I love that Grace says he and Rocky "haven't run into anything where our cultures clash" while they're actively navigating two pretty major points of difference. From Grace's perspective, being watched in your sleep is sort of unnerving; for Rocky it's imperative. From Rocky's perspective, eating is taboo and private; for Grace it's a casual, social activity. When Grace says they haven't run into any culture clashes, he's just woken up to Rocky watching him and now he's eating breakfast. It's obviously not true that they have no conflicts in their social norms! It's just that they instinctively accommodate each other with curiosity and empathy, finding ways to bend on the things that matter to each other and explain when something is really important to themselves. Grace has spent his life holding other people at arm's length, and then in Rocky he meets someone who makes him want to do the work, and that work becomes so natural he doesn't even realise he's doing it.

#grace who has historically been abrasive and uncompromising to his peers: wow not doing that for the first time in my life feels great

the thing with aroace grace headcanons is like. i can totally see it. it’s not what i’m most interested in because my hobby happens to be writing romantic drama and pornography, but i can see it. it’s my runner-up headcanon for sure. but. he doesn’t identify that way. he instinctively flinches away from anything that even implies hes anything other than a perfectly normal heterosexual man who has all his shit completely figured out. he doesn’t identify using that phrase, and if someone explained it to him, i don’t think he’d identify with the concept, either. he’d be like “that sounds awesome! that’s not me though, i fulfilled the Normal Girlfriend Experience shortly after college. didn’t work out but i’ll probably find someone i mean a woman specifically who i click with one of these days, and then we’ll have sex and get married or whatever it is you’re supposed to do.” and then he’d just blithely go on not thinking about it. he’s a school teacher in san francisco in the 2020s, he’s on the front lines of the culture wars whether he likes it or not, he knows what pronouns are, he may very plausibly know the words “aromantic” and “asexual” but it has never in his life occurred to him to apply those to himself. and it quite possibly never will. he’s not particularly introspective and he absolutely does not have the level of self-insight required to understand why he’s only had one long-term relationship in his life, and why it ended so fucking badly. not solely due to his orientation you understand, but also due to his various flaws as a person. where was i going with this. oh yeah. i need everyone to make this guy more repressed right now immediately.