“No,” said the Ceifeiro, “even the celibate priests think that our chastity in marriage is, at best, eccentric.”

“But I don’t,” said Ender. For a moment he wanted to tell them of his long companionship with Valentine, as close and loving as a wife, and yet chaste as a sister. But the thought of her took words away from him. He sat on the Ceifeiro’s bed and put his face in his hands.

Even though she had agreed wholeheartedly with Ender that it was right for Miro to go, it was still unbearable to lose her child. It made Ender wonder if his own parents felt such pain when he was taken away. He suspected they had not. Nor had they hoped for his return. He already loved another man’s children more than his parents had loved their own child. Well, he’d get fit revenge for their neglect of him. He’d show them, three thousand years later, how a father should behave. Bishop Peregrino married them in his chambers. By Novinha’s calculations, she was still young enough to have another six children, if they hurried. They set at the task with a will.

Next, we must reverse our steps to the scene where Ender first meets Novinha in person:

“In answer, he raised his hand and brushed his fingers across the back of her cheek. It was a timid gesture, almost an adolescent one; it reminded her of Libo, and it was more than she could bear. She took his hand, hurled it away, then shoved past him into the room.”

It could easily be said that this gesture on Ender’s part was a sexual one, but it can be even more convincingly argued that it was a gesture of comfort. The viewpoint character in this passage is not Ender, but Novinha. Her first instinct is to peg Ender’s gesture as “adolescent,” “timid” and thereby innocent.

Then, due to her past experience, she’s reminded of Libo, and she instantly forgets the innocence that she previously associated with Ender, instead projecting on Ender her vision of the gesture as a sexual one.

“Thou art fertile ground, and I will plant a garden in thee.” It was the sort of thing a poet says to his mistress, or even a husband to his wife, and the tu was intimate, not arrogant. How dare he, she whispered to herself, touching the cheek that he had touched.

A lot of people peg this statement by Ender as a sexual one, but they do so on account of a connection drawn between the metaphor in Ender’s statement and the fact that the Piggies reproductive cycle revolves around the planting of trees. However, little have these people considered that despite this theme, Ender knows nothing about the Piggies reproductive cycle at this point in the novel.

Rather, Ender’s statement is meant to symbolise spiritual renewal, a conclusion backed by an awareness of Orson Scott Card’s religious background. His LDS Book of Mormon frequently uses the planting of a seed/tree as a metaphor for spiritual renewal.

Furthermore, if Ender truly had any sexual interest in Novinha, Ender, being as brutally honest with himself as he is, would mention it in one of his own viewpoint chapters. What we have to keep in mind is most of these sexually perceived statements of Ender’s are being filtered through Novinha’s viewpoint. Since she’s allosexual, she naturally assumes that Ender is too.

There is only one other instance in the series where it is explicitly stated that Ender and Novinha “made love,” but in the same sentence, Ender is described as being very distracted by something else. Again, his marriage with Novinha becomes sexual only because that is how they have traditionally thought of marriage.

After Novinha

After Novinha leaves Ender, we’re further enlightened on the details of Ender’s absent sex life.

Miro, pondering his loss of Wanda, expends a great deal of energy saddened over the fact that he never slept with her when he had the chance. Ender on the other hand, after losing Novinha, does not think of sex at all. He thinks about the person that he’s lost emotionally, but his thoughts of lost physical intimacy do not go further than no longer being able to hold his wife’s hand or being saddened at the loneliness of having to sleep alone.

Once again, we must return to the tree in fertile ground. As Ender interacts with the Piggies, he’s forced to explain the descolada’s effect on Piggie reproductive cycles, which then leads Valentine and Ender into explaining the Human reproductive cycle to Planter:

“A male does best, reproductively, if he wanders and copulates as widely as possible.” (Valentine)

“I’ve done the wandering,” said Ender. “Somehow I missed out on the copulating.”

“I’m speaking of overall trends,” said Valentine. “There are always strange individuals who don’t follow the norms.”

Here, Ender states specifically that he’s never had sex, and considering that he’s been married for 30 years when he says this, I think it’s safe to say that he never wanted it. Further in this conversation, Valentine almost makes fun of Ender, by calling him her “reproductively unavailable brother.”

As Valentine is describing male sexual dominance, Ender’s first thoughts are not directly about sexuality itself:

Then of course, there’s the question of why Novinha left Ender in the first place. She left him because she was jealous of Ender’s relationships with Jane and Valentine, of the fact that he was closer to them than he was to her.

Ender had expected Novinha to be jealous when Valentine came, and he was prepared for that. He had warned Valentine that there would probably be few opportunities for them to be together at first. And she, too, understood– Jakt had his worries, too, and both spouses would need reassurance. It was almost silly for Jakt and Novinha to be jealous of the bonds between brother and sister. There had never been the slightest hint of sexuality in Ender’s and Valentine’s relationship– anyone who understood them at all would laugh at any such notion– but it wasn’t sexual unfaithfulness that Novinha and Jakt were wary of. Nor was it the emotional bond they shared– Novinha had no reason to doubt Ender’s love and devotion to her, and Jakt could not have asked for more than Valentine offered him, both in passion and in trust.

It was deeper than any of these things. It was the fact that even now, after all these years, as soon as they were together they once again functioned like a single person, helping each other without even having to explain what they were trying to accomplish. Jakt saw it and even to Ender, who had never known him before, it was obvious that the man felt devastated. As if he saw his wife and her brother together and realized: This is what closeness is. This is what it means for two people to be one. He had thought that he and Valentine had been as close as husband and wife can ever be, and perhaps they were. And yet now he had to confront the fact that it was possible for two people to be even closer. To be, in some sense, the same person.

That says a lot about Novinha’s perception of Ender. First of all, we discover that since her first encounter with Ender, she has ceased to perceive him as a sexual person, and secondly, she’s figured out what kind of relationships he’s capable of having and feels that he has deeper relationships with other women than he does with her.

The best way I can describe an asexual relationship (at least Ender’s version of it) is this: it’s like friendship, only much, much deeper. The dilemma in Ender’s marriage is that Novinha recognises this about him and perceives Ender as having formed these types of relationships with other women despite his being married to her.

Interestingly enough, Ender doesn’t feel the same way. In fact, he sees himself as having a romantic attachment to Novinha but doesn’t feel that way about either of the other relationships. Yet, it’s obvious that he has in fact formed some type of extremely intimate bond with Valentine and Jane in addition to his bond with Novinha.

It isn’t uncommon, as Novinha does, for a family member to recognise a person’s asexuality before they recognise it in themselves. Ender does seem to be aware of it, however, because when Valentine first arrives on Lusitania, one of his first thoughts is to worry that Novinha will be jealous of their closeness.

Young Peter & Young Valentine

“You’re crying,” said Jane in his ear.
“This is such a happy day,” he said.
“It is, you know. You’re just about the only person wasting any pity on you tonight.”
“Fine, then,” said Ender. “If I’m the only one, then at least there’s one.”
“You’ve got me,” she said. “And our relationship has been chaste all along.”
“I’ve really had enough of chastity in my life,” he answered. “I wasn’t hoping for more.”
“Everyone is chaste in the end. Everyone ends up out of the reach of all the deadly sins.”
“But I’m not dead,” he said. “Not yet. Or am I?”
“Does this feel like heaven?” she asked.
He laughed, and not nicely.
“Well, then, you can’t be dead.”
“You forget,” he said. “This could easily be hell.”

To me, this doesn’t really say, “I’m horny and want to be with my wife.” To me it says, “I don’t understand why I’m such a sexual failure. Maybe it would have been better if I had chosen to be sexual despite my lack of internal desire for it.”

“Better to have loved and lost,” he murmured, “than never to have loved at all.”

What’s further interesting to me about that prior passage is the fact that Jane knew that Ender was thinking about himself as a sexual failure without him having to bring it up.

How do we know he’s not just repressed because of trauma?

We don’t. There’s no telling what he would have been like had he not been to battle school and suffered through war. But regardless, we do know that he isn’t sexually attracted to any of the women he has romantic feelings for.

There are plenty of people who identify as asexual on account of trauma, but somehow I don’t get that vibe from Ender. Even seeing Petra naked in battle school didn’t give him those types of feelings, and that was before he underwent the worst of his traumatic experiences.

Furthermore, it’s clear from the fact that Ender is so comfortable discussing sexuality that he is not sexually immature. He has absolutely no problem talking about sex. He knows enough about it to figure out the Piggie’s reproductive cycle and explain it to people, but he does so from a purely biological perspective.