I’m quite young, but personally—I spent most of my childhood thinking a crush was just “friendship I’m embarrassed to want to continue,” so I avoided befriending girls I had “crushes” on just because I thought me doing so would be creepy or clingy. Later on, in high school, I didn’t like that I hardly had friends who weren’t guys, so I was happy to befriend someone who wasn’t, who I’ll call Z, even though being around them made me generally anxious.
When I found out about myself being aro (and ace), it lead to me gaining a furthered interest in LGBTQ politics and being less ashamed in trying to advocate for myself in platonic relationships.
Z also figured out that they were aroace, and we quickly and mostly-accidentally entered an intimate platonic relationship. Which… was a big mistake! I was under the impression that our aroace compatibility made us immune to having a bad relationship, but I ended up really liking their touch and acceptance, and not really liking being around them otherwise. Z wasn’t a bad person, so I didn’t really have a reason to be anxious around them, so I thought it might just go away if I tried hard enough. It didn’t. Just a pretty big personality conflict. Cue several months of feeling bad whenever we did anything non-cuddling, and feeling guilty that I felt bad during those times—which ended up being a lot, because Z stopped enjoying cuddling. I’m grateful to them, though, for being willing to talk to me about it, even if it took us a while to figure out what was wrong.
Since then, I’ve found other cuddle buddies that I feel much more secure around. And it’s still weird and surreal to see people in my friend groups having romantic desires, and dating people. Every time it happens I want to quiz them and be like “are you sure you’re not secretly aromantic and you just haven’t realized??” :P
It’s also probably why I like Lemon Demon and Tally Hall and Will Wood instead of, like, normal music that normal people listen to.
I’m aro allo and sometimes I wish I was aro ace instead. People really tie sexuality to romance in a ton of ways they don’t understand, and revealing that I’m aro often doesn’t go well unless the person is well versed in this subset of queer ideology or autistic enough to understand struggling with social concepts. It often makes pursuing sex rather annoying, because I’m kinda picky in who I want to have sex with.
I’m not sure how to quantify how it’s effected my relationships. As I mentioned it rules me out as a potential partner for many, but so does any other number of factors such as my other queer identities, how I look, where I live, what language I speak and more. I try not to think about it too much because ultimately there’s not really anything I can do about it. I’d rather focus my thoughts and efforts towards what’s under my control and pursuing what makes me happy.
Ah, yeah. I consider myself lucky to be aroace because most people struggle less with “imagine not being attracted to people” than “imagine you want sex without romance,” which requires defining what those mean, and also convincing them that you’re not just afraid of commitment. I imagine it’s getting more publicity over time but the average person (and even the average queer person) just hasn’t heard of the split attraction model and has never thought of romanticism and sexuality as separate things.
I think what I find most frustrating about it, is that I’m often on the exact same page in terms of what is desired as the person who decides not to date me because they are scared away by the aro label. I very much enjoy all the kinds of intimacy that are available when people open themselves up to a partnership with someone, I just don’t experience a unique feeling that I define separately from each of these kinds of intimacy. For example, I deeply desire physical intimacy whether the context is with someone where sex is on the table or not. That desire for physical intimacy varies from person to person based on a variety of attributes but none of the attributes are an innate feeling that I have but cannot name. I also love getting deeply emotionally intimate with people, but many people are unwilling to explore that kind of intimacy if it’s not a sexual/partnered relationship. I do not draw a distinction between a deep emotional intimacy with a friend, a family member, or someone with which I’m in a sexual or partnered relationship. Even describing all this I struggle for the right words sometimes, because people usually don’t call it “partnered relationship”, they call it a romantic one 🤪
No serious relationships for me. Once I realized it, life got way easier! I completely ignored the idea that “I must find a partner, sooner rather than later as I’m growing older by the minute”. I started doing a lot of things on my own, and have been enjoying the heck out of it.
I don’t date or have QPRs or anything like that and never have. Didn’t realize I was aro-ace(-spec?) til my late 20s. If I had realized earlier, it would have made things a lot less confusing to me.
Relationships? Which relationships?
I’m honestly half joking. The one relationship I ever entered as a teenager was because I was drowning in hetero- and amatonormativity and didn’t know any better. I never hugged her, I never kissed her, and I especially never did any naughty things with her. It was an attempt from my mother to encourage me to feel love as an otherwise friend-less neurodivergent child. you know, the kind of “why don’t you write a love letter to her, if you enjoy being around her?” encouragement. It was only platonic, but I didn’t know better. I’m sure my mother meant well, but in hindsight it is disgusting how much it actually was amatonormative coercion.
Other than that, as an aroace, I never entered a romantic or sexual relationship.
I did find some amazing online friends for life, though. We’ve been meeting for a full week once a year, for the last decade, and always have a blast. Funnily enough, at least 4 people in the friend group turned out to be queer… :D
And friendships is where I excel at, I’d say. I’d consider myself a very loyal friend.
What does hurt a bit is the obvious priority shift when people start putting their long term relationship to the next level, which usually massively decreases the time and effort they put into their friend groups. The fact that they suddenly have something better to do than do stuff with friends, or only rarely show up, because their significant other(s) are more important does feel more and more isolating over time.
In my experience, the older I’ve gotten as an aro person the more comfortable I’ve gotten with my identity but also the more isolating it’s gotten. Many friendships just kind of fall away over time even when people aren’t in relationships, because many people just don’t prioritize them as much in general. I’ve found myself somewhat by accident in a romantic relationship that I enjoy (it was a 1 in a million kind of thing), and didn’t even realize how much social and physical interaction I was going without until it suddenly was there again. At the same time though it’s still isolating among people in relationships (double dates are bizarre for one…) that I don’t measure my partner against other potential partners, I measure him against how okay I was with being alone, which was very other than the isolation; if we were to separate for whatever reason I’d be upset to lose this relationship in particular but in the big picture totally fine just going back to flying solo.
Basically I’ve just learned to accept as an aro that I’m on a really different wavelength from all the allo people in my life and to try not to put too much blame on individual allo people for the way amatonormativity screws us all over.
