#aro relationship

My boyfriend of 2 years came out as aroace to me and claims he wants to stay queerplatonic with me, but I've always been an "all or nothing" allo girl and don't feel comfortable at the thought of being qp.

But I don't want to:

1. Let him go, because he said that he doesn't want us to change. He said he just can't promise a future with me.

2. Come off as aphobic, or worst, BE queerplatonic-phobic.

3. Jump to drastic conclusions when I've never been in a qp relationship before.

So, I'm reaching out to ask: What do I do? Should I give up and part ways, or should I give qpr a shot? If I go with the latter, how do qprs work? How do I live in one? How do I love an aroace?

Okay, so first thing’s first: you have no need to be scared or apologise. Not to me and not ever for seeking advice from the community. That’s why the community is here. And you want to learn so you’re not aphobic or queerplatonicphobic. Aromantic relationships can be intimidating and it’s okay to be unsure. You’re not a bad person or aphobic.

First rule about queerplatonic relationships: it’s whatever the people in it want it to be. Alloromantic people can and do have QPRs. What is important is that the both of you can agree on the type of relationship you want to have, the dynamic you want to maintain with each other. A queerplatonic relationship can be whatever the people in it want it to be, doesn’t matter what it looks like to the outside world. The relationship is yours and it’s for the two of you.

With that said, if you truly can not find it in yourself to become comfortable with this shift in your relationship– no, I’ll need to interrupt myself here

Your partner coming out as aroace does not have to change anything. Like, I should’ve lead with that. Your partner coming out as aroace and wanting a queerplatonic relationship does – at face value – not require any changes besides taking what you have now and calling it queerplatonic. Slap the new label on and you’re good to go.

Okay, now, I don’t want to assume whether he might want other changes about your dynamic. If he doesn’t, you need to figure out if you’re comfortable with the new label or if that already is a hiccup. You’re continuing your relationship as is and just call it by a different name. A rose by any other name, etc etc.

Now, if you truly can not find it in yourself to be comfortable with this… let him go.

I’m kinda bad with relationship advice and already feel like I’m rambling but you reached out to me and I want to do a good job. So maybe tackling your 3rd point is the most pressing thing. Maybe you can research and learn more about what a QPR can be (e.g. that it can – among other things – be literally the exact same relationship you’re already having just called differently).

I know it sounds intimidating and “queerplatonic” is a big word and “platonic” usually forces a certain perspective. But it’s just a different coat of paint on the same thing you’ve enjoyed with him thus far. Promise.

Hell, I was okay with my ex-partners continuing to call it a romantic relationship because I felt it was on me that I couldn’t communicate clearly to them.

That’s the other big thing. Big Thing: COMMUNICATION IS KEY

Doesn’t matter romantic, queerplatonic, amical, sexual, alterous. Any relationship requires clear and open and honest communication! Ask him directly what he expects from you. Then think about that. Then tell him what you expect. Does that still match? Great. Done.

But keep your relationship a continuous dialogue. You can not be partners (romantic or queerplatonic) if you don’t communicate your needs and wants.

This is also the “how do I love an aroace”, you’ll need to ask him. Because no two aroace folks are the same. It’s probably weird but rephrase your own question: “How do I love [him]?” And either you can answer that or you need to sit down and talk to him about it anyway. As for the “he can’t promise a future”, yeah, well, could he before coming out? Not to be rude but people change, life changes, none of us really knows what tomorrow holds and while commitment is great it’s hard to promise things with certainty.

I sincerely hope I could help and lessen your worry.

Thank you for reaching out, although I hope you didn’t ask only me and i’ll accordingly tag a few blogs @aroacepositivityplace @aroace-people-are-lgtbq @simplyqueerplatonic @queerplatonicpositivity @no-thx-im-aroace

HI YALL

this post is gonna be a followup of (this post right here), but if you have no idea why I'm making this post, I'll give you the tldr!

A while back, I decided to post a survey regarding tagging queerplatonic relationships/alterous relationships on AO3. With just over 200 responses and the survey now closed, the most favored tag has been decided by popular vote: you guys!!!

I wasn't really expecting to get so much feedback! BUT, I'm proud to announce that the most favored tag for tagging queerplatonic and alterous relationships on AO3 is none other than:

Character A ~ Character B

here are the survey responses! if you'd like to see the responses for yourself, (here's a link to the survey, where you can view previous responses)!

(ID: A screenshot of a survey results page. The survey is titled, "What symbol do you think works/looks best for tagging QPR/Alterous/Ect. relationships on AO3?" It has 222 total responses. The results are as follows:

A ~ B, 102 votes, (45.9%).

A - B, 30 votes, (13.5%).

A + B, 90 votes, (40.5%).

A # B, 14 votes, (6.3%).

A ^ B, 20 votes, (9%).

A * B, 59 votes, (26.6%).

/end ID)

So What Now?

I will be contacting AO3 support with the queerplatonic/alterous tag proposal!

If you guys would like to contribute, keep reading! Since a tag has been decided by popular vote by you guys for tagging queerplatonic/alterous relationships on AO3, I say it's time to start implementing it!

If you have a queerplatonic/alterous relationship tagged on AO3 as either "A & B" or "A/B", I implore you to go in and manually replace them with "A ~ B".

What will this do? Well, the goal is to start using this tag so that AO3 can properly recognize it and give it its own category. You can't categorize something that isn't in use yet, after all!

(When tagging, I found that using spaces between the symbol and the names helped to improve readability, so just like when you're tagging "Character A & Character B", put a space in between to get "Character A ~ Character B" !)

To all who voted, thank you guys so much for your participation! I'm excited to see those of us with queerplatonic/alterous ships be able to officially tag them! Feel free to reblog this to spread the word, and I'll keep you all updated as I contact AO3!

Well hey there friend, I am certainly behind that!!

So, I feel like Geralt could be a classic demiromantic or quoiromantic. He doesn't make a deep enough connecting with most people to develop feelings, so he just doesn't. He feels familial love for his Witcher brothers, and figures the romantic love everyone talks about is basically the same thing. And honestly, who can blame him, because feelings are hard, okay?

He understands and experiences sexual attraction, though. Boy, does he experience it, if you know what i mean. (He has a lot of sex, okay).

Except he meets Jaskier. At first he thinks that he's just attracted to him sexually, at first (or only sexually). Honestly, maybe he does. But then they don't fuck, and they get closer, maybe even like friends. And after a (long) while, he realizes he cares for Jaskier. At first, he figures it's just like he loves his bros, a familial thing, except he feels things for Jaskier that he definitely does not feel for his brothers. Like jealousy when Jaskier gets a little to friendly during his performances, for instance.

So, here are the two options: something comes up in conversation with yennefer, who tells him what a fucking idiot he is. Or, my favorite. Ciri is bored on a long travel at some point and starts telling a long, flowery love story she heard once at court. She talks about a knight who falls in love with a maiden but has to hide his love. He fights for her, protects her, but pines in silence. The knight can't help a bit of selfishness, though, and fights of all of her suitors off, until one day he sees that she's depressed because of her lack of love. The knight confesses what he was doing and why, and the maiden tells him that he was who she wanted all along.

And as the story goes on, Geralt is like "hm. Shit. Fuck." because he feels all those things that the knight felt, and does that mean he's, like, romantically in love with Jaskier? So he sucks it up and tries to find a roundabout way to ask Ciri if he could maybe, possibly like Jaskier? And she just stares at him and goes "duh"

It's a whole before they run into Jaskier again, and never once did Geralt consider that the feelings were mutual. Until they go to an inn where Jaskier is singing a ballad about The One Who Got Away and Ciri has to hold him back from tackling Jaskier and blurting out his newfound feelings.

(referring to this post)

hi hello! short answer: no, nothing's been decided yet!

long answer: here are the results so far! as of right now at the time im posting this (8/26), the poll looks like this! results pulled from a pool of 169 responses.

--(a soft note, some responses were removed because people were not being respectful with the "fill in your own tag" option, which ultimately ended up in me removing that option altogether. i didn't feel it very fair to keep any of the legitimate responses that were sent in when nobody could vote on them. to those of you who sent legitimate responses in, my apologies. i didn't really expect my little post to get as much attention as it did, so if you think i should add anything back in, let me know please!)

45% of people liked A~B

41.4% of people liked A+B

28.4% of people liked A*B

12.4% of people liked A-B

9.5% of people liked A^B

7.7% of people liked A#B

most people liked A~B and A+B, and as i checked the poll i noticed they were fairly tied the entire time i've had this survey up.

i personally really like the way A~B looks, but so long as we get a tag i dont really care at all ahahah. also if anyone knows a way to actually propose this to AO3's tag wranglers, PLEASE let me know! i really want to make this an actual thing!

SO. as of today, the survey is STILL OPEN, and i'll link it below. i wasn't expecting to get as many responses as i did, but i'd really like if we could get more responses and opinions before i close the poll!

one last thing; i'll likely be closing the survey around/after october 31st. it feels like a good end date to me, and i'll probably make a post with the results afterwards!

My partner and I of whom I am married to ( @cheettai​ ) have been trying to figure out how to define our relationship after we both made some new self-discoveries. So I came up with the word Appromour to describe our relationship (More on this after definition and the general usage). It is a portmanteau made of the words Approximate (ie close to actual, but not completely accurate or the same, or notably different but strikingly similar to) and the word Amour meaning love.

 Appromour describes a relationship or partner in which you have relationship that is not romantic, it *may* not quite fit into you “typical” idea of qpp either as well. Its a way to describe a relationship that *may* seem like a romantic relationship to yourself or even outside observers. It looks like and may be very close to a romantic relationship but decidedly still not romantic. 

QPP and Appromour can be used *somewhat* interchangeably, but are differentiated by the fact you may feel something oddly similar to romantic attraction and/or even partial or fleeting romantic feeling. Due to these feeling you may also desire or just be comfortable expressing and/or performing any number of way romantically. Even if a relationship manages to hit some, many or even all of the “traditional” notes of a “typical” romantic relationship,  it still may never feel quite right to call it romantic, then this may be an Appromour relation. This can even mean you feel many of the forms of attraction for said person/people or even desire it enough and feel comfortable with a partner(s) to perform most or all of them, but ultimately you may not feel this way consistently or just off enough that romantic is still wrong. You could feel this way about any non romantic partner(s) that you feel any attraction to and you desire to partake in romantic expression and/or activities but you know it not an actual romantic relation even if may seem or feel similar.

So my Partner discovered they were Lithro and I have been grappling with the fact that I was some form of grey romantic for sometime. All we knew is that we did love each other but it became clear that not in the way the “traditional” romantic love would indicate  (ironically despite a lot of people thinking we are such great example of romantic love). We knew we wanted to be with each other, we knew that we are easily “life companions” but not exactly Romantically. We desired to fulfill a romantic performance and even had  occasionally  expressed  earnestly what one would expect from a traditional romantic relation. However problem was we didn’t feel like we actually could ever achieve that level of “authentic” romantic relationship personally that we both desired and people expected. 

The very word romantic, carried a lot of baggage and weight that was hard to live up to, even when you can feel part of what makes it up. This was especially tough on my partner who felt inadequate with a relationship that was even just *called* romantic, but we struggled because we felt QPP didn’t either. It didn’t really work for how we felt due to how we expressed our relationship. It seemed off for both our personal definitions of a QPP, so after a lot of talk I deiced that it would help my partner and to a lesser extent myself to find a new term to express our relationship. I didn’t want to use “pseudo” as it had too much negative weight and could delegitimise the types of other love we felt for each other. We felt that we had something that felt like something at least rather close to romantic, an approximation of it even...and so the word Appromour was born.