Being aroace is weird.
Touch your elbow. Do you feel anything? Do you really want to touch your elbow again? Are you trying to find someone to touch your elbow?
Put your hand on a hot stove. You don't want to? How do you know if you've never tried it?
Being an averse aroace is like if everyone around you turned every conversation into how great it feels when people touch their elbows.
Being an averse aroace is constantly dealing with people asking why you don't want to put your hand on a hot stove.
Others' experiences differ. I do not speak for every aromantic asexual person.
My experience is one of complete lack of understanding of many people's worlds. It can feel incredibly isolating when everything in the world references something you have no concept of.
Itâs weird to always be the odd one out.
Imagine if every book you read, every movie or TV show you watched, had a fixation on people touching each others' elbows. Even if not explicit, the desire to touch elbows is ingrained in children from a young age, and practically every story focusses on elbow-adjacent goals and desires. Childrens' films show women leave their lives for the hope of the right person touching their elbow. You're scared that you'll go to the club and people will start asking you if you want to touch their elbow.
I can be invested in people's relationships. I can watch shows and movies with character's motivations including touching someone's elbow. However, if that is their only motivation, or the only thing keeping characters in the narrative, I will get bored. Would you care if a huge epic saga was all centred on someone trying to touch their crush's elbow? It gets a bit boring if they have no other characterisation.
Realistically, academically, I can understand what a relationship is. Similarly, I can theoretically understand why people would enjoy sex. That is not a world I can live in, and it is a view I will never fully comprehend.
So many people's final and most important goal in life is completely un-understandable to me, almost to a cellular level. I have never had any of the 'normal' thoughts and feelings that every person insists is the only way to truly be a functional human being.
Imagine you had to justify your goals every time they are brought up. "This is X, they are gay BUT they can still fuck people of the opposite gender, they just won't have attraction!" "This is X, they don't feel pleasure from people touching their elbow BUT they can still touch elbows with people!" "This is X, they have never put their hand on a hot stove BUT they have walked on hot sand on the beach, so they are still valid!"
I want to live without feeling like people are shaming me for my inability to do or feel something. And I know that is rarely the intention. But the infantilisation makes it difficult.
I keep coming up with metaphors to try to get people to understand. But at the end of the day, so much of my identity means that people keep justifying how I can live 'normally'. "You can have a QPR" "You can find a relationship where you both know xyz" "You can do xyz to remain a relevant and valued person".
I feel like, eventually, everyone will make a life for themself based on a concept I can never fully understand. The only thing I can liken it to is this: imagine that everyone around you wants nothing more than to work in a mine shaft and never see the sun again. You cannot fathom this, but everyone seems to believe that this is the perfect end goal of life, and that true happiness can only be obtained if you find a person to go down the mine shaft with you and never see the sun again. Sure, you could see other people, both those who chose to also go down the mine shaft, and people visiting, but the expectation to go down the mine eventually permeates all of life.
I don't understand love in the same way everyone else does. But I do love. And I do not mean it in the way that I could, if I wanted to, fake a romantic relationship with a close friend and look to all the world like I was walking into the mine shaft with a partner touching my elbow.
I mean that I fall in love with all of my friends so deeply that it hurts me to see them upset. I mean that every single one of my friends will receive personalised gifts even when it's not an occasion. I mean that all my love is devoted to the people I have chosen, and who have chosen me in return.
In the past, this has not worked out for me. People's priorities always shift back. No matter how fun it is to play in the sun with me, everyone gets the urge to go to the mine shaft. And sure, you can talk to the people in the mine shaft, and have good and close relationships with people in the mine shaft. But you'll never understand why they chose to go down there in the first place, and it's even more difficult to understand why they want you to find a reason to go down there, even though you know you don't want to.
You don't want to go into the mine shaft.
You don't want to touch the burning stove.
And right now, you don't think you will ever have the urge for anyone to touch your elbow.
