“You’ll Change Your Mind”: A Mixed-Methods Study of Asexual women’s Memorable Messages About Childbearing

Asexual women often navigate cultural expectations that link womanhood, sexuality, reproduction, and motherhood. For asexual women moving through childbearing years, messages about whether they should have children may shape how they understand aging, identity, family expectations, and acceptable life trajectories. Guided by the theory of memorable messages, this study examined the memorable messages asexual women received about childbearing. Participants reported 107 memorable messages, which were analyzed using thematic analysis. Five themes characterized message content: motherhood as a social obligation, familial expectations/interpersonal pressure, fear appeals about life without children, identity invalidation through future projections, and social scrutiny/judgment. Most messages were negative and were often communicated by other women, including mothers, family members, and friends. Participants described two broad forms of impact: interpersonally, messages shaped relational strain, social distance, and communication boundaries; and intrapersonally, messages contributed to uncertainty, self-doubt, identity affirmation, and resistance. Findings show how memorable messages about childbearing can function as a form of gendered and sexual identity socialization, particularly within family and relational contexts. This study contributes to scholarship on queer aging by showing how asexual women encounter and negotiate age-graded expectations about reproduction, motherhood, and family formation.