Shipping is so much more FUN when you're aspec.
I'm not super fandom savvy, having only ever been active in one of them in any meaningful way, but I am familiar with the online culture surrounding shipping fictional characters together. Something I've personally witnessed is that the thinking around platonic v.s. romantic is extremely binary; a relationship can be one or the other, and a platonic relationship is the failing outcome if you, as an audience member, preferred the latter. This reflects much broader societal thinking, so it makes sense that most people approach shipping this way.
However, when you're aspec (anywhere on the aromantic and/or asexual spectrums), this idea doesn't necessarily apply. Suddenly, platonic and romantic are not opposing ideas, they're just two potential options on a very, very wide sliding scale / multi-dimensional graph wherein the significance of a relationship is completely disconnected from its label.
A huge part of shipping culture (again, just from what I've witnessed) is that Explicit Confessions and/or an onscreen mouth kiss are necessary to make a ship canon, and that not happening means Your Ship Isn't Canon And Therefore Isn't Important or Valuable (and gets used as a way of invalidating other people's ships). However, for a lot of aspec folks (and others, of course), romance is not automatically more valuable than friendship, and an end goal for a particular character dynamic becomes a lot less about fulfilling A, B, and C to verify the couple as "real" in the eyes of the mainstream or even the fandom as a whole, and instead is more about wanting to see characters happily in one another's presence. Specifics vary wildly case to case, so I'm gonna leave that fairly broad.
Ultimately, I have found myself shipping characters in the usual way less and less as I've learned more about my own aspec identity and experience. I care less if characters kiss; I care less if characters declare three little words...though I also am very familiar with the history of queer erasure and definitely root for explicitly romantic queer rep. And all this doesn't mean I don't have couples I support - I very much do. But whether their relationship is specifically romantic matters very little to me, with rare exceptions. (In fact, I often find myself "shipping" characters platonically - seeing a couple that would make great best friends being forced along standard, heterosexual romantic beats.) Mostly, I want the characters I ship to be around each other, to support each other, and to love each other in whatever capacity is fulfilling to their arcs and to the narrative.
Or, to put this all in a more digestible meme format:
Allos: If the couple doesn't kiss then the ship isn't canon
Me: but have you considered that the real kiss was the friends we made along the way?
