there is, i think, a particular kind of epistemic laziness in the way people approach aromantic asexuality—an insistence on translating it into terms that are already legible within an allonormative framework, as though the absence of romantic and sexual attraction must necessarily be a deficit rather than a reconfiguration of experience. the question is always what is missing, never what is present.
but to be aroace is not to exist in a vacuum. it is not a hollowing-out of the self, nor a failure to arrive at some universal human endpoint. rather, it is an alternative orientation toward intimacy, attachment, and meaning—one that exposes, quite inconveniently, the extent to which our cultural narratives have overprivileged romance and sex as the central axes around which a life must turn.
we are taught, over and over again, that love (by which is almost always meant romantic love) is the highest form of connection, the ultimate telos of human existence. entire genres, entire mythologies, are built upon this premise. to deviate from it is treated not as divergence but as error—something to be explained away, corrected, or, at best, politely misunderstood.
what does it mean, for instance, to take seriously the idea that friendship is not a precursor to something else, not a lesser form of love waiting to be upgraded, but a complete and sufficient mode of relationality in its own right? what does it mean to decenter the couple—to refuse the hierarchy that places romantic partnership at the pinnacle and relegates all other bonds to the periphery?
aroace existence, simply by being, asks these questions.
it also reveals how much of what is considered “natural” is, in fact, deeply constructed. amatonormativity—the assumption that everyone both desires and should desire a monogamous romantic partnership—is so pervasive that its absence is often read as incomprehensible. people reach, reflexively, for explanations: trauma, repression, immaturity, a phase. anything but the possibility that this, too, is a valid and coherent way of being.
there is a subtle violence in that refusal. not always overt, not always malicious, but insistent nonetheless. it manifests in the constant probing (“are you sure?”), in the pathologizing (“maybe you just haven’t met the right person”), in the quiet erasure of narratives that do not center romance or sex. it is the violence of being rendered unintelligible within the dominant discourse.
and still—aroace people build lives.
lives full of attachment, of care, of chosen commitments that do not neatly map onto the categories provided for them. queerplatonic relationships, deeply invested friendships, familial bonds reimagined and reconstituted—these are not substitutes for something else, not placeholders for a “real” relationship that has yet to arrive. they are, in themselves, real.
perhaps what unsettles people is not the absence of attraction, but the implications of that absence. if a person can live fully, meaningfully, without romance or sex as central organizing principles, then what does that say about the supposed universality of those experiences? what does it reveal about the structures we have built—social, economic, emotional—around the assumption that everyone is moving toward the same end?
to take aroace lives seriously would require a reorientation that many are unwilling to undertake. it would mean valuing forms of intimacy that are currently marginalized, questioning the primacy of the couple, and acknowledging that there is no singular blueprint for a fulfilling life.
so instead, the easier route is taken: misunderstanding, minimization, erasure.
but the thing about erasure is that it never fully succeeds. people continue to name themselves, to articulate their experiences, to carve out spaces—however small—in which they are legible to one another, if not to the wider world.
and in doing so, they do more than simply assert their own existence. they expand the possibilities of what existence can look like.
to be aroace, then, is not merely to lack something. it is to inhabit a different configuration of being—one that, if we were willing to listen, might teach us that the architectures of love and connection are far more varied than we have been led to believe.
in this essay, i will
