When did you know?

Ask somebody who is into this when they first noticed, and the answer usually arrives slightly apologetically, as if there were a correct age and they had missed it. The answers vary far more than people expect. What almost nobody gets right is how little the date tells them.

Consenting adults only. Everything on this page is about adults over 18 who have freely agreed to it.

Written from first-hand experience or extensive research by the editor.

This page is about adults, and about the point at which they first put a name to this. Everything this site covers happens between consenting adults over 18. The subject here is a memory a great many of them turn out to be carrying: a scene in a film or a remark from a partner that landed far harder than it had any right to, and the much later evening when they found out it had a name and that other people used it.

The answers people give

I ask people this whenever I get the chance, and the range stopped surprising me years ago. Twenty-three, after somebody she was seeing did something offhand and she spent a week thinking about nothing else. Thirty-one. Forty-four, said with a look that checks whether I am about to laugh. Hardly anybody gives the same age, and almost everybody gives it with a small apology attached, as though they were early or late for something.

The details differ and the shape does not. A scene in a film that somebody found herself rewinding once the house was empty. A novel read twice on the same train journey. A partner who said something half as a joke, and the joke doing something to the room that neither of them mentioned again for years.

What comes with all of it is a strong reaction and no explanation available for it. That is what makes it stick. Most strong reactions have somewhere to go: you tell a friend about the film, or you laugh about the joke the next day. This one has nowhere to go, because every obvious place to take it feels like the wrong room.

The gap between noticing and naming

Here is the distinction that matters more than anything else on this page, and it is the one people fumble, usually against themselves.

The reaction and the word rarely arrive together. Most people describe a stretch, sometimes months and often years, in which they knew something was charged without knowing what it was, or knew exactly what it was and assumed nobody else on earth felt it. Significance without a label. Interest, some unease, and a firm sense that this was not to be mentioned to anybody.

What happens later is that they find the word, usually through a search box, and go back over the stretch carrying it. They decide they should have known sooner, or that the years of saying nothing were cowardice, or that anything left unnamed for that long must have been shameful. I have watched people do this to themselves for twenty years. It is the most common piece of unnecessary misery in the subject.

Memory does not help. It is rebuilt a little each time you recall it, so what you have now is closer to your latest retelling than to the original. Every time you have gone back to that film or that conversation you have overwritten the earlier version a little more, and by now the file is in your present handwriting throughout. The person who first reacted, without a word for it, is not available for questioning.

Wanting this does not mean something happened to you

Let me put this plainly, because it is the fear underneath the question for most people who ask it. Wanting this is not evidence that anybody did anything to you. Most people with the interest have no such history, and the research has never found the link that popular assumption keeps asserting.

What people describe is nearly always something they came across rather than something done to them. A film. A book. A remark that landed. The evidence is set out at does wanting this mean I was abused, which also covers what to do with the answer if your history does contain something.

Theories that fit, none of them proven

Nobody knows where this comes from. I want to say that before listing the explanations, because the explanations are seductive and not one of them has been demonstrated.

The first is that what a person finds charged is simply part of how they are made, and the noticing is only the moment it surfaced. It fits the reports well and explains nothing about why this subject rather than another, which makes it a description dressed as a mechanism.

The second is that it arrives with a stage of adult life: a partner willing to try, a divorce that took the lid off, a decade of responsibility that made handing over control suddenly attractive. Plausible for plenty of people, and it accounts for when the interest surfaced rather than why it was there to surface.

The third is Roy Baumeister's 1988 argument that masochism works as an escape from high-level self-awareness. I find it the most useful idea in the literature and it gets misused constantly, because it describes what this does for adults rather than where it came from. It does fit one thing I see often, which is people noticing the pull most sharply in the years when they are carrying the most.

So the honest position is that nobody knows, and I would rather hand you that than a tidy answer.

Having no word for it

What people are after, when they finally go searching, is rarely a definition. Most of them knew what the word meant. They wanted the part that would explain why it was doing something to them, and no search result carries that.

That is the loneliness worth understanding here. Not the wanting. The having no word for the wanting, no way to ask, and an accurate instinct that asking would be a mistake. Adults work out very quickly what is unaskable and are usually right, which is why so many people reach forty having said none of it to anybody.

What the internet changed

People used to find out they were not alone at about thirty. Some found out at fifty. A reasonable number never found out at all and died believing they were the only person in the country built this way, which I think is one of the sadder ordinary facts about the twentieth century.

Now the discovery happens through a search box, and it delivers in a minute the two facts that used to take twenty years: there is a name for it, and other people use the name. What else turns up is a separate problem and mostly a bad one, since none of it is filtered. Set against that is the removal of two decades of believing yourself unique in a bad way, and I would not want the twenty years back.

And the people who work it out at fifty

Not everybody has a long gap or a vivid first moment. A decent minority come to this in their forties or fifties or later, usually after something moves in their life, and they are often the most anxious of anyone about whether they are allowed it.

That fits the same picture rather than contradicting it. Some noticed something in their twenties or thirties and filed it away so efficiently that it took a divorce to turn it up again. Others genuinely had not, and arrived by an ordinary adult route that needs no explaining. Either way, see what age is too old to start.

The question worth asking instead

Where did this come from is the question everybody wants settled and nobody can settle. It also would not change anything if it were settled. Suppose you found the exact scene in the exact film. You would still want what you want on Thursday.

What is it doing for you now has a real answer, and you can get at it tonight without a theory. Does it leave you better or worse afterwards. Does it involve another adult who has agreed. Is your life quietly getting smaller around it. Origin stories are interesting and almost entirely useless.