Okay. Lisa Braeden is aromantic. Lisa/Dean is in fact aro4aro. Why? Let's go.
Who the hell still goes on about a hookup they had 9 years ago? Like. Okay. With Dean it makes sense. He has no life outside of hunting, Sam, and sex. I can understand Dean still being like "If I'm going to die, I want to fuck Lisa again first." But Lisa has a life. She has a child and friends and a stable job. What woman with all of those things talks about one weekend nine years ago so much that when Dean appears everyone is like "oooo. That's the guy she always talks about." I don't think an alloromantic woman would talk that much about a hookup that presumably had nothing romantic about it to her respectable married friends. The best night of an alloromantic woman's life would probably involve a boyfriend and romance, not just crazy sex. Which brings us to my next point.
She deliberately sought out guys who are not going to be available for romance. When she says that Dean isn't Ben's father, it was some other unattached drifter, she also says, "I had a type. Leather jacket, couple of scars, no mailing address." And yeah, a lot of us think she was lying about the first part, but there's no real reason for her to lie about the second. Which, as an aromantic allosexual? What a fantastic strategy. 10/10. And like, let's be really clear here: looking at what we know of the timeline of her life, she went right from picking up guys who would never be anything other than one nights stands to being a single mom and presumably being way too busy for that. For all we know, she might never have actually had a romantic relationship ever until Dean.
She seems really happy with being a single mother. Like... If I got pregnant by someone I knew I was never going to see again, I would be going to Planned Parenthood because I know I couldn't handle that alone. Lisa could have gotten an abortion. She didn't. That raises the possibility that she wanted to be a single parent, potentially even more than she'd want to have a kid with a partner. That's true for some aromantic people. Hell, while now I wouldn't want that because I'm just way too disabled for that, as an aro kid I had multiple different fantasies about it. Like, usually in media being a single mom is trashy and depressing and sad. It's honestly really interesting that Supernatural, the misogyny show, has such a positive depiction of it with Lisa.
She consistently understands Dean and his thought processes and priorities incredibly well. It's easier to get people if they're similar to you. And I think anyone seeing this post probably already agrees that Dean is aromantic.
The entire dynamic of Lisa and Dean getting back together is... weird? To be clear, their relationship up to that point is: a) they hook up once, b) a decade later, he saves her kid, c) a year and a half later he shows up on her doorstep crying and then leaves, d) he comes back and she lets him live with her as her partner for a year. That is not the normal trajectory of a relationship. At no point is there any dating there. But if you ask me, it makes a lot of sense for an aro who doesn't really understand romantic relationships to begin with.
I'm leaving list format now so I can really dig into this. Let's start with a personal anecdote from me. When I was in high school, there was this guy. He was pretty lonely because he was disabled and, you know, kids are assholes. It was pretty well-known that he would ask out pretty much any girl who was ever friendly with him. And like, not in a creepy way—if you said no, that was that. He was more than happy to stay friends. Most of his friends were girls in fact, and they'd pretty much all gotten asked and then moved on. Anyway. I got asked. And unlike all the other girls, I went "well. Relationships are a thing people do. I think he's attractive, and that's all crushes are, right? Sure, I'll say yes." I didn't bother examining if I actually had romantic feelings for him (I didn't think those existed, I thought all crushes were purely about attraction to someone's appearance), I just went with it. Needless to say, I didn't know I was aromantic yet.
I'm not convinced that Lisa knows she's aromantic, either. I think when she did all her hookups, she told herself, "I'm just young and having fun and don't want to be tied down right now." And then once Ben was around, she said that she was just too busy for a relationship. A lot of aromantics and asexuals continually push off realizing that they don't want the same things as other people with excuses like "oh I'm just too young for that" or "I'm too busy with school" or "I'm trying to get started with my career" and it takes them a really long time to realize that even when all of those aren't true anymore, they still don't actually want romance and/or sex. I think because Lisa went right from "I'm too young" to "I'm too busy parenting," she probably still hasn't had that realization. She assumed that eventually she'd find the right guy and want to settle down. And then Dean Winchester ended up right in front of her, and she went "I guess this is it."
If we look back at 3x02, her first reaction to the idea of having anything to do with Dean again is "hell no." That makes sense. I think that's the normal reaction if a hookup suddenly wants to get together after eight years. She only changes her tune because he's really good with her kid. He wishes Ben was his own kid, even. And when that's the case? Well, Ben could use a male role model. She's always wanted that for him. And it would be nice to have a coparent. Plus hey, Dean needs this too. He could use a place to stay and a thing to do and someone to support him. Ben would have a Mom and a Dad like he's supposed to, and Lisa would have a boyfriend, like she always said she would eventually when she got around to it. There's a great opportunity for everyone right in front of her. She might as well go for it.
At no point do either her or Dean realize that actual feelings for each other played no part in it. They both wanted to be coparents who were friends and fucked, and they both figured "hey, that's basically what romantic relationships are, right?" They didn't mean to seek out an aro4aro QPR arrangement—they just both fell into it and assumed it was normal.
Anyway full disclosure that, a lot of this draws off my own personal experience of what being an allosexual aromantic is like, so other aromantics might look at this and go "no actually she doesn't sound aro at all to me" and that's fair. Also I have never been alloromantic, so when I say "I don't think an alloromantic would do what Lisa does," that is fully a guess. I do not actually know.
