No Romo Zone

You and this perfect person who you’ve never met before, to come out of nowhere, fit your life perfectly, complete you and make you whole for the first time in your life, much like your mother did for me.”

And even though what he said sounds sweet or whatever, what it manifested in my seven-year-old brain was this, “If you are not with someone, you are broken. If you are not with someone, you are incomplete. If you are not with someone, you are not whole.”

And that’s not just something my dad made me feel, that’s something that we as a society have made every single child born in the last 40 years feel. Every Disney princess has a prince, every prince has a princess, every television show or movie always has a character in it that doesn’t want to be in a relationship. They’re happy with who they are. But then by the end of the series, guess what. They were wrong! They were wrong for wanting to be alone, what a fucking idiot. Everyone needs someone, yeah. It’s all to do with love.

And when you raise children in that world, where everything points towards love, when you’ve raised them for 18 fucking years, when we become an adult for the first time in our late teens and our early 20s, we’re so terrified. We’re so trying to be an adult that some of us will take the wrong person, the wrong jigsaw piece, and just fucking jam them into our jigsaws anyway, denying that they clearly don’t fit. I’m gonna force this fucking person into our lives, because we’d much rather have something than nothing.

Then five years later, you’re stood looking at a jigsaw you don’t recognize, being like, “Ah! There’s a fucking cunt in the middle of this.” And in that moment you have a very, very difficult question to ask yourself. Do I admit the last five years of my life have been a waste? Do I waste the rest of my life?

My generation has become so obsessed with starting the rest of their lives that they’re willing to give up the one they are currently living. We have romanticized the idea of romance, and it is cancerous. People are more in love with the idea of love than the person they are with. The worst thing you can do with your life is spend it with the wrong human being.

Something I touched up from a whiiiile ago in celebration of pride this year lmao

i'm not aplatonic myself, but even i can see how the aspec community excludes them. like, yeah, sure, being aromantic is cool!...as long as you still experience platonic attraction and have platonic relationships and replace romance with friendship at every turn.

and if you're aromantic, you also have to be asexual. because sex without romance is immoral and dirty and abusive. and every aroallo is an invader who's trying to destroy your perfect, pure, sex-negative aspec community. if an aromantic is not asexual, they are not a valid aromantic.

if you've ever found yourself wondering why aplatonics and aroallos alike have their own small communities instead of just being a part of the wider aspec community, this is why. you drove us away.

I wrote a master’s thesis on intentionally single people, and the number of them that said in various ways, “I didn’t know not dating people was even an option at first” was absolutely tragic. They honestly thought they had no choice and it never occurred to them that opting out was even a possibility available to them.  

People honestly believe these are life experience you are required to have AND THEY ARE NOT.

And I can't imagine not frequently feeling sexual emotions about my partners- I'm not capable of suppressing that or idk not even feeling that to begin with(?I have no idea what allorose people mean when they say their relationship is only sexual when they have sex and at no other time. Like- do they just not feel sexual attraction at other moments ?? wouldn't that be not perfectly allosexual?). I don't understand how people who feel sexual attraction apparently don't feel sexually about affection like hugs or kisses with their partners.

But the expected relationship model is generally that people romantically date someone then maybe, only if they both want to and feel ready, it becomes also sexual (although, generally it is still expected that it eventually becomes sexual), and that sounds like torture to me because I can't put myself through dating like that when Im not even romance favorable until I feel romantic attraction to someone. My experience is more like I want a sexual relationship but theres a low chance of me feeling romantic attraction and romance can only happen if I and the other person are ready for it(and Im polyam/polyerosous so I don't do monogamy anyways)

That's probably why I prefer to be with other alloaros and alloarospecs. So many alloromantics are just so obsessed with dating and it feels like even the ones who claim to like sexual relationships without romance expect you to eventually be okay with romance. And it feels like people only care about sexual consent and don't care about how romance (and other things like friendship etc.) requires consent too.

I found a picrew with the aplatonic flag!

It also has the anattractional spectrum, anattractional, omniaspec, loveless aplatonic, and demiplatonic flags. Going to try to start an aplatonic picrew chain! Here’s mine!

Edit to add that they have an androgyne flag also and I'm enjoying this a lot. And also I forgot to actually add the apl flag, so here's another one I made:

Aplatonic l Aroace Green and Purple

*aplatonic is not an arospec identity*

Aroace sunset l Aroallo l Aromantic

Arospec l Demiromantic l Loveless