aromantic-official:

Today, we are officially launching aromantic-official! Our goal is to raise awareness and organize events for people across the aromantic spectrum.

Who are we?

We’re a collective of aromantics who came together through Arocalypse, an aro-spec forum and Discord server. Each of us comes from a different background, but we are all eager to contribute to the aro-spec community. Over time, we have all started personal aro blogs where we write from our own perspectives. This has led to an increased presence of active aro-spec blogs on tumblr, but we recently realized that there are few, if any, blogs doing large-scale organization and outreach for the aromantic community. Many blogs that once served this purpose are no longer active. Furthermore, the aromantic community is still in its early phases, and is still quite small and ununified. There are many aro-spec or questioning folks who may feel that they do not have a clear place to turn for advice, resources, or community support. For this reason, it was mod Magni’s idea to create a new blog to provide organization and outreach for the aro-spec community. Ze brought this up on the Arocalypse server, and the other mods were quickly on board. Thus, @aromantic-official was born! You can learn more about us individually or find our personal blogs through the mods page, and through our upcoming mod intros!

What are our goals for aromantic-official?

Our overall goal is to organize events, provide community outreach, and boost aro voices. We would like to provide a central hub and resource for aro-specs, those who are questioning, and allies of the community. To achieve this, we have several other objectives in mind:

Aromantic Spectrum Awareness Week: This event began in 2014, originally taking place in November (shortly following Asexual Awareness Week), but has grown and evolved over the last few years to stand more on its own and be more inclusive. As the original @arospecawarenessweek account appears to no longer be active, we intend to help promote this event in the future to ensure its continued success. The annual date is the week after Valentine’s Day. Aro-spec Awareness Week 2019 is February 17^th to 23^rd, so look to us for more information about that in the future!

Education/Resources: We want to keep an organized collection of information about aro terms and issues! We currently have a Resources page as well as a Glossary!

Surveys: In order to collect more information about the aromantic community, we are creating and updating a collection of surveys which can be found here.

Advice/Discussion: We want to reach out to the aro community, so we want to give people the opportunity to come to us with questions so that we can provide information or advice to the best of our abilities. Feel free to ask us questions! We have posted an FAQin order to more easily facilitate productive discussion about aro-spec identities and issues.

What now?

In recent weeks/months, the aromantic community has entered a renaissance period. Despite constant external pressures and a lack of resources, this fledgling community has begun to thrive more than it has in several years, with important but civil intracommunity discussions cropping up day by day. With a bit of organization and outreach on our part, we hope to foster continued discussion in this way, and hopefully create more awareness for aro-spec issues outside of our small community. We are embarking on this journey to boost the voices of aro-spec people and raise up our community, and we invite you to follow along!

Congrats@aromantic-official on your launch!  I look forward to seeing what you do for the community.

AUREA - To be or not to be: a non-profit?

What does it mean to be a non-profit and is it the right move for AUREA? Tell us what you think.

[Image description: A close-up of a drop of dark green food coloring in a glass of water. The pigment has not spread very far and you can see clear ribbons of dark green. Around the drop of coloring are lighter whisps of green in a variety of shades, implying that more food coloring was dropped in earlier. Overlaid on the image are the words “AUREA- To be or not to be: a non-profit”]

Dear All, Hannah Tesler is a PhD candidate at Yale and is looking for participants for her study on single adults living in the US, including Aros. Here is her call for participants:

“Title: Seeking Singles for Participation in a Research Study

We are looking to interview singles adults based in the US who identify with varying sexual and romantic orientations, including those who identify as being aromantic, for my dissertation. The purpose of this research study is to learn more about individuals’ relationship preferences and dating behaviors over time. Study activities will include participating in a zoom or phone interview, and future follow-ups, if you are willing – but you can choose to opt out at any time. After the initial interview you will be asked to complete a brief demographic survey and you will receive a $20 gift card to thank you for your time. For more information or if you are interested in participating, please email hannah.tessler(at)yale(dot)edu”

AUREA is working on the 2022 Aromantic census and looking for volunteers, including analysts, questions editors, question testers, and/or translators! If you’d like to become a volunteer, please fill in the application form, which will close April 8th, 2022:

Aro Census Team Member Application

[Image description: A thumbnail of a google form. Overlaid on the image are the words “Aro Census Team Member Application”]

AUREA - My Aromantic Fantasy-World

AUREA readers’ submitted what their aromantic fantasy-worlds’ would be like.

[Image description: A picture of a wrinkled aromantic flag. On top of the flag, there is a black and white photo of an old city street and a metal chain necklace with a green jewel pendant. Overlaid on the image are the words “AUREA - My Aromantic Fantasy-World”]

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The first-ever aromantic conference will be live on February 19th and 20th, hosted by spAce Malmo!

All times are in CET. You can learn more about the event on InstagramandFacebook!

Schedule for Saturday The 19th:

10 am - Welcome

10:15 am - 12:00 - Deconstructing Amatonormativity

12:00 - 2 pm - Aromanticity in South-East Asia

2pm - 3pm - lunch break

3pm - 4pm - hangout / networking session

4pm - 5pm - 50 Shades of Aro panel discussion - about the aromatic spectrum

5pm - 6pm - Adventures in Aromanticism

6pm - 6:30pm - Aromantic Census

6:30 - 7pm - break

7pm - 8pm - Aromantic Diary and Aromantic Representation

Schedule for Sunday the 20th:

10am - 11am – Romance Aversion

11 am - 11:30 am - On Being Aro and Autistic

11:30am - 12:00 - Aro UQ research

12 pm - 2 pm - Dealing with Amatonormativity

2 pm - 3 pm - Aro Creatives Hangout and Networking

3 pm - 4pm - lunch break

4 pm - 5 pm - Aros of Colour panel discussion

5 pm - 6 pm - Aros of Colour Arospecs hangout

6 pm – 7.00 pm - break

7 pm - 8 pm - Aro + Trans panel discussion

8 pm - 9pm - Relationship Options for Aros

Image descriptions can be found in the image alt text

AUREA - Imagining an Aromantic Winter

Akweley Mazarae returns! Now as a member of the news team to talk about aromantics and what the winter season could be.

[Image description: A photo lantern that is sitting on a porch and covered in snow. Sitting beside the lantern there is an aromantic flag made out of a rectangular plastic canvas. Overlaid on the image are the words “AUREA- Imagining an Aromantic Winter”]

AUREA - DIY Pride Gear (Part 4)

Pride month is here and we’ve got three DIYs for you to tackle!

[Image Description: A photo of a white wooden aro ring leaning against a round, white, felt furniture foot protector. Both items are sitting on a plain black background. Overlaid on the picture are the words “AUREA- DIY Pride Gear (Part 4)”]

too-spicy-and-too-queer:

aro-neir-o:

imladiris:

Other people have probably written about this, but the intersections between neurodivergency and being aro/ace have been on my mind a lot since I found out I’m neurodivergent. Specifically, I’ve been thinking about how the different types of discrimination I face play into each other.

I’ve been infantilised for pretty much my whole life because of my neurodivergency. The way I tend to act, and the things I tend to struggle with, mean I get treated like a weird excitable kid who doesn’t understand how the world works. The fact that I’m also aromantic and asexual is viewed just another facet of this “immaturity”. So the idea goes: of course Iwouldn’t be interested in romance and sex. How could I even understand such adult topics? I’m just a kid who gets distracted by butterflies and likes to infodump about history. Isn’t my innocence so endearing?

Instead of my orientation being taken seriously, it’s belittled and taken as a confirmation that I’m just childish and strange. This has led, on several occasions, to people assuming it’s just a symptom of my neurodivergency that needs to be medically addressed.** Aromantic and asexual people already face excessive questioning about our orientations and get told the cause must be [insert diagnosis or symptom of diagnosis here]; being neurodivergent makes this exponentially worse, because the underlying assumption is that I can’t have the agency or the self-knowledge to identify this way. After all, I’m just a weird kid, aren’t I? I need other (read: neurotypical and allo) people to explain everything, even my own experiences, to me.

This infantilisation made it particularly hard for me to come to terms with my orientation, because I didn’t want to prove everyone that they were right. For years, I pushed back against the way I’d been treated by seeking out the one thing that would make me an adult in others’ eyes - a romantic and sexual relationship. It hurt to realise I didn’t actually want that deep down. It felt like being told I really was that weird kid, tolerated but ultimately babied. It’s taken a lot of work to accept that the way I am doesn’t make me any less mature and deserving of respect.

There isn’t really a conclusion to this - mostly I wanted to post about my experiences as someone who is both neurodivergent and aroace, and the issues I’ve faced because of it. If any other aro/ace neurodivergent people would like to add to this or share their own perspective, I’d love to hear it.

**A lot of neurodivergent people do consider their experiences of attraction to be linked to their neurodivergency, and that’s obviously cool and valid. That’s not what I’m talking about here. My point is the systematic pathologisation of aromanticism and asexuality and the denial of my ability to define myself.

This is (perhaps unfortunately) a very relateable experience. It’s not something I really accepted personally until recently, but in hindsight, many of my interpersonal conflicts stem from others misreading my neurodivergence. My arospec and acespec experiences are furthermore dismissed because they are assumed to be part of my neurodivergence.

It’s definitely hurtful, especially because (for me) some of my beliefs about relationships maybe influenced by my neurodivergence. Parts of how I experience my identity are probably tied into my neurodivergence. And other parts of it seem entirely separate. I think those are both valid experiences, but both of them are belittled for different reasons.

Thank you for sharing this; I’m glad I came across it and had the spoons to add on. (Hopefully that’s all right - I can always make my own post.)

This is very interesting for me to read, and I’ve had a very different experience with the way people treat my orientation and neurodivergence.  I think there are three big reasons why I’m treated so differently.  First, I’m AMAB, large, and hairy.  Second, while I’m aro, I’m not ace, and I’m partnering and romance-favorable and have had a lot of partners.  Third, my neurodivergences manifest a bit differently from either of yours.

I’ve never been called immature or infantilized for my orientation or my neurodivergence.  I’ve been called a lot of demeaning (or intentionally demeaning) or dismissing things, but never that.  I think it’s worth examining why, because femme AFAB people especially receive a lot of that kind of thing that masculine people don’t.  I think stories like this, from marginalized people, reveal depths to the insidiousness and harmfulness of misogyny that may not come up with straight white able neurotypical gender-conforming women.

What I have been called, both because of my orientation and my neurodivergence, is unmasculine, unaggressive, stoic, uninvolved, unemotional, uncaring, unsupportive, detached, and aloof.  While those first two are absolutely true and accurate adjectives to apply to me, they were intended to be bad and insulting, but to me they are big compliments.  The rest, though, aren’t even remotely true, and anyone who spends any time getting to know me at all knows I’m the opposite of all of those things.  But because of my neurodivergence, I don’t express being highly emotional, deeply caring, and intensely involved the ways that neurotypical people do, and this comes up in intimate relationships quite a lot.

Interestingly, I also get complimented a lot because of these same traits.  I’m often called wise, “an old soul”, observant, patient, and eloquent because I see things from an outside perspective and take time to think before expressing my thoughts.  People ask me for advice about romantic problems frequently and tell me my advice is particularly insightful, even though most of the time it can be boiled down to one of three things: “Have you asked directly for what you want?”, “Have you expressed your feelings directly and clearly?”, and “Have you explicitly discussed that together or are you making an assumption?”  Neurotypical alloromantic people get really wrapped up in the social scripts of romance and expression and forget to be direct and clear, and that can give people like us some big advantages in communicating and building relationships, at least if we can convince the neurotypical alloromantic people in our lives to challenge their own assumptions and take what we say about ourselves and our own experiences as true and literal.  We can ask them to do that, and if they don’t, that’s their failing, not ours.

Carnival of Aros - Self-care, Self-love, and Aromanticism

I am coming out of my work-ridden space with some thoughts on self-care and work-life balance, so it seems incredibly fitting that this month’s Carnival of Aros theme is self-care and self-love.

As always, my thoughts are under ‘Keep Reading.’

Aro self-care is something I find to be very specific and different from my other forms of self-care. When I struggle daily with relationship norms and values that I actively disidentify with because of my aromanticism, I can’t help but think that we do need these resources.

Below are some of the ways I have been learning to care for myself when I encounter thoughts that are regurgitations of anti-aro sentiments. Internalized aromisia/arophobia is very real and sometimes we all have to struggle with it. In different ways, too. Being an aroflux person means that sometimes I devalue my place in the aro community for being “not aro enough.” And other times, I devalue my place in broader society because I’m “too aro.” Sometimes I am frustrated I don’t feel any love, including self-love, and other times I’m called selfish for caring too much.

Self-care for me means accepting all of my identity, all of my struggles, my happinesses, and my feelings. That’s so much harder in practice than in theory.

What my self-care looks like

Something I have been reading a lot more about recently (particularly when my therapist also mentioned it) was the idea of being in relationships with everything around me. I recall a First Nations idea of interconnectedness or connectivity, and trying to implement this way of thinking has been helping me understand myself and others in our complex world.

I think of my identity and myself as a collection of selves, and my work with myself is a kind of ’Parts Work,’ as my therapist calls it. I try to build relationships with different parts of myself. For example, young parts of me that still exist and express fear when I encounter certain triggering circumstances. Or the parts of myself I’m trying to cultivate and let enter me but am still developing. I work with myself and all of my parts to co-create a self-sustaining system (note: I don’t mean system as in plurality; I am not plural personally).

Just like I have parts of me I really enjoy, like my very creative selves, I also have parts of me I struggle with and have often suppressed, like the internal critic that thinks my aromanticism and identity are fake. What has been incredibly important to me in my self-development is caring for ALL of those parts.

That includes caring for parts I don’t like and am often frustrated with or angry at. At the end of the day, all of the parts of me are trying to help, even if they don’t really do so in an effective way. Just like I wouldn’t yell at a child who may have broken my plate when they were trying to help me put away the dishes, I don’t want to yell at the parts of myself that make mistakes in good faith.

Things I try to remember to implement in my self-care

• Not beating myself up for having internalized amatonormative beliefs, and instead sitting with them curiously. Hearing myself out and comforting that part while also being firm and clear about my boundaries engaging with it.
• Not beating myself up for not having the energy to sit with all of my parts or feelings as they come up. I don’t have to be ready to work on and parent myself literally all of the time.
• I can ask for help or for company when I engage with other parts of me or engage in self-care activities. People are often way more excited to be invited to that kind of personal and intimate experience than they are weirded out by it. If they’re weirded out by it, it’s not on me, it’s more about them and their comfort and that’s all valid. We all relationship differently and I need to be aware that my queering of relationship structures isn’t universal.
• I can say no to others asking things of me, including asking to help and be part of my self-care. Sometimes it is caring for myself to try to practice doing things independently to build up my resilience, while other times even when I could deal with things on my own, it’s an exercise in being vulnerable to invite others.
• I’m allowed to change up my self-care strategies and routines whenever the hell I want. I don’t have to take a bath and do a facial every Sunday. I can play a video game instead, go for a walk, hang out with a friend, spontaneously paint a plant pot, write a shitton of posts for this aro blog (hi, yes, I’m currently doing this).
• My self-care doesn’t need to look like anyone else’s. If it feels good for me to disconnect from everything and everyone to play my piano for five hours straight until my fingers start to get sore, it is no one’s right to judge that behaviour as wrong or right for me. If I want cuddles and hugs and intimate time with someone without a relationship structure, it is no one’s right to judge that. If I don’t want hugs or love from others, even when well-meaning, that’s well and valid.
• I am not my own judge. I am my own parent. Those are not the same thing. I also don’t need to be in parenting mode all of the time. I can be neither judge nor parent.
• Self-love is not a prerequisite for self-care.

My relationship with self-love and self-care is inherently queer because I am queer. Because I am aro. That last bullet point is something I think is particularly important as an aro engaging in self-care, and it’s something I would personally put on an aro self-care list.

At the end of the day, I am a human being who is flawed and growing and changing all the time. My identity grows and changes with me. I love a lot, but sometimes I don’t love at all. And that’s all ok. I am not beholden to anything or anyone, and that also includes me.

aro-neir-o:

I was inspired by last month’s Carnival of Aros on intersection but I was unable to participate (and also felt it wasn’t my place to talk about my experiences as a white person who is living quite privileged now). However, some of my life experiences were echoed in those posts, and I have been thinking on them for years without expressing them.

I thought it might be useful (either to myself or to an anonymous reader) to put my thoughts out there.

As usual, more under the cut.

Keep reading

I’m tacking on an extra thought in case others want to get involved in this conversation (or if this conversation has already happened and I am very out of the loop).

The only communities available where I live are the immigrant ones. Whatever values those immigrant communities uphold, I (and other children of immigrants) must oblige by them to stay in the community.

If I were living in Poland, I could probably find queer-friendly communities and aro-friendly communities (heck, one of the AUREA team members is from Poland so obviously those exist). But because immigrant communities are not representative of the cultures of where they came from (and they evolve into their own cultures with distinct dialects and values), there is a limited pool and therefore choices to make between staying and being oneself.

Do other queer and aro children of immigrants experience this?

I was inspired by last month’s Carnival of Aros on intersection but I was unable to participate (and also felt it wasn’t my place to talk about my experiences as a white person who is living quite privileged now). However, some of my life experiences were echoed in those posts, and I have been thinking on them for years without expressing them.

I thought it might be useful (either to myself or to an anonymous reader) to put my thoughts out there.

As usual, more under the cut.

My parents are both immigrants. They’re white Europeans from a non-English-speaking country. English is their third or fourth language. Meanwhile, I was the first in my family to be born in Canada, growing up with Polish in a large Polish Canadian community and then later with English when I started school. English, at this point, is my best language. I haven’t upkept my Polish abilities much, and I have been realizing that part of why is that I so disidentify with the culture.

Polish culture is, frankly, predominantly nationalist, gender essentialist, and amatonormative. It has so much vibrancy and complexity when it comes to social structures and values, but nowadays all I see in the governing generation (and my parents’ generations) is paranoia and exclusion. 

Meanwhile, the cultures I see around me where I live are very diverse. The generation I hang around can be more inclusive if I find the right spaces. But finding those spaces has meant finding them in English. 

This is a common problem I’ve seen lamented by other aros in other communities, but it’s one that, at this point, serves me. My English is better than my Polish or my French. I don’t have the vocabulary to talk about my queerness in a meaningful way in other languages, even if the terminology exists. I also have lived in Canada my entire life, between Polish Canadian communities, immigrant communities in general, and colonialist cultures. Despite my exposure to culture other than the dominant English and French settler cultures, I can’t identify strongly with anything but what I have been conditioned to believe. The stuff I’ve learned in settler-created school systems is what I carry with me in my bias. And the culture my family comes from, that I havebeen exposed to every single day since my birth, is so much worse.

It all hurts me.

Family in Polish culture, as I have seen it, is the ultimate unit. Although I have found it is more accepting of intergenerational living than what I see here, marriage and children are such principal components of happy life that it still haunts me sometimes when I think about my complicated relationships to those things. 

When it comes to children of Polish immigrants, I have found that those who keep up with the language tend to replicate their parents’ cultural values. I see it in my young cousins, who are biracial and still repeat words and ideas that I have never heard biracial children of non-Polish or non-white parents say. This means I can’t find Polish Canadian spaces that are queer-friendly. I can’t find Polish Canadian spaces that are aro-friendly. I lose the language. I lose the culture.

And then I repeat Western-focused ideals instead.

I struggle with my own dichotomies this way. I am privileged in so many ways at present, but I always have this caveat of not having grown up with it. It feels false, somehow, to be shedding away the Polish immigrant identity out of shame. It also feels false to call upon it with all of its cultural problems, however. I don’t know where my pride is, if it even exists here.

Like a dullard, I’m pretty sure I forgot to actually submit last month’s piece. I just published it here and promptly ran off to do who-knows-what. Goes to show how occupied my brain has been recently.

This month’s theme is one that feels very sweet to me. As always, my thoughts are under the cut. This time a bit more poetic than usual. Something about this prompt really dug deeply into my emotional roots.

For me, Happily Ever After means love and family. It means kindness and devotion in all areas of my life. It means holding inter-generational friendships that often cross the line to found family. It means supporting others and giving in ways that move their hearts and minds forward.

Happily Ever After is a feeling for me, not a place, not a person, not one particular scenario. It means finding joy in every little thing, and appreciating joys I may have missed in the moment, only visible in hindsight. It’s something I keep building. Sometimes I’m working on my own on my little shed in the backyard, but that shed is still part of a land I share with the rest of the world. Sometimes I’m helping others build their sheds, or giving them extra parts from mine. Sometimes I’m just supervising and keeping others company while they build theirs. It’s always an ongoing decorating project. That’s my Happily Ever After.

Alloaro people of color deserve much love & respect ❤️ you are not less worthy of existing than anyone else ❤️ you are a good part of this world ❤️ you are not “bad representation,” you are a person, I am glad you are learning more about yourself. You are worthy of care & support ❤️

Lovelies, if you are able, then show your pride! You deserve to participate(if you choose to do so) just as much as any other LGBT+ orientation and identity! Let’s also show some pride and support for those of us who would like to participate, but are unable to do so for any reason, and let them know that they will not go unrecognized.