Making a Safe Community for all Aros and Aces

Aspec is such a vast category and one some folks (especially allo folks) tend to treat like a monolith. So I thought it’d be good to do a little questionnaire to demonstrate.

(Skip anything you don’t want to answer.)

1. How do you identify?

2. How do you feel about the following, one word answers are fine if you want:

- - Romance

- - Touching

- - Hugging

- - Kissing

- - Sex

- - Love

- - Queer Platonic Relationships

- - A Significant Other

- - One Night Stands

- - Porn (Video)

- - Smut (Written)

- - Dates/Dating

3. What is the thing you think most people misunderstand about your identity?

4. Have you encountered aphobia in your life?

Arospec flag stimboard

x | x

x | x

x | x

For Black History Month here in the US, we wanted to touch on a few ways that African American and aspec identity can intersect. Today, as a kick-off to Aro-Spec Awareness Week, we focused on aromanticism - stay tuned for infographics about asexuality! Description below.

[ID: Two images with the heading “Blackness and Aromanticism.” The first one has a muted red background and graphics of two dark skinned people with longer hair, one holding a grayromantic flag and the other holding an aroallo flag. This image reads “ African bodies are often hypersexualized, in that they are seen as deviantly and dangerously sexual and threatening to societal standards around family and sexuality. Aromanticism often gets judged as emotional coldness or sexual manipulation, so black aros may feel a double jeopardy around how they interact with sexuality.”

Do you identify as asexual, aromantic, or on the ace-aro spectrum? Are you questioning whether you may be on the ace-aro spectrum? If so, you are invited to participate in a Yale University research study on sexual and relationship experiences in the ace-aro community. You may win $100 for your participation!

Please visit tinyurl.com/AceAroSurvey for more information and to participate, and check out our poster above! You must be 18 years of age or older to take this survey, but please note that you do not need to identify strictly/exclusively as ace-aro, nor do you need to have any relationship history or experience, to participate.

This study is being conducted by Iman Jaroudi, undergraduate researcher in Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at Yale, as part of a senior thesis. It has received the approval of the Institutional Review Board at Yale University.

“You heard her.”

demirose is for people who are both demiromantic + demisexual, and it's meant to work like aroace, where it's just a shortened version of the words. (ro -> romantic, se -> sexual)

here's the flag & meaning:

I tried my hardest to use meanings that were found in both flags, and I hope I did alright !!

white: wholeness and completetion!! you are not broken or incomplete for not feeling amatonormativly!

black: demiromanticism & demisexuality! it's just a combined area for both.

blue: @biaroace and @aroaesflags both had the idea of blue being between green and purple, and thusly representing both, so I used it here. (I actually specifically used a color from the aroace flag for this) you can also use orange if you want, I just preferred the way it looked. (blue as a color is also more happy and calming)

gray: connection!! specifically, connection to others, which is a key part of being demiromantic, demisexual, and demirose!

I hope you don’t mind me reblogging your tags but these are my feelings EXACTLY

When I got married, I hadn’t had sex yet.  Waiting until marriage was important to me, so that’s what I did.  My wedding night was the first time I had sex.

It sucked.

I figured, ok, this is new for both of us, it’s probably going to take some practice.

A year later?  It still sucked  We tried a lot of different stuff.  A lot  of different stuff.  It sucked so bad, we even bought a copy of “Sex for Dummies”.

(it didn’t help)

I started working late so I didn’t go to bed at the same time as my husband.  Every time he would travel for work, I’d be grateful that I didn’t have to go through the awkwardness of avoiding his advances when I went to bed.

He didn’t think it was healthy for a newlywed couple to have sex less than once a week.  So we scheduled it.  Repeat, scheduled intimacy.  I thought I was putting on a brave face and doing what I needed to do to maintain a good relationship.

Because I had no idea that asexuality was a thing.

I talked to my husband, told him I didn’t like sex.  He didn’t understand.  I lost track of how many times I said: “It’s not that I don’t want to have sex with you.  I don’t want to have sex with anyone.”

So it was established, Amber doesn’t like sex.

But we still did it.  Because I wanted my husband to be happy.  Sometimes halfway through, I’d start crying.

And he’d always be supportive, and apologize.

After he finished.

So when I found out about asexuality, and told him how I felt, he suggested I go to a doctor.  Because obviously there was something wrong with me.

So I went to a doctor.

(surprise, surprise, I’m perfectly healthy)

Then I told my mom.  When she suggested meds to improve my sex drive, I broke down in tears.  I told her there was nothing wrong with me.  And my mom has been 100% supportive of my orientation ever since.  When people ask if I’m a lesbian, she teaches them about asexuality.  

But anyway back to my journey of self-discovery

So I tell my husband, I’m asexual, I don’t want to have sex.  You are not asexual, you do want to have sex.  One of us is going to be miserable in this relationship, and I’m tired of it being me.  I love you too much to make you miserable for the rest of your life, but I love myself too much to be miserable for the rest of my life.  We might have to face the fact that we’re not right for each other.

So his immediate response is “no, I can change, I’ll do anything, divorce is not an option, etc”

But I can’t exactly ask him to stop wanting to have sex.  Because that’s not how allosexual people work.  And he can’t seduce me into wanting to have sex, because that’s not how asexual people work.

Anyway.  He cries, I cry, we decide on marriage counseling to help our comunication.

Because we’d been married for almost 6 years by this point, and had been together for 3 years before that, and we still can’t really talk about what we want (or don’t want) in regards to sex.

So we go to counselling for 6 weeks.  The first 3 sessions individually, and the last 3 together.  During the together sessions, the therapist would prompt us with a question, and we’d talk to each other, being completely honest about things.

During (what turned out to be) our last session, I’d finally had enough.  I’d had enough of being embarrassed about what anyone else would think.  Enough of the gender roles I was being forced into.  Enough of paying someone to watch me talk to my husband.  Enough of pretending to salvage a relationship that I had been increasingly avoiding over the past 2 years, and I said:

“Josh, I love you.  We have communication problems, but we’ve been together almost ten years and I’m willing to work through those if you think we can make it work.  But I am never having sex with you again.”

(At this point, the therapist who’d been trying to get us to communicate put down her notebook and said, ok I think we’re done.)

Then and only then, did he agree to file for divorce.

—————–

I say all that to say this:

Don’t you dare fucking tell me that asexual representation doesn’t matter.  I would have six years of my life back if I had known.

And if you’re in a relationship, talk to each other oh my God.  About everything.  What dream you had last night.  That song from scout camp that randomly gets stuck in your head.  The reason you don’t like sweet potato.  That embarrassing thing you did in third grade that still makes you mad when you think about it.  If you and your partner can share these tiny, intimate details, talking about sex is no big deal.  And it takes practice, so practice.

————–

On a happy note, now, 3 years after the divorce, I am in a happy, stable relationship with another ace.  And if you happen to ask my mom how I’m doing, she’ll tell you “I’ve never seen my baby girl happier.”

ASEXUALITY IS A REAL THING, LOVING, SWEET ACE RELATIONSHIPS ARE REAL! Just because your partner wants sex doesn’t make you broken. Just because you don’t want sex doesn’t mean you should have to force yourself to do so.