Why Do I Do This To Myself?

[andraste]

Note to self: just because someone on the internet brings up ace stuff and asserts there are no people who are aromantic but not asexual doesn't mean you have to correct them by pointing out that you exist. Nothing good ever comes of it. But people who acknowledge that people can feel romantic attraction without feeling sexual attraction exist but cannot get their heads around the reverse continue to confuse me.

(Look, I am not saying that the split attraction model is perfect, just that explains the experience of a whole lot of people, including me, so I am going to keep on using it to model my own experience. Other people can do whatever.)

We just got to my least favourite Aromantic Bingo square: aren't aro people just sociopaths? And I can never leave that one alone. Because obviously romantic love is the only way to tell you're capable of empathy, donchaknow. Love for family and friends and cats doesn't count!

Other bingo squares include:



"Maybe you haven't just met the right person yet!" Well, maybe not? But at a certain point I came to the conclusion that statistics were not on the side of this argument. I mean, I could meet a woman I want to have sex with tomorrow, but given that I am thirty-eight and this has never happened before, I am pretty comfortable calling myself straight. As an aro.

"You're just mentally ill." Well, yes, I personally am. But even if there is a connection - and given that most mentally ill people are not aro, I am far from convinced - it doesn't make any practical difference to the situation. (I've heard this one more than once from mental health professionals, to the point where I've started lying to them. Which is probably a bad idea, but if one more people tries to argue me into having romantic feelings I will scream.)

"You're not oppressed!" Never said I was. I think I'm still allowed to be annoyed when people call me a sociopath, though.

"You don't belong in the LGBT community." Never said I did. I cannot tell you how much I do not care about this argument. (Except on behalf of aro people who definitely DO belong in the LGBT community because they are gay or bi or trans or whatever and have to put up with this nonsense.)

"You just want to be a special snowflake." Being aro does not make me special, any more than being short or brunette or soy intolerant or any other random characteristic I possess. It's just a thing.

"That's just normal." Glad you think so, couldn't agree more. Now come back when you're a woman over thirty-five who has never been in a romantic relationship and has no interest in ever being in one, and see how normal other people think you are.

"But why are you interested in fictional romances?" Because people often like reading fiction about things they do not want to do in real life? I also do not want to really kill people!

"But you'll die aloooooooooone and cats will eat you." We can only hope!

Comments

[lilacsigil]

I also do not want to really kill people!

Maybe you just haven't met the right person yet!

[aris_tgd]

If I'd had a drink I would have snorted it out of my nose.

[andraste]

Pffffft. If I was ever going to murder someone, it would have been the guy who lived across the corridor from me the second year I lived in a university residential college. I certainly had some disturbing fantasies involving his head and an axe.

(He lived his entire really loud life with his door wide open. Although on the bright side this lead to the occasion I listened incredulously while the local Young Liberals planned to raffle marijuana as a fund-raising exercise.)

[aris_tgd]

*allosexual aromantic ^5*

[aris_tgd]

Also, it's sad how much of this nonsense comes from people not thinking very much of friendship, isn't it?

[andraste]

*high fives you back*

I am always confused when people say 'how can you never feel love?' because, really, the only person you love is your current romantic partner??? I really hope people don't mean that!

[threewalls]

I'm sorry you're dealing with this nonsense. Not that knowing it's nonsense makes it easier to deal with, I'm sure.

Why are other people so concerned with policing what random strangers experience?

[andraste]

Why are other people so concerned with policing what random strangers experience?

I wish I knew! I love it when people tell me what is going on in my brain. (So far none of these people have actually turned out to be Charles Xavier. Unfortunately.)

[labingi]

Thank you for this manifesto. It really sucks to be completely inexplicable to most of society. There is a particular frustration attached to trying to express something about yourself that is at once very simple and very important and to just hit a brick wall--or perhaps more like a damping field into which your words disappear as if they were eaten by some strange acoustic phenomenon.

My more long-winded rant on my version of this is here. And, it's funny, in my own rant I assert, in passing, that people have no problem with the idea that sexual attraction can exist without romantic attraction. But I suspect you're up against two particular factors that problematize that: 1) having aro as a personal characteristic, not just having isolated instances of sexual attraction without romantic attraction and 2) being a woman, which, yeah.

Thank you for continuing to try to communicate about it. That's all we can do--for ourselves and to move the discourse forward.

By the way, my aro friend also has an ambition of being eaten by her cats. :-)

[aris_tgd]

That's my other pet peeve about being aroallo--the people who respond "Hurr hurr, don't you mean being a straight man?"

Because NO, obviously, the way we ignore romantic attraction in men and overprioritize it in women... grrrrr.

[andraste]

My life would be so much easier if straight men never had romantic feelings!

(I mean, it would be worse for a whole lot of other people, so I do not wish it so. But it has ruined several perfect good potential friends-with-benefits arrangements for me.)

[labingi]

Yeah, a definite double standard. And I don't doubt there are a lot of men out there who deal with crap because of it too.

[andraste]

I don't understand why it's so difficult to grasp! The people who don't believe that ace and/or aro people at all, OK, I think they're wrong, but at least they're consistent. But this is not the first time I've come across people who believe in ace people and aroace people but not aro people who are not also ace, which is just inexplicable to me.

Sometimes I explain it with 'you know how most people can have sex without having romantic feelings for their partner at least sometimes? Now imagine that you feel that way all the time, about everyone.' It really is the permanence of the state that people find confusing or unlikely.

A large part of the reason I keep banging my head on this particular wall is that I hope every 'I am aro' conversation I have on the internet is read by at least one person who thinks 'huh, good to know' and goes on with their day knowing something they did not know before.

I've never understood what was meant to be so bad about being eaten by cats. If it happens that you have a) died at home and b) with the company of cats. It's not like you still need your internal organs. (I mean, I would be concerned about making sure someone came to rescue the cats before they ran out, but other than that there are worse things that could happen to your corpse.)

(Sorry for any inbox spam, this posted twice for some reason.)

[labingi]

Good point about cats. :)

Warning for wandery ruminations... It strikes me that I have a character in my original writing (male, and that's probably not a coincidence) who could be described as aromantic but quite sexual--and that doesn't mean he's not interested in people on an interpersonal level: he basically likes to sleep with people he likes/is friends with.

Which brings me back to pondering what the line between romantic and aromantic actually is. (And I suspect there isn't a hard line, just as there isn't between gay and straight.) I consider myself to be romantic... but the older I get the more I wonder if that's true. There's a lot me in the way this character bonds, which is to say, like him, I basically bond with friends. So what is "romantic" attachment anyway as opposed to that? Is it the feeling of falling in love? And does that mean it generally goes away (mostly) anyway after you've been with someone for 2+ years? I suspect there's massive personal variation here and the more you break it down, the more it's hard to define in broad categories what "type(s)" a lot of people are.

I suspect one reason it's easier for people to grasp "asexual-aromatic" is that it suggests someone who doesn't want a partner/likes living alone (hence the being eaten by cats jokes), whereas "sexual-aromantic" suggests a sort of Bondian using people for sex (and this stereotype skews masculine)--also not wanting to be in a relationship/live with someone. But I also see no reason that a sexual or asexual aromantic would necessarily not want to be in a partnership, with a friend, for example, or a sibling. And, of course, there's no reason that "sexual-aromantic" has to suggest having a low degree of personal regard for others, regardless of whether or not one wants a significant other. There are just many possibilities, and only a few filter through to recognizable "orientation" categories. /end wandery rumination