Category: acearo non-fiction

Today’s the last day of Aromantic Spectrum Awareness Week and I thought I’d write about some of the everyday ways that being aromantic has affected me throughout my life.

• I thought there was something wrong with me when I was a teen. I didn’t find people attractive like my friends did (or if I did it was in very specific “I like this hairstyle combined with this waistcoat” aesthetic ways), I wasn’t getting crushes like they were, I didn’t understand why they were talking about boyfriends and the like, I thought the idea of falling in love was suffocating, I thought the idea of meeting someone who would completely change my mind and make me fall in love was terrifying. But I knew of no one else like me. I knew I was broken, I was wrong.
• I knew I wasn’t gay. At 16 or 17 I discovered the word “queer” and, although I didn’t use it, it was a lifeboat to me. There was a word which meant “not normal, but okay”. If someone could be not straight, if someone could be not gay, someone could be queer? Could… someone be like me? Be like me and be not broken, be not inhuman?
• When I was younger I had many anxieties relating to my friendships, that they were all fake friendships, that everyone was pretending to like me for some weird joke. (One of my friends deciding, over a term break, that we were no longer friends and that I was someone whose existence she should ignore for no reason I ever knew of… didn’t help this.) I don’t know how related this was to the “once you get a significant other and grow up you stop having friends” trope I had seen so much of in fiction and life. I don’t have this anxiety anymore! I even have friends who’re in romantic relationships and -gasp- we still hang out together anyway.
• I don’t know whether the zucchini situation will ever not be long-distance. It’s okay if it stays long-distance, it’s okay if the distance shortens, and it’s okay if drifts back down the queerplatonic-platonic spectrum.
• I don’t think I’m currently healthy enough for a local QPR, to be honest. When work is busy and my sleep is poor (and it often is) I have very few spoons left for the evenings and weekends and, while my QPP is important, sometimes I unfortunately don’t have much energy for emailing.
• I’m not out at work. Most of my co-workers don’t talk about their home lives and aren’t nosy so I’ve never felt a need to. I refer to my zucchini as “girlfriend”, which is not a lie but contains some omissions.
• I’m not out to my family. My parents never once asked me if I was dating or why I wasn’t dating so it… never came up. My extended family have on occasion asked my father (“no, but she’s happy”) but never asked me. No one in my family knows I have a zucchini.
• I think they might have assumed I was dating a male friend who I saw regularly, or mentioned him to my extended family in such a way that they assumed, because I got an invite to a cousin’s wedding which was Penny+MaleFriend instead of a PlusOne. *stares into middle distance*
• When I was younger both of my parents separately sat me down for the If You Find Someone You Need To Know That You’re Totally Compatible Before You Marry Or Buy A House Together And I Mean Totally Compatible In The Bedroom talk and I nearly mentioned it then but I wasn’t confident enough and also my parents had just mentioned sex and I need to change the topic of conversation because ewwwww.
• I never dated, which I’m really glad of. I had intense anxiety about the idea of someone finding me attractive or wanting to date me, whenever I suspected someone did I would panic, ask friends “IS THIS??” and hope they never acted because I didn’t know what I’d do. All I knew was I didn’t want that, I didn’t want them, I didn’t want anyone and I didn’t know how to communicate that. I was asked out a few times, every time I panicked and said no.
• I was an asshole in my late teens/early 20s, and I also did nothing about my personal appearance, and I think part of that was to do with cultivating a more unattractive self so that fewer people would be interested in me. (As I became more confident about being aromantic and matured in other ways, I grew out of needing to be like that.)
• (But I was also very bad at noticing flirting.)
• I really like Unresolved Sexual Tension in TV shows because I’m bad at noticing it, so to me it looks like the main leads are good mates and it’s non-romantic and it’s happy and safe. Xena and Gabrielle? Scully and Mulder? Carter and O’Neill? Bones and Booth? Beckett and Castle? NON-ROMANTIC ROLE MODELS FOR THE MATURING AROMANTIC. Until it inevitably becomes Resolved Sexual Tension and then I feel stupid and betrayed.
• I’ve been told I’m obviously a lesbian because I’m not interested in men; and then called homophobic when I said I’m also not interested in women.
• I’ve been told I’m immature because I don’t want a romantic partner and children.
• I’ve been convinced that a friend understood that I was aroace, having seen them use the words and be supportive, and then later found out they thought I was romantically interested in someone.
• I’ve been told “If you weren’t aromantic we’d probably be dating”.
• I’ve had friends and known people who didn’t think I was allowed to hate amatonormativity. They would get me to watch romantic films and then get upset that I deigned to dislike such endings like “She gave a rousing speech about how being an independent modern American woman means she doesn’t have to have a partner and then immediately establishes that it’s okay, she’s normal, here’s the guy she wants to date” or “She fell in love and grew apart from all of her friends” or “She had a argument with her boyfriend about how they nothing in common anymore and an argument with her best friend and broke up with both of them, but in the end she only apologises and makes up with the boyfriend”. Their desire for amatonormativity to grant them a romantic partner and a happy ever after was more important than any feelings I had about being erased for my entire life.
• I feel very grateful to have a group of friends who have no problems if I go “I think this is a good TV show but the succubus powers make me uncomfortable and I don’t want to watch this”.
• One of the reasons I stopped reading YA when I was a teen was the constant “teen girl just like you learns to fall in love”. The “teen boy or man who’s unlike you learned to fall in love” that was in most of the adult SFF I then started reading was easier to deal with.
• Romcoms and the romance genre bore me and erase me and alienate me and I can’t do that.
• I’ve had friendship break-ups that broke my heart.
• When I was younger I tried to work out what made a romantic relationship so special as if there were some logical maths behind it. I’ve read a lot of “what’s the difference between…” blog posts and now I try to think about it more on an individual level rather than a universal constant.
• I find writing romantic relationships interesting and frustrating.
• I find it really difficult to imagine a sff world where aromanticism is completely ordinary. Asexuality, sure. Other queerness, sure. Aromanticism and aromantic relationships as unremarkable, though, is something I struggle with.
• Sometimes I get really depressed and anxious about how uncertain my life is going to be without a partner to live with and support me.
• I was a bridesmaid earlier this month and the whole experience—having seen the whole of their relationship, having found out about the engagement, the wedding preparation, the ceremony and the reception themselves—made me both sad that I’ll never have such an experience, and also really glad that I’ll never have such an experience.
• I get depressed and anxious about how I’m too ill to write most of the time, and there’s no one I can rely on to write about the ace and aro (and agender!) characters I need to write about.
• I don’t like touching people. Brief hugs from friends are okay (quick tangent: wow, if you’re someone who gets offended when someone doesn’t want to hug you or get massaged or be touched by you without warning then you are gross and you can fuck right off) and the zucchini is the only one I can tolerate holding my hands (and even then there’s plenty of occasions where I’ve had to go “nooo not right now”).
• I’ve had sex dreams. Every time they’ve made me feel incredibly uncomfortable and like my subconscious has violated me.
• I’ve had squishes, though the last one was five or eight years ago. The ones that I remember the clearest were both on writers who I did become friends with. I never told them 😮
• I wonder how much my aromanticism and asexuality has influenced being agender, and vice versa. A large part of Being A Woman, to me, was Being A Woman Who Will Be Attractive To Guys, Being A Woman To Learn How To Look After A House For Your Family, Being A Woman To Get A Man And Kids, which I always rejected with varying degrees of understanding why I did so. Additionally there’s the idea of, well, if I don’t have to worry about which gender I’m attracted to, why even gender? There’s no answers there, of course. I am aromantic, and I am asexual, and I am agender, and that’s who I am.