I am on the asexual spectrum, and I continue to be amazed on an almost daily basis by how much more sense my sexual history makes through this lens. It explains why I’ve never really been all that turned on by nudes or dick pics, why I typically prefer to wait several dates before having sex with a new person, and why the idea of sexting with strangers has always baffled me.

I remembered another such example recently, and almost burst out laughing in public as I thought it over. Throughout my teens and twenties, when men would flirt with me online or offline, one question they would frequently ask me is, “Where do you like a guy to cum?” and almost invariably, my answer would be, “As long as it’s not in my hair or in my eyes, I’m good.”

The funny thing is, I really thought I was answering the question. I was providing a practical, logistical, literal answer to what I saw as a practical, logistical, literal query. Having spent years studying human sexuality since then, I know now that when someone asks this, often what they’re really asking is basically: “Are you excited by the idea of me having an orgasm, and can we sexually fantasize together about how that might happen if the two of us were to have sex?” It’s a bid for connection, an invitation to talk dirty, and an implicit expression of desire. But I truly didn’t grasp that concept in my first ~decade of being sexually active, and I’m sure it’s because I’m on some kind of spectrum – the asexual one, for sure, and maybe some other ones too.

To be fair, part of the issue was that a lot of these men were basically strangers to me, and the way my asexuality manifests, I now know, makes it near-impossible for me to have any sexual interest in a stranger. So I wasn’t primed to think of it as a sexy question; I was primed to think of it as annoying and presumptuous, which in many cases it was. It would have been a different story entirely if someone romanced me for weeks, consistently made me laugh a lot, and then asked where I might want them to cum. The specific vibe of our connection would inform my answer, in ways that would send a hot shiver up my spine as I answered it. Maybe I would even get as turned on from answering the question as all those horny young lads did when they asked it, back in the day.

In learning more about asexuality these last few years, I’m having a lot of these “aha!” moments about aspects of my sexual past – understanding my own desires and responses better, sure, but also gaining more empathy for the people in my history whose sexuality worked very differently from mine. I think back then, I often had a knee-jerk response to overt sexual attention, because I’d received so much of it from online harassers – but there were times when a genuinely sweet person aimed their desire at me and I found it confusing or even scary, simply because it didn’t look how mine looked. It struck me as slimy and insincere when guys would pile on the sexual compliments or ask me lascivious questions about how I fucked. Some of those guys were indeed slimy and insincere – but some were just trying to communicate what they were feeling, and to connect with me in the ways they knew how.

It can be stressful to try to decipher the meaning that underlies what someone is saying, but it’s a useful skill across many areas of life. And when it comes to sexual relationships, there are lots of different ways – both direct and indirect – that someone may say, “I find you attractive and would like to connect with you more deeply.” Not all such come-ons are as thoughtful and appropriate as one would hope, but I like to think I’m better at hearing that subtext now, even if the literal words being said are “Where do you like a guy to cum?”