It's honestly interesting to be rotating some ace and aro stuff in my mind this Pride month because on the one hand I'm very much as aromantic and asexual as ever, but on the other I'm now married (platonically, but most people don't assume that at first) and far less uncomfortable with sex and romance than I was at one point in time.
Like, I actually do think the -repulsed/-averse labels still apply to me in some ways, but I also think that they sort of flatten the fact that there are a million different ways sex and romance can crop up in your life, because of how omnipresent it is in society. And some people really are uncomfortable with all of them, and that's so fair! But it does feel a little strange to me to have been in that situation previously, and to suddenly be like. Well. Sometimes it's fine actually. But only sometimes, or under specific circumstances.
I think I've been dwelling on this some because we're going to be moving imminently for my PhD and a lot of people I've met in my program so far do know I have a wife, but NOT that I'm aromantic or asexual (yet, at least, not yet -- I'm sure it'll come up). And it's sort of weird to be like huh. I used to struggle with calling Scribe my partner because I was stressed about the assumptions people were going to make, not understanding we have something queerplatonic specifically. Whereas now I'm more just glad people know she's important to me and that I have an easy shorthand for that and am okay with the explaining of the particulars coming later, if that makes sense? Like, I do still want to explain. I'm very aro anc that's very important to me, and also I want to expand people's idea of what might be going on within a committed relationship. But I'm no longer quite as paralyzed about someone misinterpreting things -- that's on them, not on me!
In any case. I'm so glad I'm aro/ace but also so glad I have someone to get through scary life stuff with, and I'm never going to stop being grateful that she loves being in an explicitly (queer)platonic marriage as much as I do. But man. There's just so many nuances to all this and sometimes it really does hit me that every ace and/or aro person's relationship to sex and romance is pretty unique, and I wish we talked about that more in ways that built solidarity instead of like. Creating one million different microlabels to switch between whenever or if your relationship with them shifts.