A complete mess of an Aro

Excerpts On Being Aromantic.

[ID: five squares in the colors of the aromantic flag, which are green, light green, white, grey, and black. Each square has text.

Square 1: “But you see I don’t want to be lonely. I’m fine with being alone, really. I’ve made peace with it, I never really had conflict with the idea to begin with I suppose. Romantic love to me as a child always seemed like something I would grow into. But I never did: maybe I’m just lost. Maybe someday I’ll find my way back to the light.”

Square 2: “What do I even want? I think that’s hard for me to articulate. I love women, but I don’t love them. The idea of lesbian love is somehow comforting and estranging to me. I think love is too strong a word for my feelings because what my feelings are pale in comparison to most peoples’. I’ve never loved a girl I’ve only found her attractive. I’ve never loved a girl I’ve only valued her friendship. I’ve never loved a girl I’ve only admired her. I’ve never loved a girl I’ve never loved a girl I’ve never loved a girl I’ve never loved a girl I’ve never loved a girl I’ve never loved a girl I’ve never I’ve never I will never I will never I will never love a girl the way a real lesbian does.”

Square 3: “Why identify with a term that feels like it’s hurting you? That’s a stupid question. The term aromantic has never hurt me, it never will. I’m afraid of the way it weighs on my tongue and on my breath so I keep it locked up in my heart, but it protects me. It is a comfort and it is a reminder and it is my word but things are also complicated in the outside world.”

Square 4: “Tell me that romantic love is everything, I dare you. Look me in the eyes and say to me that love is what makes you human. I’ll kill you. I’ll kill everyone. I’ll uproot this system of romantic love until everyone is forced to look away from it and say yeah, maybe we were wrong for putting that on a pedestal. I’ll put the point of my blade to your throat and then you’ll see that romance isn’t everything because romance isn’t what’s in my eyes as I speak to you through gritted teeth. I have never loved you and I have never loved anyone. Does that make me a monster? Is it that, and not the blade I’ve kept at your throat?”

Square 5: “I’m okay. I’ll be okay. These are the words that are inside of me but really they are all just one word and that word is aromantic. I am aromantic. I feel no romantic feelings and I never will. It’s my biggest problem and it’s my greatest joy and it’s a piece of what makes me who I am.”

friendly reminder that jughead jones is canonically aro/ace 

My friend Nicky posted a video about his own struggles with being on the aro/ace spectrum, and it reminded me that silence is the thing that kills us. So I thought I should say something.

SCRIPT

It is easy to feel like a monster when you don't work the way everyone else does.

It took me a very long time to even understand myself as aromantic, much less to fully to internalize the normalcy of that. I do not experience romance, I do not have romantic attraction. And every time I have tried to think myself into love, or rationalize that whatever affection I feel for someone MUST be love because humans are SUPPOSED to love romantically, I have hurt other people and I have hurt myself.

I don't know how to describe what it feels like to care for someone who is in love with you, and to be unable to love them the way they love you. To see them pour themselves into you and to be closed off to them, no matter how much you want to be open. It's like living on the other side of plate glass. I can see the shape of love but I can't feel it.

I thought for a long time that I must be a sociopath or something. That I must have some kind of mental illness or a disorder that has killed my heart, and cut me off from whatever it means to be normal. I felt like a monster in human clothing, like the villain of some cheap 90s psychological thriller.

The thing that has saved me is community, to see that there are other people who feel the world the way I do. That I am not trapped in a glass box alone, but that I just live in another part of the human experience. One that has always been there, just with different names, and often not talked about.

I don't think of myself as broken anymore, but still... every time I see romance in art and media, love that transcends all boundaries, redemptive love, burning love, toxic love... I am at once grateful that art allows me to access those experiences in some small way... and I feel a longing. I feel the echoes of obsession in the back of my head that maybe one day I'll meet the right person and they'll fix me and then I get to know what it is to be normal.

late night aro blues - you are the priority in my life, and I'm not the priority in yours.

Then you have stories where it's portrayed as a broken relationship when they don't have sex, or just hadn't had it in a while.

As an ace, that always hit me when I was younger. I'm a failure, I can never have a romantic relationship if I didn't have sex life every other day, whether I want to or not.

that's why people try so hard to change the definition. because for them it's a matter of being inclusive so they don't feel like they are "bad" for assigning any sort of value to the concept, either in a real or literary sense. and that's not what it's about! at all!

it's not "i am excluded by this idea, please expand it to include me" it's "this idea is built upon and popularized by a cultural hegemony that prioritizes amatonormative expectations, and those ideals are directly harmful to me as an aromantic person. rather than try to change and redefine the idea of soulmates, or even rather than just immediately drop it, we should examine the cultural beliefs baked into it that we take for granted and challenge them."

also . absolutely whack that op is insinuating that it’s on u if u just like assume ppl (alloros) r talking about romantic love. idk man it’s pretty normal that we would do that considering it’s what society shoves down our throats?? i genuinely can’t tell if this post is targeted at allos or at aros who have dared to criticise the concept of “not all love has to be romantic!1!!!1” but if it is indeed the latter. cringe

because when you do that shit, it fucking hurts aromantics. it feeds into the already pervasive narrative that we can’t ever care for anyone, that any love that we might feel isn’t nearly as meaningful even if we pour our heart and soul into it, that we can’t possibly be “just friends” with this person.

guess what? friendships matter! friendships exist, in a shit ton of different forms that’s far more different today than it was before, and us pointing this out is not the same thing as straight homophobes erasing gay people and relationships.

(also imagine how many “straight” relationships in history might actually have been close friendships but we don’t talk about that part of heteronormativity for some reason huh.)

I know this post is about historical figures, but I want to say that this is also a hugely pervasive thing in fandom.

There is nothing wrong with shipping fictional characters together romantically, but please try not to back it up by pointing out literally every positive interaction they have and insisting that "friends would never do this!"

Especially when it's stuff like openly saying how much they care for each other, or being there for each other during a crisis, or risking their lives for each other. Like, way to tell every aro person reading that "you will never have/be worthy of this."

I'm not saying you have to only have queerplatonic headcanons from now on. Or that you're not allowed to interpret certain interactions between characters who are canonically platonic friends as actually being romantic.

THANK YOU. you put it into words.

…but you’re not sure how to go at it. Maybe you don’t know much about aromantic people, or you don’t know if your representation is respectful. This post is meant to be a primer on how to go about making an aromantic character for your story.

This is a fairly long post with multiple sections under the read more. How much of it will be useful to you depends on what you want to write. I’m writing this post as something that could be helpful to an alloromantic writer who plans on making an aromantic main character in an original novel, but of course different writers making different kinds of stories won’t all need to think about the same things nor do the same amount of research.

The post is organized in the following sections:

Part 1: Building your character’s identity - a series of questions you may ask yourself when creating an aromantic’s character identity

Part 2: Relationships - summary of the main types of relationships aromantic people can have

Part 3: Arophobia and amatonormativity - summary of the kinds of discrimination and struggles aromantic people face

Part 4: Bad representation and negative stereotypes - what aros don’t like to see in fiction, especially about ourselves

Conclusions - …conclusions

Resources - some links to websites and articles you may use to do some beginner research

An important thing to note: I am writing this post as a single aromantic person. Not everyone in the aro community may agree on everything. Furthermore, while I have given a quick rundown of many topics, this is hardly a complete guide. Research is your friend.