Sometimes I think about my experiences as an aro wlm. I’ve seen like, a couple of posts wanting more aro het women to talk about how they navigate gender and dating and attraction and how it differs from allocishet women, and I have a few thoughts on it. Growing up, I knew a lot of allocishet women. And I think if someone were to ask me if I related to their experiences, I would have to answer….
It depends.
There were plenty of times where I did feel alienated by allocishet women. Talk about crushes tends to alienate me by default because I didn’t really get them. But I think the greatest tell as to whether or not I would relate to, or at least understand, an allocishet woman and her experiences with attraction or gender, is kind of defined by how much she buys into tropes about women and how they should want men.
In society, there’s been a lot of expectations about the ways women should want love. In the environment that I grew up in, a lot of women are supposed to want to be wives, not lovers. A lot of women are supposed to want the role of being a wife, but you aren’t supposed to have sex before marriage. It’s not just about the man you fell in love with, it’s about fulfilling a plan. A plan which I see many allocishets more than happy to fulfil.
And well, I just couldn’t relate to that. The allocishet women who I relate to, are the women who don’t feel completely comfortable with the arrangement either. Allocishet women who don’t want marriage, who are serial daters. Allocishet women who are polyam, or who don’t want children, or who are in or want a breadwinner wife/househusband arrangement with their partners, or who are kinky in some way. I have seen myself and my thoughts and desires reflected in certain allocishet autistic women too, especially when they write about how autism affects the way they navigate relationships. Allocishet women who, in some way, defied the standard narrative of becoming a wife and mother.
In some ways, aromantism prevented me from having a very “typical” girlhood. No first crushes, no handsome prince narrative, no fantasy of a wedding day. To me, my girlhood was a girl going on adventures with fairy friends to stop the wicked goblins. It was a girl proving her power and skills to doubting boys and earning their respect. It was a magic user learning of injustice and doing all that was in her power to stop it. And this is just my truth and how aromantism affected my experiences with gender. But if you asked me whether or not I related to allocishet women, I would answer with “it depends”. Was wanting to marry a prince a huge part of her childhood fantasies, or did she see herself more in the witch wanting to stop grave injustice from happening?
