As part of The Guardian’s First Per­son series, Paul Cox, 24, explains how he and his wife found love and hap­pi­ness as an asex­ual cou­ple, despite not being phys­i­cally attracted to each other.

In a fas­ci­nat­ing post touch­ing on many top­ics in her area of exper­tise, Dr Petra Boynton—a psy­chol­o­gist spe­cial­is­ing in sex and rela­tion­ships health—comments on the inter­view and its after-effects.

Asex­u­al­ity has long been doc­u­mented within sex research but has only become a pub­lic issue recently with the rise in our sex­u­alised cul­ture (so peo­ple are shocked that some of the pop­u­la­tion don’t have or want sex) and the increase in asex­ual aware­ness groups. We’re see­ing a treat­ment of asex­u­als within the pop­u­lar press that echoes the way the media has pre­vi­ously dealt with gays and bisex­u­als. So asex­u­als are seen as folk who’re just going through a phase, who’ve not met the right per­son yet, or who just haven’t made up their minds what they want. And we’re very keen to ‘fix’ those who say they don’t want sex in much the same way we want to curb those who say they want it a lot. So it’s nice to see a gen­eral inter­view with a cou­ple that lets them tell you how they see things — although dis­ap­point­ingly this story has led to numer­ous dis­cus­sions on TV and radio, mostly with peo­ple say­ing ‘but how can they not want sex? There must be some­thing wrong with them!’

via Mind Hacks