abstinent, or both. Being involuntarily celibate means you are not celibate by choice, and wish to be sexually active with other people, but find it hard, difficult, or impossible to do so.

Many autistic individuals struggle with involuntary celibacy. They wish to have meaningful and successful sexual and romantic relationships with other people, but find it hard, difficult, or impossible to do so. There are many reasons for this.

One is autistic people lack the social skills necessary to both interpret and respond to the sexual signals of other people, as well as the ability to give off the signals necessary to sufficiently attract the people they wish to have sex with.

Autistic people generally have trouble with reading social cues. They also have difficulty with being able to give off their own social cues so that people understand where they are coming from. In addition, autistic people generally have a certain degree of social anxiety which inhibits them from expressing themselves to the fullest in social situations.

Love shy people tend to desperately want the affection, romance, and sex that an intimate relationship offers them, yet they are unable (currently but not necessarily permanently) to form these intimate sexual relationships with others. They may try exceedingly hard to have romantic relationships and sexual relationships or encounters, but it never seems to work out. Often, they may have brief encounters with the object of their sexual interest, but these encounters do not end up leading to sex. The encounters that are not brief but extended often end up in the so called friend zone relationship, where the object of the love shys desire pins them into the category of only being friends (a.k.a. we dont have sex and never will). This friends zone is exceedingly hard to break out from, especially when the love shy person finds it so difficult to express his romantic and sexual desires and needs to the person of their interest.

Love shy people are often very loving (and i mean VERY). They also are highly affectionate. The main issue that they have is there is a discrepancy between their desire for a sexual relationship with the person of their choice and their ability to successfully convey that desire to the person of their interest.

So it stands that in order to break out of the loveshy circle, there are a few basic things that the loveshy person must accomplish. I will list these now:

•the love shy person must further enhance and develop his social skills, particularly the ability to convey their romantic and sexual desires and needs to the person of their interest.

•the love shy person must carry out these skills in the real world.

*the love shy person must focus on the enhancement of the self in all other ways that promote their ability to successfully attract, seduce, and have sex with another person.

I purposefully omitted gender specific terminology in this post to keep from grouping people into categories they need not be grouped in. Love shy and involuntarily celibate people come from all walks of life and can be any or no gender and also have any or no sexual orientation.

Thats all folks. Thank You.

-by Bramble Larson