I honestly think that I’m nearly asexual. I’ve had, like, 3 real crushes in my life. Luckily my current boyfriend is one of them, so I guess I will mostly just enumerate what I liked about him when I first got my crush:
He’s geeky and not intimidating like the kinds of guys you meet at college parties. There is no part of me that ever thought Matt just wanted in my pants or whatever. I knew he liked me for me.
He isn’t afraid to have or talk about feelings. He doesn’t have some stupid model of “masculinity” in his mind that he feels the need to compare himself to. He can cry in front of me.
This one might not make sense to many people, but I found it attractive that he is not 100% able-bodied. He has a prosthetic leg. This is not a creepy fetishist thing. I am also not able-bodied. There aren’t many people my age who can understand what that’s like. I appreciated that he could.
Turn offs…well, the opposite of my first two points: the guys you find at frat parties who just want to hook up and feel the need to defend the size of their dicks to anyone who will listen. I fucking hate that. “Mansplaining” – that is, men who assume that because I’m a woman I don’t know anything about “manly” things like programming or math or soldering and start trying to explain things to me. Even Matt is occasionally guilty of that one. Immature views about mortality, taking stupid risks to show that they’re brave and manly and cool. That’s just stupid. I don’t want a man who’s going to get himself killed doing something stupid before he turns 30.