“Phobia” may not exactly be the right word, but it is definitely along those lines. A bit of background, I was brought in a dedicated Christian environment in a non-religious country, and I also have autism. Growing up I (m20s) was always told the s-x is interesting and exciting, but should only be in marriage. It probably has something to do with my autism but I somehow ignored all I was taught and developed a fear and disdain for s-x completely – although that has developed and changed somewhat as I have got older.

As you can probably guess, my first phobia is just talking about s-x, I am all right with text as long as I censor the words, but verbally I just cannot do it without a lot of skirting around the topic.

I decided to try and do something about my initial fear of everything to do with s-x. I am a very academically inclined person and so I thought I would face my fear and research s-x; the idea being that I was uncomfortable with it because I did not understand it and that if I new more it would not be so scary. This only partially worked. I read a lot of Wikipedia articles and went through a few books. This research, instead of overcoming my phobia, rather refined it into two. My first phobia of talking about s-x and my second of p-nis–in–v-gina s-x specifically.

Unfortunately I do have a s-x drive, so I would actually like to get married and engage in other forms of s-x one day with my future wife, however my two phobias are going to make that difficult. I learnt all about different f-tishes and k-nks and things when I was researching s-x, and given that a lot of them have little or nothing to do with the standard method of s-x (p-nis–in–v-gina), I was not put off by them nearly as much although I would still require a lot of time to be able to get comfortable doing them in marriage.

Several months ago, I was confessing this to an online friend, Jess. She thought she would like to try and help me and talked to me about s-x verbally; when she invited me to actually share about what my own s-xual interests are; I could not even get out two words of the opening sentence, and I started gagging and was nearly sick. I knew my aversion to verbally talking about s-x was bad, but not that bad. Now I am very concerned because if I cannot talk about it, how could I ever get married?

Jess later tried to scam me so we do not talk anymore. We only ever had such a conversation once.

A couple of months later I started talking about this with another friend of mine called Emma. She is married, but was having some physical problems in her marriage bed with her husband. After she found out that I have done quite a bit of knowledge on s-x she started asking for my advice. She is a fundamentalist Christian who does not believe in asking the internet about this stuff so I was a good resource for her even though I partially censored absolutely everything I told her.

Eventually I opened up to her about my struggles of verbally talking about it, and wanting to get married one day, but without ever having to do the standard method of s-x. She said that she would be willing to talk to me verbally, but she did not think it would be appropriate given that she was married and wanted to just stick with textual messaging. She instead suggested that I try and use r4r and personals subreddits to try and find another friendly woman to help me.

So at Emma’s encouragement I wrote a post with her help, and put it up on several subreddits, trying to find a non-judgmental women to help me. We thought it best to only look for women, to avoid creepy men and because I am planning on marrying a woman, so I do not need to learn to be comfortable talking about s-x with men. Also thinking about it, I have a lot of very unpleasant memories of hearing boys at school talking about s-x which really disturbed me, and might actually have contributed to my fear.

As you can imagine, the posts were not very successful. The results were as follows:

• A woman who listened to me for a little, then said I was f-ing mental and left.
• Two women who talked to me for a little while then disappeared
• Another women who I got on with well until we had a disagreement over something about s-x I had read then she blocked me without warning
• A woman who agreed to chat with me, we decided to engage in small talk first just to get to know each other. It was late at night for me so I did not put much effort in, and she was just saying everything I wanted to say anyway. She told me she was not happy with small talk and then bluntly told me she wanted to no longer speak.

At no point did any of these conversations actually make it to verbal communication online. They were all just textual.

As you can imagine, this further discouraged me greatly. There seems to be a running theme of whenever I try to deal with my issues, it always just makes things worse, so I just become more recluse and set in my ways.

I had previously had an incident with another Christian, to whom I confessed my issues, and she said that I would be sinning by not having the standard s-x with my future wife, even if my wife was fine with it, because it would count as denying her and thus would be unbiblical. (1st Corinthians 7:5) For the record if my some miracle I were to ever get married, unless there was an emergency I would try never deny my wife of anything, other than the standard s-x. I would however need a considerable period of time for me to learn to be comfortable doing any other thing that was even vaguely s-xual though, so I would hope she would give me some time and grace.

In the mean time, Emma was trying to push me to put myself out there. She apparently used to have a friend who was an-l only, and thought that I could find a woman like that. She thus started to encourage me to look into niche dating places for people with strange relationship/s-xual interests.

I found a website or two and some subreddits. I wrote a personal, detailing myself, my life, my religion, and mentioning that dislike of standard s-x. I then submitted it. So far on the other websites, I have had no hits whatsoever, but I am not surprised as they seem pretty dead. Reddit on the other hand, I tried to submit my post twice on an account with more than 150 karma. The first subreddit permanently banned me because they thought I was a bot (I am not) the second said I had too low karma but even if I got more, there would be little point in reposting as my post was so niche they thought there would be no point.

Then I was shadow banned, because reddit thought I was a bot. I have put in an appeal but there is no joy yet. It is annoying, as I had put a lot of effort into that account, and I have people to whom I want to reply on some theology based subreddits. I have more subreddits I would like to try, but I cannot post until I am unbanned. Of course I understand that Reddit needs to take precautions to stop fake accounts so I am not getting angry about it.

Now I am just completely discouraged, I feel dirty and I do not know what to do. I want to be married and have a good life. I am very well put together otherwise – this is the only area of my life where I struggle. It just feels like an uphill struggle through mud, and it is all my fault. I realise you probably all think I am ridiculous, and it is all right, I know, I am not so self-unaware.

Therapy is not an option, as although I can afford it, I cannot find any nearby that would suit my issue or are not very socio-politically inclined to a philosophy with which I disagree.

I am not even sure why I am writing this post. It will just result in the same as everything else, either inconsequential or it will make things worse – or I will be accused of being a robot again. Does anyone have any advise or something? Prayers would be appreciated.

Oh well, I shall just put up with it, it is not as if I have another choice.

Thank you for reading.