I was trying, yet again, to figure out what romantic attraction is. My partner describes it as a feeling of passion, so I looked that up and came across this article in Psychology Today that made it a little clearer to me.
The author at first describes it, at the beginning of a relationship, as "the throes of all-consuming love fires." This makes some sense to me -- as in, this dovetails with what alloromantics describe, and is something that I don’t experience. It’s that thing people talk about, where those fires die down eventually, into more of a background burn. And then you get all sorts of books and articles telling you about how, in long-term relationships, you have to keep feeding those fires and keep the passion alive.
But then it went on and included this picture: a triangle of “consummate love: intimacy + passion + commitment.” I think it should really be a venn diagram, but okay.
The three angles of the triangle are “liking (intimacy),” “infatuation (passion),” and “empty love (commitment).” (that is: if you ONLY have commitment, and none of the rest of these things, you have “empty love.”)
The sides are combinations: passion + commitment = “fatuous love” (i think they mean when people are maybe very physically attracted to each other, and commit to a relationship, without actually liking each other as people??) Passion + intimacy = “romantic love.” And intimacy + commitment = “companionate” love.
(Obviously, I’m not fond of adding these things up into a hierarchy, such that it’s BEST to have all of them, or it’s a REAL relationship if you have all of them. Just to deconstruct that real fast: that makes the assumption that those three things are the only things that a relationship can be made out of. Which automatically shuts down any exploration of what other components might be important, and how those components interact with these ones, and what other types of relationships might be important, and what those are made out of.
It also unquestioningly supports the idea that this is the ONE kind of really important relationship in your life, which is a very American idea. (It’s not exclusively an American idea, but we take it to a very isolating extreme. Lots of people have a lot of interesting stuff to say about how our tendency to isolate people into pairs -- not extended families, not friend groups, etc. -- feeds our extreme capitalism by limiting people’s resources. BUT ANYWAY)
What’s interesting about this triangle, actually, is that “romantic love” was always presented to me, I think, as the whole triangle. Like, that you only experience these things with your partner(s). (Other than “liking” -- but even then, there’s that question people ask: “do you like them, or do you LIKE like them?” Where there’s a sort of “hierarchy of like.”)
And part of the reason that I didn’t realize that I was aro was that I’ve been married for nine years, to someone who I have deep intimacy with and deep commitment with. I didn’t realize that I didn’t experience “passion,” because I’ve always just assumed that squishes/friend crushes were passion. I thought, I guess, that the way rom-coms talked about romantic and sexual attraction was an exaggeration or a rarity. And my partner didn’t realize we didn’t have “passion,” because for both of us this was our first relationship after getting into recovery, and our first healthy relationship; and when our relationship felt different, he assumed that that stuff he experienced with people in the past was just some kind of addict thing.
The way he would put it is that we’re not in love. I can’t think of it that way; that intimacy+commitment IS love for me. It’s partnered love. It’s what I assumed was romantic love, because it’s what I experience with a partner.
It’s having this person be “my person,” loving them with my whole heart, having the deepest possible emotional intimacy with them. It’s centering them in my life -- doing nice things for them, thinking about how things in my life will affect them, sharing my experiences and special interests with them, tracking what’s going on with them and thinking about what they might be experiencing, wanting to spend a lot of my time with them.
The way he did put it, when he figured it out, was that he’s not in love with me. That was a real challenge to hear. (I gasped incredibly loudly and blurted out, “WHAT? WHY WOULD YOU EVEN SAY THAT?!” Then the toddler, across the room, unrelatedly fell over and started crying, and my partner panicked trying to reach both of us at once. It was slapstick comedy gold, but only in retrospect.)
We’ve had a lot of conversations about that since then. The short version is that facing that he needs to transition, accepting this part of himself that he’s been trying to stifle for years, meant accepting his sexuality in a way that he hadn’t been, which meant realizing this stuff, and that he needed to be able to explore it. So we’re polyamorous now -- so far, only in theory, but still.
I was afraid that he would go off, and meet some hottie, and have all of the above stuff with them -- like being with me, but better! and just, like, abandon me to be in A Real Relationship or whatever. But he’s very emphatic that he wants what we have; that he’s not interested in abandoning the relationship we’ve built, that he loves it and it’s important to him. (When I type that out, it’s like, of course that’s true, but I have huge abandonment issues and it was a really rough summer!!)
Last night he went to Target and came home with a mug for me that says, in gold, “you’re my person <3″. I cried a lot. I don’t think he realized how much I feared not being his person anymore -- and especially, not being his person because of something I can’t change about myself.
That’s a little bit of a tangent, but it’s important to me to share. Because, regardless of what this triangle says, the “companionate love” we have, the queerplatonic partnership we didn’t have a name for all those years ago, is what we want together, and what we love having with each other.
Regardless of what our amatonormative society tends to claim - and despite my desire to have “my person” with someone whose “person” I am -- life isn’t a hike to the supposed pinnacle of love. Where you have one person who you get all your needs from, where your friends and family and other relationships become unnecessary, or are just occasional blips on the radar, or are sort of fallback relationships to have in case the “real” one ends.
Life is like a walk around the park, or the neighborhood, where you can have deep connections to a lot of different people, and share your lives with each other in a lot of different and crucial and awesome ways.
