In an excerpt from Plato’s Symposium, Aristophanes recounts the origins of love. According to his Greek mythology, humans were once four-legged, four-armed, and double-sexed. Fearing human beings were becoming too powerful, the deity Zeus sliced them in half, leaving their heads facing inward so they could eternally measure their bodies’ absences. They were thus doomed to feel incomplete until they found their other halves. And when they did, they would throw their arms around each other and weave their flesh in an attempt to become one again.
In the Bible’s Genesis, after creating Adam (the prototype), God realizes that he requires a mate. He rips a rib from Adam’s body and begets Eve, a built-in lifelong partner.
Many of the origin stories about the inception of our species establish this blueprint for coexistence – that every body has an equal and opposite body, a destined companion without which we are incomplete. Our modern construct of romance still upholds this paradigm; romantic love is the paramount prize of existence. But what if I can’t access that prize?
In response to this construct, Aromanticism is a concept album about lovelessness as a sonic dreamscape. It seeks to interrogate the idea that romance is normative and necessary.
This isn’t protest music, however, as much as it is process music. It’s the 2am sweat you wake up in, processing that lonesomeness might not just be a transitory hallway you’re passing through en route to inevitable partnership. It’s recognizing statelessness as stasis. It’s admitting that you still desperately crave affection, even if you’re not fully capable of returning it. It’s admitting that your favorite self-empowerment chorus, “I may be alone but I’m not lonely!” is, often, bullshit. It’s wondering why, as a first grader, you would unbox your markers and couple them into personified pairs. It’s wondering why every restaurant you take yourself to has each table pre-set for two. It’s wondering how privileged people can feel love interpersonally but still adhere to systems of social hierarchy that cause them to treat othered groups with loveless indifference. It’s wondering if our urgent fear of dying alone is cellularly inherent or socially inherited. It’s wondering – if God is love, but you don’t feel love, are you a godless being?
Alternative titles for Aromanticism could be: Narcissus; Don’t Touch Me; Please Touch Me; Sure, Let’s Touch Each Other but Please Leave Right After We Cum; Grey A; It’s Not You, It’s Me; It’s Not You – Actually, It’s Not Anyone; It’s Not Me, It’s My Childhood.
The not-yet-dictionary definition of an “aromantic” is someone who doesn’t experience romantic love, or does to a diminished, abnormal degree. I’m just trying to get it out from over the squiggly red line.
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