Let’s talk about relationship hierarchies, and how it negatively impacts everyone, and is still present even in aspec communities.
Let’s start with qprs, or queerplatonic relationships. These are meant to be relationships that are close, they are not (necessarily) friendship or a romantic, nor sexual relationship. (A party can decide to define it as such, and typically seen romantic/sexual/friendly things can still occur, however the party can view it however they’d like.) However people outside, and even in the community, feel a need to shove it right in between friendship and romance, as if relationships were stairs and you just had to walk up them. Hell, even I’m guilty of doing this. I used to explain my qpr as “like a step above friendship, but below romance.”
I would just like to note how awful that wording is. That implies friendship lesser than romance, and was likely a case of me being so heavily influenced by amanormativity. Most, if not all of us are. It’s not something you need to be ashamed of or beat yourself up over, it takes time to learn things, so as long as you can acknowledge how thought processes like that are wrong, and move on, it’s good.
But the point is, the term, “queerplatonic relationship” or even just “queerplatonic” are incredibly misused. What originated as a term to describe something that was a committed relationship outside of romance, (and friendship, if wanted I believe), turned into another rung on the ladder. Relationships should not be listed from top to bottom, because that isn’t how it works. An actual relationship hierarchy, would be incredibly subjective from person to person, depending on their preferences.
This means however, aspec people turning around and saying friendship is more important than any other relationship is simply recreating what we’re trying to fight against. Things like that are not only harmful to lesser known aspec identities, (such as aplatonic), but also our community as a whole. I would talk about how aspecness is seen as a negative or something to be made up for, even within the community (intentionally or not) but I feel that should get its own post specifically.
Relationship hierarchies are unnecessary, and do far more harm than good, but we also have to acknowledge when we are participating in the idea, even if its been repackaged to appeal to a wide audience of aspec people.
Friends aren’t more important than any other sort of relationship, and vice versa. Queerplatonic is not a “stepping stone” to a romantic relationship, and neither is friendship (inherently). Please acknowledge how diminishing it is to refer to a queerplatonic relationship as simply “best friends with a different label.”
