#alterous attraction

My experience of attraction doesn’t differentiate much.  I feel the same emotions about my close friends as I do about my partners.  So ideally, I wouldn’t differentiate between close friends and partners at all.  But I still do, and the reason why is because my friends don’t feel the same way about me as I do about them.  My experience of intimacy, of allkinds of intimacy, is fundamentally different from what alloromantics experience.  What I want from friendship more closely aligns with what allos want from romance than what they want from friendship.  But between my alterous experience of attraction and romance repulsion, I usually find both romantic relationships and friendships with allos unsatisfying.

So, as an amorous aro, what “partner” actually means to me is someone who reciprocates my feelings and wants to act on them.  If I’m in a friendship or a romantic relationship with an allo, the way we feel about each other is pretty different.  We’re just compromising and finding what works.  I sympathize a lot with aros who are frustrated with other aros who focus on partnering, since they get enough of that from the allos in their lives.  Ideally friendship would be the top form of relationship for me, too.  But my culture and my allo friends define friendship in a way that is not particularly compatible with my experience of intimacy, and I see friendship in general as being incredibly restricted by amatonormativity.  So, I still differentiate between partners and friends because I have to create that kind of differentiation for other people to understand it and feel comfortable, especially the people I’m in those relationships with.

For example, my best friend and I have a platonic friendship, but that’s because that’s the kind of boundaries she’s comfortable with.  If our relationship was a closer expression of how I felt about her, it wouldn’t be all that different from my relationship with my alterous partner.  The biggest reason why my relationship with my best friend and my relationship with my alterous partner are so different is because the two of them have very different ideas of what intimacy and attraction mean.  My partner’s ideas are a lot more like mine.  My relationship with my best friend has to be different because the boundaries I would prefer don’t work for her, and thanks to amatonormativity, I have to compromise more than she does.

So while ideally I’d like to not rely on significantly different relationship models between the people I love, I have to because of how different our experiences of intimacy are.  And while ideally I’d like not to prioritize some of my relationships over others, I’m going to put more time and effort into the relationships where our boundaries and feelings are more compatible because those relationships are more satisfying.  But I’ll also continue to subvert and rebel against harmful relationship norms.  I know amatonormativity is harmful to allos, too, and hopefully they can learn something from queerer relationship models.  Ultimately the work of dismantling amatonormativity will have to be taken up by allos if it is ever going to succeed.

Friend Reminder that Aro-spec is in fact just that. A Spectrum.

Some of us do feel small bits of romantic attraction. Some of us fall in love (platonic, alterous or romantically). Some of us are repulsed by the idea of romance. Some of us will never be in a “romantic” or queer platonic relationship. Some of us enjoy the thought of getting married. Some of us are indifferent. Some of us are fine with just having sexual relationships. Some of us worry about other things.

But we are all on this big green spectrum of aromantic.