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In commemoration of aro week, I'm gonna talk about my relationship with romance across my life and how I realized I was aromantic. Enough time has passed for me to have an almost complete understanding of my sexuality and I think it'd be cool to reminisce and remember all the progress I've made. Plus, it might be good entertainment value. It may even help someone understand themselves better if what I write sounds familiar to them.

Strap in folks, cause it's a long one.

First, my childhood. I was generally pretty oblivious about romance. I remember swimming in a pool along with another kid my age, playing and having a good time. When I took off my swimming goggles for the first time in front of him, the kid looked at me and told me I had really pretty eyes. It made me kind of self-conscious, but didn't think much of it. Another time, I was watching a movie with a kid of a friend of my mom. We were laying on a bed, and since we were good friends, I snuggled up to him. He looked at me, a little awkwardly, and asked me if I understood what I was doing. Again, I grew cautious but mostly disregarded it.

And lastly, I remember travelling on a car with my family and talking about what my sister and I wanted to do when we grew up. I said I wanted to be an actress, to which my mom told me it was fine, but I had to do everything the director said, including kissing. I was immediately horrified and swore right then and there not to pursue that career.

Do a lot of kids get disgusted by the idea of kissing? Sure, even when they turn out to be allo. But knowing what I do now about my relationship with romance, I can't help but consider it a sign of what was to come.

(My parents also told me that when I was in preschool, a kid approached me and gave me a big fat kiss on the lips. I don't remember this, but I thought I'd share it regardless cause I think it's hilarious.)

Thus, we continue to my pre-teen years and adolescence. At around 11 years old, I started to develop some very strong feelings for a boy in my class. I felt nervous around him and thought he was very cute, which led me to conclude I had a crush on him. These feelings persisted all throughout middle school and high school, even though I never became close to him. He did however flirt with me on occasion, and even asked me to date him, to which I said "I don't know" despite believing I had feelings for him. I was just really uncomfortable and didn't want *anyone* to know how I felt about him, even the boy himself.

I also developed 'crushes' on other boys I considered cute, which just cemented to me the fact that I was attracted to men. I felt this way despite not knowing anything about them and never making a single attempt to try and get to know them. The idea of doing that was unthinkable, and admitting my feelings to anyone even more so. One time my friends were talking about the boys they liked and asked me who I had a crush on, and I denied having one. They didn't believe me, but they dropped the subject eventually. I was just that uncomfortable with the topic.

During those years, it was also common for me to read popular novels that had romance in them. Examples were: The Fault in Our Stars, Divergent, the Hush Hush saga, the Shadowhunters saga, and Percy Jackson. As much as I liked the plots, I was also really invested in the romances. I read as the characters developed feelings for one another and entered beautiful relationships that made them happy and gave them purpose in life. I loved the idea of romantic relationships and wanted to get into one myself, even though I never took steps to find a person I wanted to be with. In my head, I thought it was something that would eventually happen on its own and went through life without caring too much.

Then, when I was 17 years old, I entered an inter-school event that lasted 3 days. There, on the first day, I met a boy from a different school whom I immediately took a liking to. We clicked in a way that was almost unheard of for me and spent every single day together, talking about ourselves and having a very good time. I considered him a friend and deeply enjoyed our time together.

That came to an end however, when at the last day, he asked for my number. Alarm bells started ringing in my head, cause wasn't that usually a sign someone wanted to date you? Still, I gave him my number in case he just wanted to keep in contact. Maybe he just wanted to stay friends. But no, soon after messaging me, he started flirting with me. Looking at those messages, a deep unwellness began to grow within me. I started shivering and sweating. I became so cold I had to cover myself in blankets. Somehow, I felt as if I had developed a fever, and I had no idea why. I talked about this with a therapist at a later date, and she told me it looked like I'd had an anxiety attack, which I'd never had before.

I commented what was happening to my friends and family and told them I wanted to stop his advances, but shockingly, they all gave me the opposite advice: to give him a shot. I was flabbergasted, cause I was completely certain I'd never develop feelings for him, and yet people still wanted me to go out with him "just in case". Do people just go on dates with someone even though they don't initially like them? I remember thinking. The idea seemed ridiculous to me.

Regrettably, I didn't keep in contact with the guy. I was persuaded not to blow him off, but to see where things went. Not long after, I ended up ghosting him, which is something I'm not proud of. If that experience taught me anything however, it was to be upfront about my feelings and to communicate with the other person clearly so we could reach an understanding and proceed from there.

Afterwards, I didn't think much about that episode. My reactions had been strange, sure, but I just didn't have a reason to revisit the event. I spent the rest of my high school years and the first of my college years still believing myself a hetero woman and passively waiting for the moment I met someone whom I felt comfortable enough to date. In a way, I was ashamed about my 'crushes' cause I only seemed to get them for cute boys without knowing anything about them. I mean, how shallow could I be?

By that point, I was well into reading fanfics and even wrote a few of my own. Those are the places where I was first introduced to the concepts of aromanticism and asexuality. At first, I didn't understand them very well and thought they meant 'people who only develop feelings for a special someone'. Then, I played Our Life: Beginnings & Always, a visual novel about your relationship with your neighbor, Cove, who starts as an 8 year-old kid and finishes as a 23 year-old adult. The game spans different stages of your life and you can control what kind of relationship you share with him; you can be indifferent to each other, best friends, or lovers. Most importantly, when he's 18 years old, Cove reveals to you, without spoiling too much, that he's aspec. That was when I became very interested in the subject and did some preliminary research in order to understand it better. I even began to toy with the idea that I could be aro or ace, but not in any meaningful way.

That was, until JaidenAnimations' coming out video was released.

The video itself left a deep impression on me. I couldn't relate to everything Jaiden said in it; after all, I'd believed for most of my life that I had crushes while she was aware she didn't have any. I also never thought I was bi or pan cause, you know, I had strong feelings towards some boys.

But there were some things I could relate to. Like not having celebrity crushes, or being mystified at people wanting to get to know or date anyone they thought was cool/attractive, or thinking lovesick people were exaggerating, or being somewhat content without being in a relationship (despite working under the assumption that I'd get into one eventually).

And when all of the things she said had sunk in? I thought, removing the embellishment: oh shit.

(As a sidenote, I want to clarify I don't agree with everything Jaiden said in her video, namely that empathy makes someone human or that aros aren't monsters cause they can love other people in other ways. Neither people who don't feel empathy or don't feel love are monsters; what makes someone one are their actions, not their feelings.)

Barely after the video's end, I pulled out Google and began reading about aromanticism for real. I got into websites explaining what it was more deeply, read up on people's experiences in forums, took tests about the likelihood of me being aro, and pulled out Tumblr to search through posts under the aro tag. I must've done all of that for 3 days straight. And the more I learned, the more upset I began to feel, for the usual reason: being taught that romantic love's everywhere and gives your life meaning and happiness. To learn that it had been inaccessible to me all along, and would probably always be, was a distressing discovery.

I spent some time feeling down, mostly staying away from romantic media for my peace of mind. I searched for what I could do to change how I felt, and the advice most people gave was to look for a community of similar folk to share your experiences with, so I looked in Disboard and joined an aro server that had good reviews.

This was one of the best decisions I'd ever made. I was warmly welcomed by the people there and given free reign to explore the channels and resources they offered. What's more, the server was filled with queer people of every identity imaginable, from aroaces to aroallos, from cis people to trans people, from straight people to pan people, from people with partners to people without. It was the biggest exposure to LGBT content I'd ever had.

Which brings me to another important aspect of myself at the time: I didn't have the best relationship with queerness. I wasn't a raging homophobe who believed the gays were grooming children or that trans women were sexual predators, but the subject itself made me deeply uncomfortable. I thought that on some level, queer people were intentionally breaking the rules and being difficult on purpose. How could someone not be cis or straight? Isn't that what everyone is? What everyone must be?

But I was at least self-aware enough to realize that these thoughts were wrong. I tried to find common ground between my experiences and those of other queer people so I could stop having them, but I found it difficult to do that. I'm attracted to men, I thought, so why can't I understand people who're also attracted to men, or people who're attracted to another gender? I'm a woman, I thought, so why can't I understand that some people could also be one without it being assigned to them at birth? I accepted cis boy's gender, so why couldn't I do the same with trans boys? Or with any other gender?

In hindsight, this was probably a sign of how disconnected I was from my own gender identity and sexual orientation, how little I understood both subjects, and how repressed I'd been most of my life. This is all to say that along with figuring out if I was aromantic, I set out to understand queerness in general. And by doing that, to also understand myself. It's not an uncommon occurence for someone who's questioning their gender to also begin to question their sexual orientation, or viceversa.

It's impossible for me to compile a step-by-step list of everything that made me finally realize I was aro, not only cause it happened years ago, but also cause a lot of it was a process of acclimatization rather than of logic. To reference Heartstopper, I didn't wake up one day and go "I guess I'm aro now"; I accepted the label a little bit more each day until one day I felt comfortable enough in it to change my server role from 'questioning aro' to full-on 'aromantic'.

But I'll write down a couple things that tipped me off besides my past experiences with romance, in no particular order of importance.

1) Reading people's comments on YouTube videos about how jealous they were of couples depicted in them, whereas I was just happy for the couple.

2) Learning about comphet, or compulsory heterosexuality. This was a big one, cause it made me realize that what I wanted from my 'crushes' wasn't a date, but flattery. I felt more valuable when they paid attention to me and concluded that if I thought a boy was cute, it could only mean I was in love with him. I'm critical of comphet only being associated with lesbians, cause when I first heard of it and read it only happened to them, I became disinterested cause I didn't think it could apply to me. It was only later when I learned more about it out of curiosity that I found out I could actually relate to a lot of it and that I wasn't exempt. Which brings me to,

3) Realizing I wasn't a girl. I'm not going to talk about how I discovered I was trans cause that's not the purpose of this post (and it'd make it twice as long), but I will say that when my perception of my own gender began to change, I found my need of validation from other boys dissipating. It was the idea of me being a girl next to a cute boy that made me think I was attracted to him, not actual attraction.

4) Asking myself more questions about my supposed crushes, such as: Did I think about the boys I thought I had a crush on in my free time? Did I fantasize about kissing them or going on dates with them? My answer was no to both; it was only when I was around these people that I felt this pseudo-attraction. (Also: do you fall asleep in supposedly romantic places such as restaurants with low lights? If the answer's yes, then that's a sign you're 100% aromantic, without exception XD)

5) Realizing I didn't understand how orientation labels worked. At all. When I was learning about being non-straight and trying to reconcile that with my budding knowledge of trans people, particularly about how no one knows what gender you are until you tell them, one question that kept coming up in my mind was: how can people choose who to fall in love with if they don't know the gender of the other person? Not only did it imply that I thought of orientations as choices, but also that falling in love with anyone was itself a choice. But of course, they're both nonsense. People who say they're straight/gay/bi/etc don't do it because they're somehow choosing it; it's just a description that best suits their sexualities. Allos don't choose who to fall in love with either; they just fall in love with someone and when discussing their orientations, pick a word that conveys a general idea of who they tend to fall in love with. Orientations aren't mandates; they're tendencies.

But one of the most important things I learned on my journey, was how to dismantle my old thoughts about queerness. Queer people aren't intentionally breaking the rules. They're not being difficult on purpose. They simply experience their genders/attractions in a different way than most people do. And the truth was that maybe, deep down, I felt resentful of them for being their true selves instead of pandering to cisheteronormativity, like I'd done.

To finish this post, I'll just recap one thing. If you're questioning whether you might be aromantic yourself, I'll give you the same advice I was given: join an aro environment, whether online or in-person. A community will help you figure yourself out and, if you're like me, make you feel better about your identity. I too recommend you get brutally honest with yourself and reassess everything you think you know of your relationship with romance.

(I also want to clarify that I identified as aroallo for some months after adopting the aro label cause I thought, okay, if I'm not romantically attracted to my 'crushes', then I must be sexually attracted to them right? But eventually I realized I didn't feel that way either. To be honest, the strong feelings I develop for some men are still a bit of a mystery to me; the only things I know for certain are that I don't wanna date them nor have sex with them, not even befriend them. My current theory's that I feel a combination of aesthetic attraction and gender envy. I say the latter cause after transitioning, I found myself liking to look like these men, and realizing that rather than being attracted to men in general, I was attracted to a particular style or gender presentation. I'm more in love with a vibe rather than a gender or an individual.)

Okay, I think that's everything. Thanks for reading this far! Writing this took me longer than I expected, but it was also deeply cathartic. Maybe I'll write a similar post about how I realized I was agender in trans day of visibility, or whenever I feel like going on a deep dive about my feelings on gender. We'll see.

And if you wish to talk about aromanticism with someone, feel free to DM me. I'm always up for a chat.

Without further ado, I hope you had an excellent aro week, and I'll see you later!

(I came out as aro to a friend and explained to them what it was, so I did my part to spread awareness of it to the general public lol.)

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