Dr. Pragati Singh, a medical graduate from Maulana Azad Medical College, Delhi, is a public health professional, researcher, internationally published writer, social entrepreneur, podcaster, and an internationally renowned sexual and reproductive health and rights impact leader. She is known for her unique initiatives in niche fields, including Indian Aces: India’s first initiative on asexuality; HumansOfQueer.com: a platform for LGBT+ people’s stories; SAMHA – Sexual and Mental Health Association (now in a new avatar as Qrate): a UNDP-backed startup to sensitise medical and law professionals; and PanACEa: the world’s first pan Asian conference on Asexuality, held annually during Asexual Awareness Week in October. In 2019, she was featured in the BBC’s list of 100 most inspiring, innovative, and influential women from around the world.
Shikha Aleya (SA): Hi Pragati, we are so happy you’re in this issue of In Plainspeak to talk about commitment and sexuality. Commitment is one of those loaded words that means many different things to people, and is shaded by a variety of contexts. So please jump right in and tell us a bit about what the word feels like to you, and what it seems to represent to people, from your perspective and experiences.
Pragati Singh (PS): Thank you, Shikha. I know people have heard this before – that love is not a word, it’s an action – but to me, more than love, it is commitment that feels like that. Commitment is not a word, it’s an action, by which I mean you could promise it, you could claim it, you could believe it, but commitment shows up in action, especially repeatedly, over a period of time, in any kind of relationship including parental, familial, sibling, even friendships, and, of course, platonic relationships and romantic sexual relationships as well. Commitment to me means you sign up to terms and conditions and you actually stick to them. My perspective is heavily influenced by what I’ve seen in platonic relationships and how people seek platonic relationships and I would love to speak more about that as well. My understanding has been refined over a period of time because of the questions lay people ask me, and when I say lay people here, I mean people who are not seeking platonic relationships.
Sometimes at an event, or at a social gathering, people ask me what I do, and I talk about what I do with Platonicity, which is a platform to help people find platonic relationships. Then they ask me what I mean and I tell them to think of a relationship, but not necessarily with the components of sex and romance involved. So then they’re like, “Oh, so you’re helping people find friendship, or find friends” and I say, “No”. I mean sure you could call it friendship, in some situations that could be the right word, but that’s not really what they’re actually even asking. They’re speaking of friendship as in people to hang out with, but there are so many other things to relationships which are not about sex and romance.
So I’ve come to realise that for a lot of people the equation is that a relationship is friendship plus romance plus sex, and once you take out the romance and sex, friendship is the one term that remains. That’s how most people understand any romantic relationship. But then, what about other components that we seem to have neglected? Of which one very important one is commitment. One of the most important things that people are seeking in platonic relationships is commitment. Of course, there are other aspects as well, like maybe you want exclusivity, maybe you want a long-term relationship, a life-term relationship – all of those things – but commitment for me has become the distinguishing feature of what I help people find through Platonicity versus what a lay person thinks I’m trying to do.
Another thing about this, because I’m helping people find such a unique set of combinations, is that it comes down to how you negotiate it. For example commitment to me could mean that you will stick with me if I am homeless, or when I get sick, or get the blues, or if I cannot have a child when I want to have a child. To somebody else, it could mean that I am your number one priority in life, or it could mean exclusivity – that you will not be looking around for other intimate partners. It could be so many other things. For example, it could be who will make decisions for me during a hospitalisation, or who else is going to be the legal co-signee on a lot of things.
SA: That’s a lot to reflect on, thank you. Amongst your many ventures, you began Indian Aces in 2014 for ace (asexual) and aspec (asexual spectrum) people from/in India, and then also Platonicity in 2022 for matchmaking for nonsexual / nonromantic / platonic relationships, lavender marriages, and marriages of convenience. So, briefly, what is asexuality? How does such a range of possible agreements between people play out in the normative, commitment-oriented spaces all around us?
PS: I would say asexuality is a sexual orientation characterised by a lack of sexual attraction towards others, and it is distinct from sexual desires, sexual drive or sexual libido, which are more physiological processes in your body, and also distinct from sexual behaviour, or sexual activity. So it is on a spectrum which means that on one end you could experience zero percent sexual attraction by which I mean somebody who has never been sexually attracted to someone, but it could also exist as somebody experiencing it like let’s say two percent which means that of the hundreds of people they have met, they have experienced sexual attraction to one person or two people in their entire life, but for the rest of their life they feel fairly as much as an asexual person does towards other people. I’m just quantifying it for ease of explanation, but it doesn’t actually exist as a quantifiable thing.
Also, this has to be distinguished from people who don’t experience sexual desire towards other people, and this has to be distinguished from people who do not want to engage in sex with other people, which could have so many reasons ranging from personal views to religious to political views to medical diagnosis to past relationship to where you are in your life stage as well. Sometimes you’re just at a stage where you’re like I don’t want to do anything sexual for the next five to ten years for whatever reason – you could still want a relationship but you could want it without sex. What I started in 2014, Indian Aces, was only meant to be a community platform for me to talk about what I had learned about asexuality and for people to gather together and perhaps share some thoughts. A space for people to come together. Then it turns out that a big pain point for a lot of asexual people in India has been finding companions, or partners, or commitment – you could use those words interchangeably sometimes.
One of the one of the most interesting things that this work has brought to light for everyone but especially in my journey is that, yes, in India especially, we couple these things and we don’t just couple them, we don’t even think of them as separate things – sexual intimacy, romantic intimacy, emotional intimacy, cohabitation, legal partnership and child rearing. I would say these five or six things are assumed to always coexist in such a way that you don’t even see them as separate components of relationships. Sometimes you assume it’s one thing but it’s actually still six functioning things even in that kind of relationship where you might be able to find all of them in one person and be happy with it for the rest of your life! But with all the work that I’ve done with asexuality and relationships and non-normative relationships, it’s so clear to me that not only can they be decoupled but that they do exist as decoupled components even in a traditional relationship. I have come across people who might, for example, have children with one partner, be living with another partner, having sex with a third partner or might have multiple partners over a period of time over the course of life. So yes, I definitely see them as separate things, and those things can be fulfilled and experienced and lived with different partners all together, even at the same time.
It’s very difficult for people to understand and it’s very difficult for people even within, for example, let’s say, queer communities, to understand this. It’s also been difficult for people who are working on sexology to understand this. I remember I went to the World Association of Sexology conference in Prague back in 2017 and I asked people, “Have you ever heard of asexuality and what do you think it means?” People did not know, and that’s fine, but what asexuality shows about human sexuality and its different components is something that I think would not have come out. For example, the distinction between sexual attraction, sexual desire and sexual behaviour – where one is feeling an attraction towards another person whether or not you would actually want to do anything with them, let’s think of it like a crush. The second is sexual desire or sexual drive or sexual libido, stuff like that which can exist without there being a sexual partner, it is just you experiencing it in yourself. For example, when you’re young and you’re beginning to self-pleasure, you may or may not have somebody specific in your mind, it’s an experience in your body and sometimes there is no other person actively, physically involved – it is physiological. And the third is whether or not you actually act on anything, so there are people who experience attraction and experience desire but they perhaps cannot or do not express themselves through sexual behaviours with another person, because of different reasons such as medical conditions or disability.
SA: There is so much to understand that receives so little focus. In the context of sexuality, safety, inclusion and the experience of a self-affirming life has multiple layers. So when we think about commitment in our relationships, what are the top of the mind thoughts you’d like to highlight?
PS: It sounds like utopia because in an ideal world you and I and everybody else wants all of this together, safety, inclusion and a self-affirming life, ideally very quickly and easily. It’s very difficult to negotiate these three things or expect somebody to negotiate them. In certain ways commitment does come down to really truly being okay with finding five of the six things you want in a relationship and sticking with it. And yet a lot of us struggle for years to find some combination of them.
So, a lot of the times when I’m explaining to people what I do through Platonicity, once I’ve gotten through the first barrier – which is that they think it’s just friendship that I’m helping people find, once they’ve realised that there’s this matter of commitment and a long-term relationship or priority in all of these relationships – then they assume that it must be fairly easy for people to find this. In our country, of course, there are so many other components which people are still not letting go of. So even within Platonicity, even when they’re trying to find a minority within a minority, people are still thinking about things like caste, or about things like how much the other person should be earning. It’s not like these things actually take a back seat. You would assume they might, but they don’t.
I encourage people to do this exercise with me where I ask them, “What are your top three non-negotiables?” That list should be about safety, inclusion and self-affirmation, but it’s not. It’s about caste, what state they come from and how much they earn. I find this very interesting in our country where I thought that this work is life-saving for people. I have received messages where people are willing to run away from home and just never go back to their parents or are willing to be disowned by them – and they still stick to the same ideas.
What it means is that each combination of, or each person in the pair of people, have their very own unique terms of what safety would mean to them, what self-affirmation and inclusion would mean to them. There is no template. There are people who want to have children together but not be in a sexual relationship with each other, there are people who want to never have children, just want to cohabit in the same house, or those who want a social façade of a marriage, there are people who want deep emotional intimacy from each other but no romance and no sex. There is no one way that works for all.
That’s why I would say there has to be radical self-honesty first. You have to spend time talking to yourself and sometimes if you’re not able to reach out to let’s say, a therapist or a counsellor, there has to be at least a few steps taken to have that clarity with yourself.
The second point is you have to be able to communicate with the other person what a non-negotiable is for you. For me it has become extremely important to go through this exercise of negotiables and non-negotiables because when people come in to Platonicity they have a very vague idea of what they’re okay with – and this often it leads to one of two things: one is they let go of a good match because they were so hell bent on negotiating the negotiables, and the other thing is that sometimes they will go ahead with somebody who looks like a good match but it’s actually not, because they haven’t thought about non-negotiables.
SA: Thank you! A quick last question here to ask – what set you upon this path, working on this and related themes? Please tell us a bit about you, Pragati, the person.
PS: I started in 2013. I was going through my own stuff and I started looking up things on the internet and I came across this one word, asexual, which I had not come across before. I was like, wait, I know about L and G and B and T, what is this Asexual that I’ve never heard of? So I ended up just researching it a little bit and throughout that period I was like – wait, am I asexual? Is this me? I went through an entire up and down of I am, I’m not, but at the end of about six to eight months I realised that it had blown my mind in the following ways. One, what it had shown me about human sexuality that I’d not even considered. Two, the various non-normative styles of relationships and commitment that exist out there in the world that I had never even thought were a possibility. Three, I also realised that nobody was doing anything about asexuality in the country at all and that also blew my mind because I had seen so much work around LGBTI, that I could not believe it for the longest time.
I thought that maybe let me make a Facebook page where I can just talk about the immense knowledge I have come across over the last six to eight months, I’ll just share it. So I started a series where I would answer people’s questions. They would just type it into the Facebook page and I would answer them. That’s how it started. Eventually I did research, community events, and a bunch of other things. Platonicity happened as an answer to a desperate call that I got from a woman in Punjab. She was, I think, in her mid-20s and she sent me a message on Facebook about her parents forcing her into a marriage, of the possibility of being raped and of killing herself. She was traumatised and sought help. I was like, how do I help this girl? Until then my entire work around asexuality was very non-relationship-centred but over the years I’ve grown to realise that, in our country, the social façade of marriage is critical to people’s survival. So I organised a Platonicity meet-up in Delhi in 2017, as a response to this woman’s call. I don’t know if she ever turned up, I don’t know what happened to her, but that’s how it started back in 2017.
After that I kept doing what people were asking me to do. Honestly, sometimes it’s heart breaking. There’s a lot of darkness to it because I don’t often get happy messages but those are the things I have to absorb, unfortunately. Which is why in the last couple of years I’ve taken a little bit of a break. It was taking a toll on me, I was burnt out and I could not even see it. It was other people around me who saw it and said, “What are you doing to yourself Pragati? You’re also human, you also need to self-regulate, to be able to self-actualise; you have needs.” I’ve taken a little bit of a break since then.
Two things I want to say – one is that I have not aimed for perfection. This work has been very imperfect, like making posters which look ugly, to doing research which is not as perfect as it could be. I have imperfectionism – for the first time in my life. The way that I used to be was that I was a very good student, always trying to get the highest score for the MBBS, and all of that stuff. Then this work taught me how to be okay with doing less than perfect work! Doing what you can with what you have.
Two, doing something that nobody else is doing is an absolutely incredibly rewarding journey not only because you’re setting your own path but also you know that if you were not doing it there are people who have zero percent help. That makes you feel that this is important work even though it comes at a cost.
Image credit: Mariah Miranda
