Lidia Buonaiuto was 27 when things finally clicked and a lifelong weight was lifted: she wasn’t a freak, she wasn’t a weirdo, and she wasn’t alone in feeling the way she did about sex and relationships. She was, she discovered, demisexual.

“I don’t fancy people,” she says, almost apologetically. Demisexuality, she says, is a relatively straightforward term to describe how she identifies herself in the world: “I don’t have a primary sexual attraction to anyone the way most people do, ever. I identify as straight and I’m not in any way a prude, but I need to have a deep emotional connection with someone before any sexual feelings appear. Demisexuality is not a preference or personality trait.” She likens it to a neurological block in which she can’t form romantic and sexual connections in the “normal” way.

Scepticism abounds around emerging sexual identities, and in the case of demisexuality, which falls on the halfway mark on the asexual-to-sexual spectrum, the research is slim. Yet awareness has rocketed in recent years; according to Google Trends, searches on “demisexuality” have surged since 2009, with the most interest coming from Australia, Canada, the US, Britain and the Philippines.

Last month, in her standup show Venus, the comedian Sophie Duker discussed demisexuality with her audiences night after night at the Edinburgh fringe festival; the demisexual hashtag now has more than 2 million posts on Instagram, and almost 12,000 members on Reddit’s demisexuality sub-group. But how does it affect growing numbers of young people who identify as demisexuals?

“I understand the perspective of people who ask ‘why do you need to label everything?’,” says Buonaiuto, “but it’s been really helpful to identify with something that makes me feel comfortable about my sexuality. I’ve put a lot of pressure on myself and have had a lot of pressure from friends and family to be a way I’m not.

“I can’t have one-night stands or sexual escapades or fancy a random person who is interested in me. I don’t have that desire at all, my brain doesn’t work that way and I forced myself into situations that just ended up giving me a lot of emotional distress.”

Buonaiuto is now 30 and works as a project manager in the media. She grew up in south-east London to Italian and Jamaican parents “at the lower middle class end of things” and attended an all-girls comprehensive, where she struggled to work out why she couldn’t be like her peers; she didn’t have crushes, couldn’t relate to their conversations about sexual desire and didn’t feel anything for “objectively hot” boys who tried it on with her. Instead they tended to get “hung up” on her, she says embarrassed. “I was seen as a challenge.”

Sophie Duker discussed demisexuality night after night at her Edinburgh fringe comedy show.

Buonaiuto is keen to stress that demisexuality does not mean she never wants to have sex.

“I’m not celibate,” she explains. “I have sexual urges but it’s only when I’m in a relationship that has come out of an intense emotional connection first. I don’t have a physical ‘type’, it doesn’t matter what they look like. My sexual fantasies are never physical, it will be about a guy coming over to me in a library, having the same favourite author, talking, bonding … I can’t feel an urge for anyone without that, and it’s so rare for me to find it at all.”

Demisexuality was first coined in an online forum in 2006 by a member of Asexual Visibility and Education Network (Aven), a website designed in 2001 to provide a resource on all things asexual – asexuality being the description for a person who does not experience sexual attraction at all.

By 2004, Aven had 1,000 members; today there are more than 100,000 registered users. It is defined as an attraction model: “primary sexual attraction is an instant attraction to people based on instantly available information such as their appearance or smell, which may or may not lead to arousal or sexual desire. Secondary sexual attraction is considered to be an attraction that develops over time based on a person’s relationship, an emotional connection with another person… Most sexuals in romantic relationships feel both primary and secondary sexual desire. The term demisexual, under this model, tends to refer to people who experience secondary sexual attraction but not primary sexual attraction.”

In 2017, Dan Savage, the sex and relationship guru behind the column and podcast Savage Love, was scathing about demisexuality, despite being considered a progressive beacon on understanding identity and sexuality. He wrote: “We used to call people who needed to feel a strong emotional bond before wanting to fuck someone people who, you know, needed to feel a strong emotional bond before wanting to fuck someone. But a seven-syllable, clinical-sounding term that prospective partners need to Google – demisexuality – is obviously superior to a short, explanatory sentence that doesn’t require internet access to understand.”

Professor Anthony Bogaert, a Canadian psychologist at Brock University, who studied the phenomenon in 2004, concluded that although less than 1% of the British population identified as asexual, more people were likely to fall into the area Buonaiuto occupies, and younger people especially.

Dan Savage questions the need for a label. Photograph: Maarten de Boer/Getty Images

“Demisexuality is a sexual orientation like gay or bisexual,” says Brian Langevin, executive director of Asexual Outreach. “It’s very true that demographics skew far younger and the primary reason is that the asexual community grew up on the internet. It wasn’t until 2001 that asexual people came to discuss what had always existed but now had a language.”

Buonaiuto has had two significant relationships, one for nine years and another for 18 months, but it has taken her years to get over only ever having sexual desires for her ex because it was so rare she felt that way in the first place. “When I first read about demisexuality, I felt embarrassed and sad I identified that way,” she says, “but it made sense for me.”

Freedom from sexuality is still deemed radical in a way that freedom of sexuality isn’t, but Buonaiuto thinks it’s only possible to have these conversations as younger people become more progressive and accepting. “For older generations who don’t understand, well, if it doesn’t concern them, who does it hurt?” she asks. “Let young people understand themselves better and have things that help them navigate through this crazy time.”