[image description: three sets of two lockscreens featuring a design of repeated arrows banded in the colours of various aromantic spectrum pride flags. The left lockscreen features the arrows set against a gradient background matching its respective flag colours; the right features the arrows set against a plain white background. Flags included are: alterous (yellow/grey/pink/red), demi aro-ace (navy/light blue/black/white/light grey) and nebularomantic (purple/dark blue/teal/white/peach/dark coral/violet).]
I’ve turned my aro arrows into lockscreens! All backgrounds/wallpapers are available for free personal or non-commercial use. For flag creator credits, please see @aroflagarchive.
flag id: the right flag has 6 stripes. in order, they are dark blue, purple, yellow, light pink, cream, and turquoise. the middle has 5 stripes. in order, they are light sky blue, purple, light pink, cream, and light sky blue. the right has 5 stripes. in order, they are dark blue, light pink, faded purple, light pink, and dark blue. end id.
November’s prompt is commitment. I just had a conversation with a friend about loyalty, so I wanted to expand on that a little bit for this prompt. As always, my thoughts are under “Keep Reading.”
I want to follow up on some points I made in my last post about attraction, specifically how I don’t really experience differences in attraction. While a lot of discussion about aromantic identity and experience centers attraction, my personal experience doesn’t match this. I can’t separate my experience of attraction into categories like platonic, aesthetic, and sensual. I’m either attracted to someone, or I’m not, and the difference in that feeling of attraction itself between different people is minimal, even though the relationships themselves are drastically different. More importantly, attraction isn’t a key factor in whether or not I choose to be intimate with someone.
For me, being aro is not about defining the nature of attraction, it’s about decentering attraction in relation to intimacy.
For me, intimacy is all about mutual expressions of love, so who I’m being intimate with, and why, and what exactly I feel about them is a core part of the experience of intimacy with them. The primary factors in my intimate decisions are trust, a history of emotional closeness, vulnerability, nurture, empathy, and what I think will work well in that particular relationship. Attraction is either a minor factor or not a factor at all, even though I do experience attraction, sometimes quite strongly. Attraction is just unimportant to me when it comes to making choices about intimacy and relationships.
So while it’s true that I don’t experience romantic attraction, that’s not what matters to me about being aromantic. What’s important to me is that my experience of intimacy is fundamentally different from how alloromantics experience intimacy, as I mentioned in my last post. All my different kinds of personal relationships are different from the kinds of personal relationships alloromantics form. All the normative models of personal relationships, friendship, family, and intimate relationships, fail to be applicable to my experience just as much as the models of romance fail to be applicable to my experience.
Because of this, I reject the idea that being aromantic is a lack of something that alloromantics experience. My experience of attraction and intimacy isn’t a lack of anything, it’s a fundamental difference in form and structure that extends to all kinds of relationships and intimacy, as I said in my last post. It’s also misleading to questioning arospec people who do experience some form of romantic attraction to define aromanticism as a lack of romantic attraction.
A good example is that I see a lot of aro people complain about how hard it is to find friends who prioritize friendship, or intimacy in friendships, or are willing to make commitments in friendships, and I also have this problem. If anything, a lot of aros experience friendship more richly and more intensely than allos. I think this is an example of how aromantic experience is fundamentally different in ways that can’t be explained by simply an absence of romantic attraction. I’m sure some individuals experience being aromantic as primarily just a lack of romantic attraction, but I think defining aromanticism at its core as an absence of a particular kind of attraction is a disservice to a lot of aros.
I recently developed a relationship with another aro, and we selected the label “alterous” for our relationship. Afterwards, I realized that I felt good about that. I felt good about the label, and I felt good about the conversation about labeling our relationship. Then, I realized I’ve never felt like that before. No label ever quite felt like an accurate descriptor for my experience of intimacy and a relationship.
Other relationship labels I’ve had in the past might have been accurate regarding specifically what boundaries we had, or how other people read our relationship, but they weren’t accurate labels of my feelings of attraction and intimacy. I always felt like, in some way, I had to perform a role to match the label, and that such a performance was inauthentic. It didn’t help that the labels for most of my intimate relationships were amatonormative labels, and some of my partners explicitly communicated that they had expectations attached to certain labels. Speaking those labels aloud felt like invoking those expectations, making them heavier with every enunciation.
In a couple more recent relationships, I used the labels “partner” and “partnership”, which didn’t feel oppressive the way more amatonormative labels felt. They didn’t feel inaccurate or inauthentic, either, but I didn’t feel the satisfaction I do now with “alterous” in this relationship. I suspect that part of the reason why I felt differently is because those partners were alloromantic, and everything feels different with an aromantic partner, but I don’t think that’s the entire reason. I also haven’t had any alloromantic partners since I came out as aro, so I don’t know if “partnership” would feel more validating now or not with an alloromantic partner who was acknowledging my aromantic experience.
My alterous partner and I discussed the merits of various labels, and discussed both the model we want and our feelings for each other, and how important it is for the label to reflect all of that. I think in a lot of my prior relationships, we selected a label and then assumed our relationship model would change to match, but in this case, we discussed our relationship model first and then picked a label to describe it. The label is descriptive, not prescriptive. We aren’t attaching expectations to the label specifically. We’re just trying to find an effective communication tool to express how we feel to others. That distinction is liberating.
