Why identifying as aromantic is important to me (as a 36-year-old woman)
Submission to the October 2020 Carnival of Aros on the theme of ‘Prioritization’.
I identify as aromantic asexual (aro/ace). Both parts of that identity are important to me, but the aro one particularly so. Why? Because at 36 years old, society’s amatonormativity has more of an effect on me than its allonormativity.
In your teens and twenties, sex is a huge deal. There’s a lot of pressure to have sex and to be sexually desirable. But by the time you reach your mid-30s, this eases off. Your allosexual peers’ obsession with sex starts to wane, and you find less conversations about it taking place in your everyday life. In fact, if I were to admit to a 30/40/50-something allosexual person that I’m just not that interested in sex, I reckon there’s a good chance I’d receive a nod of recognition.
However, if I were to say that I’m not interested in having a relationship? That I intend to be ‘forever alone’? Well, that would raise eyebrows. For in amatonormative society, partnering up and settling down with someone, in the form of a mutually exclusive, ‘romantic’ relationship, is deemed inevitable; essential; the natural order of things. As you get older, society can (just about) countenance you not wanting sex. But it can’t comprehend you wanting to remain single.
When younger, aro people can get away with saying things like, ‘oh, I’m not looking for a relationship’, or, ‘I’m not interested in getting married’, in response to those seemingly innocuous, everyday questions we all get asked such as, ‘have you got a partner?’ and ‘are you married?’ Why? Because people assume that’s just your age talking, not your orientation. However, as you get closer to 40, being asked these kinds of questions can fill aro people with trepidation. How to explain that you’re just not that way inclined, when the overriding message from society is that you should be?
I remember a work lunch a few years ago, at which the conversation amongst my colleagues turned to talk about their husbands; how they met them; how they popped the question. Obviously, I had nothing to share on this topic, but that was okay; in my colleagues’ eyes, I was still young, with plenty of time to find My Man. I do wonder though, had I stayed in that job, how my colleagues’ attitudes towards me might have changed as the years went by and I continued to stay single. How would they have accounted for my singleness? With open-mindedness or prejudice?
For this is another issue aro people face as they get older. As the years go by, you become more conscious of what your family and any long-standing friends/co-workers might be making of your perma-singleness. Do they think me socially inept? Emotionally under-developed? Frigid? Pitiful? Just… not normal? Such is the stronghold amatonormativity has over our lives, that to lead a single life leaves you open to being perceived in all sorts of narrow-minded and unkind ways.
This is why claiming an aromantic identity is so important to me at this stage of my life. Whilst I’m still not really ‘out’ as aro, just coming out to myself has made all the difference. Now I know who/what I am, people can make whatever assumptions they like about me; that I’m a socially inept loner, whatever; it doesn’t matter. Knowing I’m aro, I feel the sting of the prejudicial attitudes our hetero/amatonormative society has towards single women a lot less, and am a lot more secure in myself.
Knowing I’m aro also helps when it comes to just being able to deal with everyday adult conversation; so much of which is centred around people’s dating lives, their married lives, their coupled-up nuclear family lives. For alloromantics – i.e. the majority of people – their ‘romantic’ relationship, and the family they create around that, is the very foundation of their lives. So, of course this ends up being the subject of a lot of everyday chit-chat, whether at the family dinner table or round the office water cooler. But for those of us who are aro/arospec, these most ‘normal’ and mundane of conversations can be awkward at best and alienating at worst.
My aro identity provides a much-needed bulwark against this. Before I discovered aromanticism, when I found myself in conversations about marriage and dating and settling down, I would often end up feeling insecure and embarrassed because my lack of relationship experience meant I had no similar anecdotes or stories to share. And even though I knew I didn’t actually want a relationship, and felt on some innate level that I was destined to stay single, this didn’t stop me from wondering whether the fact I’d made it all the way to 30 without ever having been in a relationship, or gone a date, meant there was something wrong with me. If I hadn’t discovered aromanticism, I can imagine these feelings of shame and embarrassment would only have intensified as I got older.
But now I know I am aromantic, I understand my non-existent relationship history to be a sign of my aromanticism, rather than of there being something ‘wrong’ with me, whether socially, emotionally, or physiologically. Again, this doesn’t mean I’m at the stage where I feel comfortable being all ‘I’m aro!’ when talking to people. But it does mean I can hold my head a bit higher when I find myself caught up in conversations in which everyone’s going on about their love lives.
As I get older, it’s my aromanticism that makes me feel queer in the world. My peers, siblings and cousins are coupling up and settling down, and here I remain, steadfastly single. As a result, I become more conscious of how my lack of romantic attraction sets me apart from others more than my lack of sexual attraction. No one’s quizzing me on the details of my sex life, or asking me who I ‘fancy’, anymore. But people do enquire about my relationship status. And people are likely to make all sorts of not-very-nice assumptions about that 30/40/50-something woman in their midst who continues to stay single. This is why, now I’m in my mid-30s, I have more of a need to give a name to, and to understand, my lack of interest in romantic relationships, than I do my lack of interest in sex. Claiming an aromantic identity helps me to navigate the amatonormativity which is all-pervasive in everyday adult life; and to navigate it with pride.
