A Lil Awareness
This goes out to all the aros who feel out of place in the community.
To the aros who thought they found a space to talk about their disgust with marriage, dating culture, and romance, only to find all that and more under clever guises within the aro community.
To the aros that wanted to socialize and build a community and only found a deceptive stepford-esque cliques fraught with constant semantic wars, infighting, overanalysis, suffocating microlabeling and circlejerking, and such a lack of cohesion and consistency you wondered why you even came. Why you even call yourself aro.
To the aros who already know who they are and who they want to meet, but cant be heard over the deafening sounds of hundreds of teens desperate for identity.
To the aros who dont call themselves aro either cause of the stigma or because the word no longer means anything to them. Or because they fear promoting aggressively pomo theories of why people date, and the identity politics that follow.
To the aros who value actions over words. Community over discussion. Romance-freedom over labels and pride.
We are Harosy. We are Romance-free. We are not here to fight, we are here to build community, alongside and intersecting the aro community. We are centered around the following:
you don’t want to contractually bond yourself to another person (marriage)
you don’t want to romantically pair-bond (be someone’s #1 and you theirs)
you don’t see such relationships as better than any other type of relationship, and don’t see anything wrong with you for this, or any other person for doing the same, and aren’t planning on changing
If you fit the three tenets above, then welcome. You are Romance-free. And we are here for you.
EDIT: It has come to my attention that the word “nonamorous” has existed for some time and fills roughly the same purpose and definition as romance-free.
EDIT 2: This blog is no longer active, but will remain online for archival purposes.
