I’m autos*xual and I’m more attracted to my own reflection than other people – I have passionate sex with myself all the time

Body image is a complicated concept and something that is unique to every person.

While some people struggle with their reflection, others have learn to love what they see in the mirror – and in some cases, that love can become extremely intense.

Such people, who call themselves ‘autosexuals,’ are romantically and sexually attracted to themselves, may sound rare – but studies show they appear to be growing in numbers.

Chris, a 45-year-old yoga teacher from California, identifies as ‘autosexual’ and claims he knew his sexuality from a young age.

Speaking to FEMAIL, he revealed he began experiencing feelings of attraction towards himself from as young as 12, around the time he started puberty.

As a teenager, he began to explore his sexuality with himself and it soon developed into a full-blown love affair – with all the with intimacy, romance and sex that typically comes with a conventional relationship.

Chris said his primary partnership is the one he shares with himself, although he has dated others in the past and is currently in a long-distance partnership with a man he’s been with for two years.

He is ‘most turned on’ by the thought of himself and regularly engages in ‘mirroring’, one of a number of ‘affectionate’ terms he used to describe making love to himself against his reflection in a mirror.

Chris describes his reflection as ‘him’ and refers to himself and his reflection as ‘we’.

And he’s not the only one. In 2020, Kourtney Kardashian alluded to being herself, writing on her website, Poosh: ‘Are you autosexual? The short answer is yes, most likely. In fact, we all are – at least a little.

According to sex therapist, Katherine Hertlein, autosexual people are ‘attracted primarily – sometimes exclusively – to their own bodies.

‘Appreciated more generally, autoeroticism involves a whole range of sexual behaviours and attitudes,’ she said, adding that, ‘some people may be turned on by themselves exclusively, while some might be turned on by both themselves and others.’

Speaking to FEMAIL, Chris recalled sensing ‘echoes and hints of something different’ about himself during adolescence.

As the years passed, he increasingly felt distinct from his peers, who only ever showed interest in dating other people.

‘It started when I was around 12, flirtingly,’ he said.

The yoga instructor then spent a year ‘building sexual tension’ with himself before reaching an ‘epiphany’ moment in front of a mirror.

He remembers the moment the erotic feelings he had been harbouring towards himself came to a crescendo one afternoon.

‘It was in my bedroom during summer that I was 13 when I had gotten home from the beach one day,’ he said. ‘It had been had probably been about a year of sexual tension built up between me and myself.

‘I was wearing a very small pair of yellow swim trunks, and I just looked across the room at the mirror, and what I saw staring back at me – who I saw staring back at me, just gave me goosebumps.

‘It was just like when you see someone, and you start to have a crush, and I walked up to the mirror and locked eyes with him.

‘I placed both my hands on the mirror and leaned in and kissed him and it just it was like electricity.

‘I remember stepping back and looking at him from maybe two feet away and just breathing heavily, kind of bewildered astonishment of how good it was.’

But as Chris pointed out, there were ‘no words’ for such a thing at the time and it wasn’t until several years later that he even discovered the term autosexuality.

Although he couldn’t pinpoint the feelings he felt towards himself, the relationship quickly developed and the love making became ‘a ritual’.

He felt he couldn’t tell anyone about the relationship since the rest of his peers were only talking about dating other people, typically in a heterosexual context.

But rather than ‘repressing’ his sexuality, he simply ‘concealed it from the world’, and continued to explore the relationship with himself, only growing more infatuated with time.

In the beginning, Chris kept the relationship strictly hidden from his friends and family and only briefly opened up to his father once he’d become an adult.

Now, decades into his impassioned love affair, Chris has been able to share his relationship with more people, and has spoken about it with a number of friends and a cousin with whom he is very close.

Chris, whose parents have both passed away, said his mother ‘would never have understood’ his sexuality.

‘There wasn’t even a word to define so it was further handicapped in that way,’ he explained.

Although keeping the relationship hidden had its challenges, the secretive element of the romance only enhanced his self-sensuality.

‘On the other side of the coin, it made it even better when I did close the door and engage with that incredibly beautiful boy on the other side of the glass,’ he said. ‘It was amazing, it was like a drug.’

He said he pays close attention to ‘taking care of myself’, which he admitted only makes ‘the drug stronger.’

‘Sometimes in the middle of a fever pitch, mirroring session, I’ll just look into my eyes, and I’ll look at you know, his eyes looking back at me, and I’ll just say, I understand you.’

Often during ‘mirroring sessions’, he will compliment and whisper words of affection to himself. ‘There no barrier to me and him,’ he said.

Overtime, the relationship has grown from being ‘hormone fuelled’, to developing into a more serious and emotional ‘connection’.

Like most typical relationships, there are moments of ‘darkness’, with the yoga instructor admitting he can be his own ‘worst critic’ – though it ‘doesn’t wear away at the sex’.

Sometimes days will pass where there is no sex, but he revealed this only increases the ‘fire’ he feels when he returns to mirroring the next time – likening the feeling to ‘a new drug’.

‘Then it’s so new and it’s new angles, new crevices or discovering a new way a sunbeam will cast over my ribs down the side of my butt, for instance.’

‘It’s love as well as lust, it can be just running my fingers across my cheek bone and watching the way my fingers travel across my skin. And hugging – there’s all kinds of ways to hug myself.’

‘When I’m hugging myself, I can enjoy the view from front to side to over the shoulder, around the waist, clasping my neck, and sometimes I can even clasp my throat,’ he mused.

‘The relationship is quite intense – it always is,’ he said, adding that it was ‘genuine and fulfilling and a safe harbour in this ever crazier world.’

In the same way many look towards a partner for comfort in difficult times, Chris looks towards himself for ‘solace’ as part of a ‘coping mechanism’.

In the peak of one stressful moment, he recalled an encounter in a clothing store changing room last summer.

‘I remember I was working on a project where I was having a creative block and I just couldn’t get it done, so I just had to get up and leave it for a while.

‘I went down to one particular department store that had changing rooms and I knew that I had to do something borderline deviant.

‘No lines were crossed – but I basically went into a changing booth with the big mirrors, and I just took everything off, and I completely mirrored myself in a public changing booth with the door closed.

‘And just the sense that there were people right out there right behind that thin, flimsy door just heightened everything.

‘It was just one of those incredible mischievous experiences that is hard to forget.’

The experience was so rewarding that Chris was able to return to work having overcome his creative block. ‘Suddenly all the puzzle pieces fell together because of my mirror twist.’

While he maintained that his relationship with himself is profoundly erotic and emotionally fulfilling, he isn’t his only love interest.

Alongside his relationship with himself, Chris admitted that he isn’t ‘100 per cent’ for Chris – and also has a long-distance boyfriend.

The pair have been together for two years and his boyfriend is ‘fully supportive’ of his open relationship with himself. ‘He’s very mature and progressive,’ Chris explained.

He said the sexual part of their relationship is ‘enhanced’ by Chris’s self-love and what he described as his current boyfriend’s ‘voyeurism’.

‘He’s very open to sometimes just watching me and me together. He likes to get involved and sometimes he joins us and the sex can be great. It only makes the sex really great.’

The yoga instructor said he has previously dated people who look similar to him and that he is sometimes asked if him and his boyfriend are ‘related’.

When asked if his boyfriend ever feels jealous of Chris’s intimate relationship shared with himself, he said he ‘didn’t think so’ and that their relationship was ‘very inclusive’.

In the past, however, jealousy between Chris and himself has impacted his romances with others and even lead to break ups.

‘A few years ago, this really beautiful girl came up to me in a yoga class to make a pass at me, and I had to say no, I wasn’t in the mood.

‘I was very nice about it, but I declined her offer because I was in a really intensely heated period of heightened sex with myself that I just didn’t want any kind of interference, and so I just told her I was taken.’

Chris’s relationship with himself has also previously caused issues with a girl he was dating – who dumped him via text because he was more interested in himself than in her.

At points in his life, the relationship has become so addicting that Chris hasn’t sought out relationships with others at all.

But Chris claimed that that the relationship has with himself has nothing to do with ‘narcissism’.

He said those who conflate autosexuality with narcissism simply ‘haven’t had any contact with autosexual people’, adding that it was ‘one of the great misunderstandings of the world.’

According to his own definition, he said narcissism describes someone ‘who wants to inflate themselves, gloat, get a lot of attention.’

‘They want to feel superior to everyone else at the expense of everyone else.

‘Autosexuality in my case, especially when I was growing up, was something that I hid from the world. I revelled in it like a forbidden love affair,’ he said.

He said that while narcissists had a tendency to inflict themselves on others, that ‘no one is hurt’ in an autosexual relationship.

Because of his unconventional style of dating, the yoga instructor has also had people assume he is asexual – the sexual orientation in which a person isn’t attracted to anyone.

But he insisted that this does not describe him, since he experiences passionate and ‘addicting’ desire towards himself.

During his years in college, many people accused him of being asexual because he didn’t see interested in dating people.

He said it was at this time he was ‘almost pure autosexual’.