Asexual describes a person who experiences little or no sexual attraction to others. It’s a sexual orientation, not a choice or a medical condition, and roughly 1% of the population identifies this way based on large population surveys. Like being straight, gay, or bisexual, asexuality is simply part of the natural range of human sexuality.
Asexuality Is an Orientation, Not a Behavior
The most common misunderstanding about asexuality is confusing it with celibacy or abstinence. Celibacy is a voluntary decision to avoid sexual activity, even when a person still feels sexual desire. Abstinence works the same way but usually for a shorter period. Both are choices about behavior.
Asexuality is not a choice. It describes a person’s internal experience of attraction. Someone who is asexual doesn’t look at other people and feel a pull toward having sex with them, regardless of how attractive that person might be in other ways. This distinction between who you’re drawn to and what you decide to do is the core of what makes asexuality an orientation rather than a lifestyle.
Sexual Attraction, Libido, and Desire Are Different Things
One of the biggest surprises for people learning about asexuality: asexual people can still have a sex drive. Libido is a physical urge, like hunger. It’s your body wanting sexual release, and it doesn’t need to be directed at anyone specific. Sexual attraction, on the other hand, is the experience of seeing or knowing a particular person and wanting to have sex with them. These two things operate independently.
Some asexual people masturbate. Some have sex with partners for reasons that have nothing to do with attraction: physical pleasure, emotional closeness, having children, or simply because their partner enjoys it. Others have little to no sex drive at all. Both experiences are normal within asexuality. The defining feature isn’t what someone does in bed. It’s the absence of that magnetic pull toward specific people.
The Asexual Spectrum
Asexuality isn’t a single, rigid category. Many people use the term “ace spectrum” (or just “ace”) to describe a range of experiences around limited or absent sexual attraction. Two identities that fall on this spectrum come up frequently:
- Demisexual: A person who only experiences sexual attraction after forming a deep emotional bond with someone. They won’t feel attracted to strangers or casual acquaintances, but attraction can develop once a strong connection exists.
- Graysexual (or grey-asexual): A person who experiences sexual attraction rarely, at low intensity, or only under very specific circumstances. It’s the space between asexual and non-asexual.
These aren’t lesser versions of asexuality or stepping stones to something else. They’re distinct experiences that people find genuinely useful for understanding themselves.
Romantic Attraction Works Separately
Many asexual people still fall in love. This is where the “split attraction model” becomes helpful. It treats romantic attraction and sexual attraction as two separate systems that can point in different directions, or one can be present while the other isn’t.
Romantic attraction is the emotional draw toward someone where you want to build a life together, share daily routines, and create the kind of closeness that goes beyond friendship. Sexual attraction is wanting to have sex with someone. For most people, these two feelings overlap so completely that they seem like one thing. For asexual people, the split is more visible. An asexual person might be heteroromantic (romantically attracted to a different gender), homoromantic (romantically attracted to the same gender), biromantic, or aromantic (experiencing little or no romantic attraction to anyone).
Someone who is asexual and heteroromantic, for example, falls in love with people of a different gender but doesn’t experience sexual attraction toward them. Someone who is asexual and aromantic generally doesn’t experience either type of attraction, and often builds their emotional life around deep friendships and other close relationships.
How Asexual People Navigate Relationships
Asexual people date, marry, and build long-term partnerships. Research published through the American Psychological Association found that rather than trying to fundamentally reshape what relationships look like, asexual people tend to make practical adjustments, negotiating with partners to find the level of physical and emotional intimacy that works for both of them.
In mixed-orientation relationships (where one partner is asexual and the other isn’t), this often means open conversations about boundaries, physical affection that isn’t sexual, and sometimes compromise around sex itself. In relationships between two asexual people, the focus often shifts toward emotional intimacy, companionship, and forms of physical closeness like cuddling or hand-holding. None of this looks dramatically different from what many non-asexual couples do. The difference is that these conversations happen more explicitly and with greater intentionality.
Some asexual people prefer not to pursue romantic relationships at all, instead investing in friendships, chosen family, or community. These aren’t consolation prizes for a lack of romance. For many aromantic asexual people, deep platonic bonds are the most fulfilling relationships they have.
Asexuality Is Not a Medical Condition
The DSM-5, the primary manual used to diagnose mental health conditions in the United States, explicitly distinguishes asexuality from sexual dysfunction. The manual states that if a man’s low desire is explained by self-identification as asexual, a diagnosis of hypoactive sexual desire disorder should not be made. The same exclusion applies to women. In clinical terms, the issue isn’t a lack of sexual interest itself. A disorder only applies when someone is deeply distressed about their lack of interest and wants it to change.
This matters because asexual people have historically been told something is wrong with them, that their hormones must be off, that they experienced trauma, or that they just haven’t met the right person. While low sexual desire can sometimes result from medical conditions or medications, asexuality as an orientation is stable, lifelong, and not caused by a health problem. Asexual people don’t have characteristically different hormone levels from anyone else.
How Common Is Asexuality
Population estimates vary depending on how the question is asked. A landmark UK survey of over 18,000 households found that about 1% of respondents reported never feeling sexual attraction toward anyone. Studies in Australia and New Zealand have found somewhat lower numbers, between 0.3% and 0.4%, while a UK study tracking responses across a decade found the percentage nearly doubled from 0.4% to 0.9% between the early 1990s and early 2000s. That increase likely reflects growing awareness and willingness to report, not an actual change in how many people are asexual.
The true number is probably higher than any single survey captures. Many people don’t encounter the term “asexual” until well into adulthood, and population surveys often don’t include it as a response option, forcing asexual respondents to choose “not sure” or skip the question entirely. The Asexual Visibility and Education Network (AVEN) hosts the world’s largest online asexual community and has played a significant role in giving people the language to identify and describe their experiences.