#aroace experiences

i’m aroace, and after spending years feeling like i was standing slightly outside of conversations about love, attraction, relationships, and even queerness itself, i finally decided i wanted a space dedicated to people like me.

this blog is going to be for, aroace culture, memes, identity discussions, queerplatonic relationships, late-night existential thoughts, joy, anger. community, the weird loneliness that comes with being told your experiences are “just friendship”, and the even weirder relief of realizing there are other people who feel the exact same way.

being aroace can feel strange sometimes because the world is built around romance and sex in ways people don’t even notice. songs, movies, books, family expectations, conversations with friends — it’s everywhere. people act like romantic attraction is universal, like everyone is moving toward the same ending, and if you aren’t, then something must be wrong with you.

except there isn’t.

there is nothing wrong with building your life differently.

there is nothing wrong with not wanting romance. there is nothing wrong with not experiencing sexual attraction. there is nothing wrong with valuing friendship as deeply as other people value romance. there is nothing wrong with not fitting into the story people expected you to tell.

i think a lot of aroace people grow up trying to force themselves into narratives that were never made for them. i know i did. you convince yourself that eventually it’ll “click.” eventually you’ll meet the right person. eventually you’ll understand what everyone else is talking about.

and sometimes you realize the reason it never clicked is because you were never broken in the first place. you were just trying to read from the wrong script.

anyway. this blog is not going to be all doom and existentialism. i also want this to be a place for happiness because being aroace is not inherently sad. there is so much joy in platonic love. in friendship. in community. in knowing yourself. in realizing your future does not have to look traditional in order to be meaningful.

also there will absolutely be garlic bread jokes here. i do not make the rules.

AroAce Experiences Bingo (blank card)

Hi everyone!

This is my aroace project. It talks about aroace and its rep in the media and how it should happen more often.

I am very proud of it this is for a class so the formatting might not make sense, but I changed a bunch of names for my own anonymity.

Not everyone's comments were used, I only used a few in the actual essay but everyone else's were taken into consideration and assisted with upholding the thought processes.

There is an anecdote and a dear reader letter, as well as a small booklet I have made to go along with the project.

Please let me know your thoughts!!

Romantic - Pan Greyromantic and/or Cupioromantic, Romance Favorable

Greyromantic because while I can't really say for sure if I've ever experienced romantic attraction before, I have experienced crushes, or rather squishes, before. They could have been purely aesthetic or platonic attraction, I think my brain is like holding out hope that I might actually be able to experience romantic attraction. As amatonormative as it sounds. It's mostly because I'm going to attempt to seek out a romantic relationship someday once I've finally "got my life together" whatever that means, and I would feel super guilty for the person I date if there's zero romantic attraction there on my part...

Cupioromantic perfectly describes me, as I want to participate in romantic relationships and get married someday, despite experiencing little to no romantic attraction. The reason I haven't used this label until now is because I read that some people in the aromantic community don't like it as an identity label due to it technically describing a behavior that you can control (whether you get into romantic relationships or not) rather than a feeling that you can't control (whether you experience romantic attraction or not), and it's seen by some in the community as reinforcing amatonormativity. I didn't want to upset people if using cupioromantic was wrong. But it's not. Cupioromantic is a valid identity, if anyone needed to hear that. I will be using cupioromantic from here on out, along with the other labels I use.

Up until now, I've been using romance favorable to describe that sentiment. That still applies, I am a romantic, despite being aromantic. The aromantic only applies to the type of attraction I experience, and has nothing to do with my desires.

I also use pan to describe me on top of all that because the few times I've had squishes, I've had them on both men and women. It felt more like the "genderblind" version of pan attraction as it was more about thinking they were adorable and liking their personality without gender coming to the equation at all. Going by this logic, I feel like this could also apply to nonbinary, trans and cis people of all gender identities. It doesn't matter to my brain whatsoever.

Sexual - Asexual, Sex Averse/Sex Favorable (depends on the day)

I identify as asexual. Although whether I'm sex-averse or sex-favorable depends on how I'm feeling each day. Ever since I opened myself up to reading explicit fanfics my brain has become more open to the idea of at least giving sex a try. It still sounds a bit icky sensory wise, but I think that if I tried it with someone who I trusted to respect my boundaries, I would be comfortable with giving it a go. Obviously I won't try it if I'm not 100% comfortable. Although I do want to have kids one day, and this is the "cheapest" way to do it. I'm not affording adoption, sperm bank or test tube baby on a preschool teacher salary lol.

Gender - Genderfluid and depending on the day I identify as either woman or gendervoid. Sometimes I feel like both describe me at the same time.

I was assigned female at birth, and I still very much identify with being a girl. I love presenting in a feminine way, I love traditionally feminine things, feel most comfortable using she/her/hers pronouns and feel confident in my body. But I've always felt a slight detachment between myself and other women. Whenever issues affecting women come up, my brain would always think like "Oh that's not good, I'm sorry that's happening to them" as though it doesn't affect me, despite the fact that I'm a woman. I have almost a dissociation between women and me even though I belong to that group.

I really thought about gender identity to see if I identify with any of the other gender identities out there, and every time I've always come back from it with "Definitely still cisgender woman, but with a hint of nonbinary". I didn't identify with the nonbinary part of me because I didn't want to lie about my identity if I'm actually a cis girl. But then, when a transphobic classmate jokingly asked me what my pronouns were, I came to the realization that I don't really care. I will always be most comfortable with she/her, but they/them and he/him and even neopronouns don't feel wrong on me. They feel neutral. I wouldn't feel uncomfortable being referred to by any of them. After a bit more research, I found the agender identity and it certainly described me, but it didn't really feel quite right either. Then I found gendervoid and it felt perfect. Gendervoid and agender basically mean the same thing, not identifying with any gender identity and feeling like you don't have a gender. But gendervoid specifically describes feeling like there's a void where your gender identity should be. That describes the dissociation from any gender identity that I experience a lot of the time. But I still identify as a girl as well.

Genderfluid still doesn't feel quite right, but it does describe me feeling both identities together.

I've had posts that "lumped" aroallos in with aros that don't use the split attraction model attacked for "excluding" and "erasing" aroallos.

I've been bullied into deleting posts that talked solely about my experience as an aro, because I was "talking over alloaros". Nowhere did I mention being aroace, so they either looked at my blog or decided from my username that I'm aroace. Either way, it had nothing to do with anything I said in my post because I phrased it extremely carefully. I no longer comment on aro posts and I don't make my own either, because I have never seen an aroallo call out the behaviour.

Aroaces are routinely erased from aro culture and history. I have ample evidence of this on my blog, so I am not going to link sources.

Aroaces are routinely shouted at for talking about "aphobia" and failing to understand which aspects of the aphobia hurt them as an ace and which harm them as an aro, as if the aroace experience can be cut into two halves.

I can go on, too. There are other examples I can give.

At this point, I'm past caring that alloaces hurt alloaros. I am past caring because alloaces and alloaros both hurt aroaces and nobody gives a monkey's.