It is incredibly frustrating to be aromantic and for people to treat you like you’re heartless, or could never care about anyone at all. We are also put in the unfair and uncomfortable position of justifying our lack of romantic love and explaining the “validity” of other relationship types. It can feel like you’re still stuck within the system, because either way society is telling you that you yourself are not enough, and that you need to be partnered in some way. some people never want a partner, and that’s incredibly fucking valid and should be respected.
In trying to navigate aromantic identity in relationships, I also have to deal with the frustration of being a gender nonconforming Black woman as well. I am hypersexualized, told i’m ugly, expected to perform emotional labor for free, subject to hella micro- and macroagressions, told that i’m scary, and always trying to make myself palatable for someone else. this is exhausting.
and so it is fun to dream and think about love and relationships, and i have some very important and meaningful relationships with folx, but because of my undesirability, because of my Blackness and Black womanhood, and because of my aromantic identity, I feel very much cut off from having the types of relationships that I would like to have. It can be difficult and frustrating and isolating to see friends, family, strangers, move in and out of casual, serious, or no labels types of relationships knowing that if they one day decide to have a romantic partner, they will be supported in that choice. Perhaps not by all of society, perhaps not everywhere, but there are models for what their relationship could look like. Society has given them options on how to find partners–as a Black Aromantic, I have been given nothing.
Being Black, Aro, and Imagining Relationships, hello! from a Black Aromantic by Mazarae, idkjustwordsyameen.wordpress (2021)
