Cupid’s Aro

Happy Aromantic Awareness Week! I came out as asexual a few years ago, but now I want to write a little about also being aromantic. That is, I experience romantic attraction differently than the normative experience. You might say I experience a queer version of romantic attraction.

I don’t have any numbers on this, but I feel like aromanticism is even less known about and understood than asexuality. It took me longer to see myself and understand myself as aromantic (to the point that my earlier post is a little inaccurate), even though now I look back and see all these puzzle pieces stretching back through my life. There’s more and more out on the ol’ information superhighway (which is what we used to call the internet back in ye olden times) (okay, no one outside of business magazines actually called it that), but it’s not widely seen and represented. It doesn’t help that explaining aromantic feelings can be difficult because we don’t have enough words for the different kinds of attraction and relationships we can have with people (at least, not in English–there are other languages that have words and phrases with more nuance).

So, like I said in my ace awareness post, romantic orientation/attraction and sexual orientation/attraction are not necessarily the same thing, and not everyone is driven by romantic and/or sexual feelings when it comes to relationships with other people. And the short version for my aromantic awareness is this: I identify primarily as demi/greyromantic and alterous.

The longer version is: I generally don’t feel romantic attraction unless there’s a strong emotional relationship already there, and even then my romantic feelings and platonic feelings aren’t easy for me to unthread. I feel strong emotional attraction to many people I know, but that doesn’t mean I want to be romantically involved with them–but it also doesn’t mean I don’t want to be romantically involved with them. For a long time, I’ve found the line between “good friend” and “romantic partner” a fuzzy one. A former girlfriend once told me she felt I saw her as “just a friend” because I didn’t do romantic things for her that I wouldn’t also do for a friend. And I don’t think she was wrong, because when she said that, I couldn’t think of a single thing I’d do for her that I wouldn’t also do for a platonic friend. Go out for dinner and a movie? Give flowers? Hold hands and cuddle while watching TV? Call someone by a pet name? Yep, those are equally friend and romantic partner things for me. This is one of the ways it can be difficult to explain being aromantic. I mean, if I’m not even 100% sure how I feel about someone, how can I explain it to anyone else?

But the cool thing about digging into aromanticism, about being more aware of it, is that people are coming up with new and better ways to express feelings and relationships. I want to write more about that in the coming days, but for now…let’s just be more aware of the queerness of aromanticism!