#aro thoughts

I know romantic love isn’t the “highest level” of love, but I crave it, I think because I crave the idea that someone would love me and be so openly affectionate.

But I know I can’t fall in love and a romantic relationship in practice cannot happen and would not be truly desirable. I’m merely creating an unrealistic ideal of a romantic relationship.

This here is now in attendum to my one post where i ended up coming up with the concept of a "Romance Object" (basically a sex object, but applied to romance instead of sex).

It's such a weirdly common thing once you actually start to think about it, especially in amatonormative society. People fantasizing about their crushes, the tendency in most fandoms to romantically ship characters instead of platonically or otherwise, the very existence of the concept of a "dream partner" (prince or bride or otherwise) as an ideal to chase and lense to view potential partners through and measure up against. The willingness in extreme cases to also keep on persisting and pressuring another person with romantic gestures and so on.

And lastly also the perception and base assumption of simply being worth less for not acting perfectly like a romantic object. The patch up of that with "well, if they would've truly loved you, they wouldn't have done any of that" instead of literally just "woah, that was fucked up."

How every instance of two people, who happened to be able to fullfill each other's romantic desires and needs, gets picked out and shown around as an example of romance always being good and aspiring over the hundreds of couples where that just wasn't the case or didn't work out even with work put in.

How aromantic people have experiences of either getting pitied for their lack of romantic desire or not taken seriously when they are the object of romantic desire to someone. Or how often aromantic people get called cold hearted and emotionless, even manipulative for openly stating that they either just don't feel it or feel uncomfortable about receiving unwanted romantic attention.

Firstly in that amatonormatism is just so wide spread and expected of others. When I assumed I was alloromantic, and saw other alloromantic get into relationships, there was this pressure that you Had to prioritize your romantic relationship over every other relationship in your life EVER. All of your friends, all of your family, your children, co-workers, every single person in your life (oftentimes including yourself) MUST take a back seat to your romantic and sexual partner. And it’s ridiculous because I am also sure that most people don’t actually want that.

When I was in my toxic relationship, I was essentially expected to stop talking to all of my friends. Most of that was just due to the controlling nature of my ex but it was also the expectation from everyone else in my life too. People who weren’t negatively effect by the harmful nature of that relationship distanced, people who didn’t even know what he did to me and didn’t experience my negative outlash from being in that position still left and distanced. Everyone assumes you’re prioritizing them now and they react accordingly. I hated this, and so did many of my friends. But it was just the assumption.

I’m loosing track of my thoughts but my other thought is just that— it’s so expected yet literally no one I know actually wants that. So many people have expressed to me sadness and anger and lonliness when their other important friends got in a relationship and stopped talking to them, I’ve felt and seen other people experience the pain of the pressure to have to stop being as close to their friends as they once were— stop talking, stop engaging, no more touching ever, no more sleeping over, no more intimate private conversations. You seemingly have to forfeit the depth of love for everyone else you have.

I have also had potential partners + people I’ve engaged in more-than-platonic behavior with get visibly weirded out when I prioritize my relationship with my friends. They see it as weird when I tell them there are things I will only tell and do with my friends, that I will never tell them. They get weird when I prioritize my friends over them. They get weird when they see that romance isn’t my priority. This goes even with relationships that it’s been made clear it’s only sexual/platonic but engaging in more actions that are seen as romantic.

I know most alloromantic people aren't jerks who completely forget their friends when they get into relationships (I have friends who are married, and they haven't ditched me), but time is a finite resource, and someone else getting more of it inevitably means you get less. I don't blame my allo friends for that - it just isn't pleasant to experience.

The fact is that some people need to balance their emotional connection between multiple people, not concentrate most of it on just one. I'm a 'one or two eggs in each basket' kind of person (polyamorous people will know what I'm on about - we're fighting the same war on different fronts).