I had a question today from someone that I’d only started conversing with today. On my profile where we met, I have displayed that I am demisexual and reciprosexual. I get a lot of questions about being reciprosexual. Like, a lot.

But today was a new one:

Does that (being reciprosexual) make you more submissive by nature?

I wrote back, no. Why should it? and he went on to confuse attraction with submission stating that because someone else makes the first move would that not make me more submissive?

Aside from the fact that the other person doesn’t necessarily ‘make the first move’ to trigger my reciprosexuality, my attraction or lack of it does not have anything to do with power dynamics. But also, just because someone expresses a sexual interest in me that doesn’t mean that I don’t have a choice in my own attraction to that person.

Which, I guess, needs to be explained to certain people?

I feel like this whole exchange annoyed me in ways that I cannot explain. It’s partly because why do I need to constantly expend emotional labour for others to understand. But also the effort of explaining things to someone using other people’s frames of reference. And also the leap from attraction into something else entirely annoyed me. Probably because I wonder if other people would make the same assumption?