All Things Slightly Stale

[depressedaro]

types of aros (incomplete):

1. never once thought they had a crush, never understood romantic attraction, thought crushes were a myth, have only recently realized that romantic attraction is a real thing that happens to people in real life

2. misinterpreted platonic attraction as romantic, consistently believed that they were in love with all their friends, were confused about how people only have one (1) crush when People Are So Great 

[professorsparklepants]

3. Thought crushes were a choice and just picked a celebrity/classmate to be their crush and assumed that was how everyone else did it

[a-space-for-aspec]

4. always knew it was a thing and thought that Everyone Around Them Is Just Not Good Enough To Like before realizing ‘what shit this actually isn’t normal’ and identifying as aro

[gayngel-remade-deactivated20200]

5. dated like. a billion people and never understood why it was tiring, and the emotional connections just felt lacking and performative. discovered too late that wait, wait, thats not how that works??? ohhhhh. aro alright

[actuallyfuckamatonormativity]

To me, being aro is yellow. It’s laughing with friends until my our sides hurt. It’s my mind when creativity strikes and ideas flow through me like ribbons. Aro is yellow like the summer sun and daffodils in spring. It’s the ecstatic high of dancing dizzily to my favourite song while just a little bit drunk, knowing that people are watching but feeling wild and free and wielding happiness like a shield. Being aro is warm, giddy, fuzzy, bright, cheerful, kind, playful, beautiful, brilliant, safe, reckless, hopeful. It’s yellow.

[slightlystalebread-blog]

i’ll say it again

if i don’t meet my s/o when he heelys into me and i drop all of my things on the floor, he is not my s/o.

[maladaptive-dreamer]

Some of y’all haven’t become so disillusioned with your own reality that you spend years of your life daydreaming about entirely made up worlds and people and it shows

[slightlystalebread-blog]

something really fantastic about being aromantic is how fiercely i love my friends and how it is never reciprocated on the same level, so i get way too invested in the relationship and they end up leaving because it’s not interesting to have a friend who can’t relate to romantic relationships and all that and i end up being left and no one understands why i’m hurting because it’s not like i was dumped or anything. 

[a-spec-tacular]

Invisibility is Not a Privilege.

Invisibility means every person you come out to requires a vocabulary lesson.

Invisibility means the very nature of your identity is up for debate.

Invisibility means years feeling alone, broken, and unnatural.

Invisibility means you might not even consider the possibility that you’re anything but what society says you can be.

Invisibility means you have to find out about your own identity from strangers in small, distant corners of the internet.

Invisibility means being taught in school that your orientation makes you inhuman.

Invisibility means being told by educated professionals that your orientation is pathological, a mental illness, and Must Be Fixed.

Invisibility means taking an extra year to convince yourself that your orientation could even exist before you even beginning to accept yourself as what you are.

Invisibility means coming up with an arsenal of excuses for your lack of Normality, an army of justifications for living a life that makes you just a little more comfortable.

Invisibility means “acceptance” comes at the price of breaking up and stuffing away the things that make you you, and struggling to force yourself into a hole that doesn’t fit.

Invisibility means forcing yourself into relationships and acts that you don’t want because the alternative is taboo.

Invisibility means you can never really tell them who you are.

Invisibility means you can’t even feel pride in your community half the time, because the world is intent on destroying what little of a community there is.

Invisibility means facing a world of people who would have you bow your head and let them rewrite your identity for you; who demand your complacence while they redefine the things that make you who you are.

Invisibility means your suffering doesn’t even matter to those supposedly fighting to End All Suffering.

Invisibility means shame.

Invisibility means denial.

Invisibility means loneliness.

Invisibility is not a privilege.

[carolxdanvers]

Invisibility adds another layer of shit-frosting to the crapcake that is ALL OTHER oppression that you face. You can’t get help or support or resources to deal with the REST of your oppression because you’re invisible to the world. 

That is why a lot of groups who suffer so much from invisibility are focused on visibility: because if they’re visible, maybe there’s a chance they can get help.

It’s why it’s truly horrible when people make derisive jokes about how the worst oppression some groups know is invisibility or erasure. It’s not the only oppression they’re dealing with, but you don’t know that because THEIR SUFFERING IS INVISIBLE.

[aro-bot]

i know it’s been talked about before but i feel like there needs to be more discussion on how aromanticism affects gender identity (and vice versa). also before ppl jump on me for this – this is my personal experience, this isn’t Disk Horse™ of any kind, and this is a post by and for aromantic people only. if you’re not aro don’t comment.

anyways so like, i’m coming from a dfab+genderqueer perspective here, so that’s really all i can speak on, but like. for example, lesbians tend to have a complex experience w gender because women are expected to be attracted to men and base their gender id off of that attraction. but as that kind of shifts and parts of the world become more open to the idea of girls loving girls (and ik not everywhere is changing and it’s not changing fast enough, i’m not saying lesbians don’t still have it bad or anything), i think we’re seeing a shift that girls are expected to base their gender id off of romance in general and not necessarily heterosexual romance

for me, at least, when i thought i was a cis (or nb female-adjacent, depending on the time) lesbian, i did have “friends” who shunned me when i came out, but i had other friends who wholeheartedly accepted me because they could relate my experiences (aka me lying to myself that i experienced romantic attraction in order to fit in better) to their own. and even the people who were on the fence, who didn’t outright shun me but who “didn’t accept my lifestyle”, often were on the fence because they couldn’t reconcile the idea that “”“"people shouldn’t be gay”“”“ with the idea that ”“”“women need romance”“”“ (obviously not in such explicit terms, but that was the implied message) and when i came out as aro, that was when they really started to shun me. my friends who accepted me as gay treated me like i was crazy and boring when i started to imply that maybe i didn’t like romance after all, and we pretty quickly fell apart after i stopped making up crushes to talk about. particularly the girls.

basically – as long as i loved somebody, i was allowed to just be me and, while i’ve always had a complex relationship with gender, i was usually fairly content with being read as female as long as people understood that i was queer. the moment i started questioning if maybe i was aro, i was pretty quickly shunned and treated poorly, particularly by the women in my life. i’m always asked about my lovelife by people i meet irl, because it’s expected that as someone who looks like a woman i’ll have one or at least be seeking one. i almost never see women in fiction allowed to be single, particularly if they’re older than about 13 or 14.

to be honest, i don’t think i’d be a woman if this wasn’t the case. i think i was always genderqueer and probably always will be, though i might come to a place where i’m ok with being read as a woman and only come out to close friends by choice instead of being afraid to come out. but i can’t deny that i don’t have this thing (romantic attraction) that fundamentally influences the way our culture percieves women, and that that probably influences my gender in some way

and again, if you’re not aro please refrain from commenting

[freyavalon]

Being aro (and realising I was) definitely influenced my perception of both gender in general and my gender like the concept of gender were always kind of blurry to me, so I used to force try and be hyperfeminine and like do everything to be like a girl/woman because well that’s what I was supposed to do, and a big part of that definitely was about inventing crushes on guys so that people wouldn’t thing there was anything wrong with me, my sexuality or how much of a girl I was - I’m using past tense but like that’s still the way I behave with people I’m not out to, so most people, it’s just that I stress it less now than when I was 16.

The way romance and the need of it in your life when you’re born female is crazy, and the worst is that so many people won’t even try to see it.

Today I don’t know what I identify as gender wise, I still don’t get gender, but I still have to present myself as female, because well, people and all that shit. I’m glad that people think my “lack of” interest in romance is because I’m too focused on uni (lmao), but I’m really scared of how things will be in a few years, because as I was born in a female body I must have plans to get in a romantic relationship and start a family of my own and become more feminine than I am now with my sweatshirts and unladylike manners at some point. And I really don’t know how I’ll be able to handle that, as an aro, ace, queer person.

Anyway, I can give examples of every single stage of my life, from being a little kid to now, illustrating all of this but my phone is dying so. yeah

[arotaro]

Honestly, even as a cis woman this shit has definitely fucked up my relationship with my gender.

I’m someone who as we all know is very invested in fiction and stories, but I’ve just… Never enjoyed the “girly” kinds. I was never into Sailor Moon, or Twilight, or Ouran, or- Hell I can’t even think of what else girls my age were into when I was younger, that’s how disinterested I was. I was into things like Star Wars or Pokemon or Fullmetal Alchemist or X-Men, you know, things where there’s like a 5:1 male-to-female gender ratio and a lot of the plot consists of people beating the shit out of each other. And even for the series I was into, I just genuinely didn’t often like the female characters as much. My favorites were always guys. For years I felt guilty for it, and assumed I must have been a misogynist and a bad person. I’m a girl, so why didn’t I like the girl characters? I tried to be a feminist, but clearly I was a misogynist, and a traitor to my gender. What a fucking monster I was for not being able to love Winry as much as Ling, or not watching shoujo anime, or whatever. 

I like, genuinely felt so guilty about it, and it wasn’t until recently that I figured out that the reason I didn’t like those things wasn’t because I hated women, but because of the romance (yes, even long before I found out I was aro). I’ve talked about this a bit before, but series aimed at women tend to be a lot more romance-heavy, and in series aimed at men, female characters- even the best ones- are generally either really minor characters, or heavily involved in romance. Men have love interests, women are love interests.

Not only did amatonormativity and misogyny come together to cause problems for me when I was a kid, but they then placed the blame for those problems on my shoulders when I was too young to even understand what was going on. And hell, it’s still something I struggle with today! Even now that I’m fully aware of the issue, I still feel guilty for not liking Winry very much (despite her being a cool character), or for never finishing shoujo anime, and I still find myself wondering if I just hate them because they’re women even though I know I don’t. It’s that bad!!

And yeah, I definitely agree that the pressure for women to be romantic is more than just pressure to be straight. I wished I was a lesbian when I was younger. I spent a while in a relationship with another girl (and was miserable throughout most of it, even though she was and still is a close friend of mine), because that was what you were supposed to do, right? As long as I was in a relationship with someone, then I was Normal, and it didn’t matter what gender they were because only freaks and monsters went through life without falling in love. Right?

[growinguparo]

my gender (afab nb) and my aromanticism have always been complementary. i’ve never thought they interacted, but in the process of writing this post i realized i guess they have.

when i was a kid i had a lot of dysphoria, which manifested itself in misogyny. i was different than the other girls. i thought i was better because i wasn’t feminine. if something was marketed towards girls, i hated it on principle. i didn’t feel the [pressure to be into romance because i was a girl] because well girls were all stupid and i was better than them so i was better than that too.

the other thing is i only figured out kid-crushes were real when i was 14, so up til then i always assumed when people were talking about crushes they were making it up to sound cool by imitating adults. this fed even more into my belief that i was better than other girls, because i was the only one not faking for attention.

i know most aros felt pressure to make up crushes when they were the age where that was a thing. i never did. i’d never really thought about it before, but i guess the reason for that was because of my dysphoria.

(and jsyk, i am no longer a misogynist lol. i deconstructed my feelings toward femininity after being exposed to feminist thought in my early teens, so by the time i was actually questioning my gender and sexuality at 14-15, i wasn’t like that anymore.)

[aromagni]

Oh mood about thinking people made up crushes….and yeah like romance and gender are both such intertwined social constructs that upon removing romance it’s hard to identify what gender is supposed to be? So my agender self is just like…sounds fake but okay. Also this post has mainly been from afab perspective but I know I’ve heard amab people express similar feelings.

Several months ago, I remember @arokaladin coined the term arogender to convey how gender can be so influenced by being aro. (Origin)(flag).

I think I would’ve started actually identifying as nonbinary sooner if the term arogender was around then, because one of the main ways I dismissed my feelings about not feeling like a woman was saying that like these things I feel are because I’m aro, I don’t want to look “feminine” as in desirable and stuff. So it’s important to actively acknowledge how aromanticism can affect gender and therefore validate a gender identity rather than invalidate it.

[slightlystalebread-blog]

Even when I identified as asexual & heteroromantic a few years ago, I realized that how I saw gender was different than how other people saw it. Since I’ve added aromantic to my identity and especially since I’ve dropped asexual as a descriptor, I’ve noticed how much I no longer feel the need to identify with a gender. For the past few years -- back when I identified as asexual -- I always saw myself as female, but mildly so: I didn’t feel much connection to it, but I didn’t suffer from dysphoria, which my transgender friend told me meant that I was not trans myself. I dropped my asexual label this past month in favor of aromantic, and with that I’ve definitely felt that I no longer identify myself with anything. I don’t identify as agender either though. Privately, I use gender-queer to describe myself, but I am yet to tell anyone in my life about that. The vastness of the term allows for it to fit me well, as I feel I don’t experience gender in any capacity. 

Back when I was ace, I would say that if someone used male pronouns for me, I wouldn’t feel any different. I think it’s still the case now that I identify as aro instead. I think that it stems from my desire to not be seen sexually or romantically, because I do not interact with others or think in such ways. I have no evidence or personal experience to back the claim up, but maybe a lot of aromantic people feel less connected to gender because the majority of people out there are attracted to either males, females, or both. There are very few people -- in the grand scheme of how many people live on Earth -- that would be attracted to someone who doesn’t identify themselves with a gender. This is not being said to invalidate this phenomenon, because it is very real, but perhaps it begins as a subconscious defense mechanism from things with which we do not wish to be involved

[aroacepagans]

Ya know when I was 11 I made a rule for myself that I wasn’t going to date until I was 15 and in retrospect, that really should have been a tip off that I was aro.

[prince-of-cloudy-skies]

Wow same! I used to think I would be ready for romance when I was older, but it never happened. I told myself to wait until I was in college to date when I was around 12, and I told myself I was just trying to “focus on schoolwork”, but I really just didn’t get the whole romance thing.

[aroacepagans]

Adjfkf, I also instated this rule in the name of “focusing on schoolwork”. Amazing, aro culture really is lying to yourself about why you wont date people.

[slightlystalebread-blog]

telling myself that i wouldn’t waste my time dating until i got to college lmaoo

[depressedaro]

okay, so maybe i’m a little bitter

[slightlystalebread-blog]

So hey, my new year’s resolution this year was to become more comfortable identifying as aromantic and I really love the fact that I thought of it, but I don’t really know where to begin. I thought it might be smart to go to tumblr for this, as there is a community here, but I don’t know where to go from here. I’ll be tagging this as aromantic in the hopes that it will be found and a kind soul or two would be willing to help me out. Some of y’all might find me in your asks with questions that someone who’s identified as aromantic for years probably shouldn’t be asking lol, so thanks for answering in advance.

I’d love to become more involved in the aro community and have friends with similar identities! Thanks so much!