#aro relationships
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.”
leosmain-moved-deactivated20210:
Is polyamory like, a thing aros can be? I’m not asking if aros can date multiple people, they absolutely can. I mean, if an aro wants multiple queerplatonic relationships and/or sexual relationships, can that count as polyamory? I mean the word polyamory means many-(romantic specifically)loves.
I’ve wondered that too. I figured I was poly ages before I knew I was aro, and now I can understand why, but I’m not sure I want to stop calling myself polyamorous. I don’t think people outside of the aro community would think so, the word itself feels pretty explicit that it’s for romantic love, but that might be a… Use the label you feel best suits your experience even if it’s not perfect kind of thing.
Aro people can be polyamorous too, yeah. Alternatively, I’ve seen the term polyaffectionate used.
Deffinatly! In fact a lot of aros are relationships anarchists and that started as a form of poly. I have also seen people use “polyplatonic” as a term to describe this.
Hello, yes, I am aromantic and polyamorous, and I’m also an organizer in a polyamory community and currently in polyamorous relationships. I have written a good bit about this topic before. Feel free to check out my posts on the intersection of aromanticism and polyamory.
My experiences of being both polyamorous and aromantic
A thread about why polyamory and aromantic communities should work together
How polyamory and aromanticism work together for me
Regarding what polyamorous relationships are to an aro, that’s up to you. I know aros who are in multiple QPRs and call that polyamory. While polyamory is sometimes defined as having multiple open and honest romantic relationships, many people don’t define it that way and instead define it as multiple open and honest loving intimate relationships, which could easily include QPRs or alterous relationships. Multiple relationships that are primarily sexual might fall more under the swinging umbrella, but there’s so much overlap between polyamory and swinging that you could choose either. So if you’re aro and in multiple relationships, it’s really up to you whether to describe that as polyamory or not.
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.
I said in a previous post that I’d talk about nurture more. This is going to be a bit of a tricky one because it combines basically all of my blog topics, and I haven’t tried to do that yet.
My primary goal for most of my behavior is to be nurturing. I want all my relationships, with my friends, family, partners, neighbors, communities, ecosystems, to be nurturing, so that everyone involved feels appreciated and encouraged to grow. And most of the important lessons I’ve learned about nurture are most apparent in gardening.
The thing I most often consider about gardening is that I don’t do any of the growing. I can’t make plants grow. Plants do that all on their own. Similarly, I can’t make plants thrive, or heal from injury, or bear fruit. They do that on their own, too. Most of my actions are restricted to manipulating the environment around them, and the means I have at my disposal for doing so are fairly limited. I can plant them in spots where they get good sun. I can clear weeds from around them that might hinder their growth. I can water them when it’s too dry. Almost all of my effort in gardening is one of those activities. So, the act of gardening is to identify the needs of the plants and read their current health through observation, and enrich their environment as I am able in ways that help them to grow and thrive. If they are thriving, they will bear plentiful fruit, which enriches me.
With humans, it’s not that different. Different humans thrive best in different environments. Just like some plants need more sunlight or rain, some humans need more of certain kinds of affection and validation. Just like different plants prefer different soil, different humans thrive better in different home and social environments. I want to help my friends thrive, to be a part of a nurturing environment for them. Luckily, humans can tell me how they feel easier than plants can, but that doesn’t mean listening is always easy. But through communication, consent, and observation, I can learn what kinds of love, affection, and support my friends prefer from me. Following a strict formula for how to care for someone, like heteronormativity or amatonormativity or cisnormativity, is not ideal, even for cis heterosexual alloromantic people, because people have unique needs that are constantly changing. So, I always consider what would help my friends thrive, and this directs me to love them in unique ways that hopefully will nourish them. If I’m succeeding, they will thrive better than they would have if I was not in their life. If that’s not the case, then I need to reconsider my actions and understanding.
The previous post asked how I view relationships. I think about relationships a lot beyond just interpersonal relationships with humans. The way I see the world is many systems of relation, interconnected, nested, always changing. I see myself as a set of systems, biological organs, emotions, thoughts, memories, actions, and I see myself as a part of many other systems, families, communities, personal relationships, clubs, cultural groups; this is what I mean by “my environment”. Likewise, I’m a part of some relationships with other people, and part of their environment, and my actions help shape their environment. Much like an environmentalist would aim to leave a place better than they found it, I want my presence in someone’s life to improve their environment. Much like gardening, I would like my love for my friends to be a little extra sunlight and rain in the amounts they need. And just like attempting to claim the sunshine and rain would be an act of hubris, love also should not be claimed or possessed, and instead freely given (this is where my fondness for the culture of polyamory comes in).
One of the techniques I use in my garden is companion planting, or coplanting. Coplanting is when two or more plants, when planted together, benefit each other in some way. The best coplanting matches are when the plants actually thrive more than they would on their own. The most famous example of this is corn and beans. Beans return nitrogen to the soil which the corn needs to stay healthy, and the corn stalk is a good place for the bean to climb to reach sunlight. Companion plants can provide a lot of other benefits, like covering the soil to retain moisture and deterring pests. So, when I enter a committed relationship, I think about the relationship that companion plants have with each other, how they each improve the local environment for the other. I wish to improve my partner’s life, and I would like my partner to improve mine, so that most of the ways we interrelate are mutually beneficial, and our shared love helps us to thrive.
I think a huge part of the ignorance about aromanticism is that people fundamentally misunderstand aro relationships because they simply do not have any frame of reference for what it would be like to live without romantic feelings. Non-aro people completely miss the point when they imagine their life as exactly the same, but with the romantic feelings and relationships removed, and extrapolate that that’s what aro people’s lives are like, because for a lot of people… it’s not.
It’s the same misunderstanding when cis people try to imagine what it would be like to be trans by thinking “what if I wanted to be a boy?” and straight people imagine their partner and their relationship as exactly the same, just another gender.
That’s why we get all this bullshit where allo people act as though all relationships must fit neatly and obviously into either ‘romantic’ or ‘platonic’ categories, because… their relationships do. That’s why we hear stuff like “lol what you are describing is a friendship!” when aro people talk about QPRs, because for them, any relationship that lacks romantic affection is a friendship. Because they are not imagining their life without a relationship that is committed, incredibly intimate, exclusive, and prioritised above all others.
Aro people can still desire a level of intimacy and commitment with somebody that everybody else gets from romantic relationships, without wanting a romance: sharing everything - space, money, belongings, time - having a level of emotional and even physical intimacy that is not common in friendships, being committed to one another, making that relationship a priority above other things in your life, basing major life decisions around that relationship… these are all things that most people fulfil through romantic relationships, and aro people can desire that kind of intimacy without feeling or wanting romance.
Ultimately, it doesn’t matter if you don’t understand QPRs or the aro experience. You don’t have to understand it to respect it. At some point you have to acknowledge that you don’t understand because you have not experienced it, you have no frame of reference for it, and you will never really know what it’s like because those are not one of those people. The validity of aro people’s experiences does not hinge on whether or not non-aro people understand or accept them.
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.
Me beating myself with a stick: stop thinking about making surveys stop thinking about making surveys-
Incidentially has anyone ever made a survey to figure out what the relationship preferences in the aro community are
There’s a few about Aros perspectives on romance, friendship, and PDA that are similar topics. Can be found on AUREA’s research page
