Pride Week Three: Aro Community & Relationships
Following up with the week three questionnaire from @aromantic-official.
1. What is your favorite aspect of the aro and arospec community?
Most people I’ve met in the online aro community understand and practice the core values of intersectionality. Also the aro community talks a lot about how broad and different experiences can be from one individual to another, not just in being aromantic, but in being queer in general. Another thing I like about the aro community is how many people in it are trans. It’s been a better trans space for me than any other trans community I’ve encountered, even though it’s not a trans community.
2. Are there any notable differences in your experiences in this community and other LGBTQIA+ spaces you have been in?
Most queer communities I’ve been in don’t understand intersectionality, heavily favor able white middle-class experiences, and fail to adequately challenge patriarchy and exploitative capitalism. The aro community understands the basics of all this, at least, and in some cases is pretty good at challenging these aspects of the kyriarchy.
A lot of queer communities I’ve encountered claim to represent the entire identity but then heavily favor one particular experience or narrative. Mainstream queer narratives especially get favored, like focusing on monogamous romantic gay coupling, or focusing on the medical aspects of transitioning. Many IRL queer communities I’ve encountered actively engage in respectability politics, which I find reprehensible. The online aro community avoids all these pitfalls.
Also the online aro community is by far the youngest queer community I’ve been involved in. But even though I’m 10-20 years older than most people in it, I feel more welcome and accepted for the reasons I stated above.
3. What’s one way that the aro community could be better or more inclusive? Do you have any tips on improving in this regard?
Be even more intersectional. There are limits to this when a community is an online community because there’s not a whole lot we can do to reach people who don’t have internet access. But I have noticed the community is mostly western. Amplifying aro voices from regions outside the west would be good.
4. Do you think there are flaws in the way that different types of attractions are navigated, discussed, and defined in the aro community?
Oh absolutely. My last post covered this some. But the biggest problem I see is that the aro community focuses too much on defining the aromantic experience as lacking something that is present in the alloromantic experience. I think this is reductive and detrimental to aro representation and visibility. The focus on lack is even in the name, with the “a-” prefix. I think the reality for most aromantic people is far more complex, and the current focus ignores all the ways we experience intimacy and attraction and relationships that most alloromantic people do not. There is so much more to being aromantic than simply not experiencing romantic attraction! We need to talk a whole lot more about this as a community.
A good example is that I see a lot of aro people complain about how hard it is to find friends who prioritize friendship, or intimacy in friendships, or are willing to make commitments in friendships. I think most aromantics experience intimacy in fundamentally different ways from a lot of alloromantics that can’t be explained by simply an absence of romantic attraction. Not to mention that defining it primarily as a lack of something plays into amatonormative narratives in ways that are harmful to the representation of aromantic identities, and it’s misleading to questioning arospec people who do experience some form of romantic attraction. I’m sure some individuals experience being aromantic as primarily just a lack of romantic attraction, but I think the community as a whole focusing on that in our core definition is a bad idea. I’ll write a post about this in the future.
5. Do you consider yourself nonamorous, amorous, aplatonic, experiencing queerplatonic attraction, etc., or do you not use those terms? Are you romance positive, neutral, repulsed, or don’t use those labels? Do these answers intersect?
Labels are tools. Sometimes they’re useful, sometimes they’re not. Sometimes different tools are better in different situations. I’ll use some labels sometimes and other labels other times. But most importantly, labels are the tools with which we communicate meaning about identity, but the labels themselves aren’t the meaning.
But in general, I’m pretty amorous. What I mean by this is that I like sex and I love many kinds of affection, especially words of affection and touch. I love cuddling and it’s a core part of intimacy for me, and any intimate relationship for me that lacks cuddling is fundamentally unfulfilling (though it can still be satisfying in other ways). Emotional intimacy is the most important thing in the world to me.
I don’t care for the word “queerplatonic” because I think it’s reductive for the kinds of experience people try to describe with it and it invokes the platonic-romantic binary. I am interested in the kinds of relationships people usually describe as “queerplatonic” but I prefer the label “partnership” in most cases. Also, for me, I would not call these relationships platonic at all, so that’s another reason why I don’t use that label.
I often say I’m romance positive, but I’m not actually; it’s just a convenient shorthand that roughly communicates something vaguely accurate about my experiences. What I mean by this is that enjoy some things that amatonormativity says are romantic, but to me they aren’t romantic. For example, I love kissing and making out, but I don’t experience romantic attraction. So to me, kissing isn’t romantic and I’m not kissing for romantic reasons.
6. Have you ever been in a relationship you would consider committed, such as a queerplatonic/quasiplatonic, romantic, soft romo, friends-with-benefits, or others? How did being arospec affect that and the boundaries you set?
Yes, I’ve been in pretty much all of these kinds of relationships. I’ve been in about a dozen romantic relationships. But all of this was before I came out as aro, so I wasn’t really setting boundaries to address my aro needs for the most part. I just endured repulsion because I thought it was an inherent part of intimate relationships. So for me, because I didn’t realize being aro was a real thing, being aro in these relationships mostly meant that I was miserable most of the time because I had no way to tell my partners that I was feeling repulsed or that I wanted things different from the normative relationship models.
But being aro also gives me a kind of perception into romantic norms that a lot of people lack. For example, I dated a Marxist feminist for a while, and she taught me about feminist critiques of romantic relationships, and I was able to pick up a lot of this very quickly because the flaws of romantic social constructs and institutions are painfully obvious to me. This is similar to how trans people have a perception into gender norms that cis people lack. The socialization on these topics doesn’t feel “natural” to us in the same way that it does to others.
Right now, I have no idea what kinds of intimate relationships I want in the future. I just know I want to try different things now that I know I’m aro. I want to break the normative models of intimacy even more.
