#aroace writing

I’ve been thinking a lot about friendships and morality. I don’t know if it’s a universal experience, but for much of my life, how good of a friend I could be felt directly tied to how good of a person I am. And I’ve always felt that I fell short no matter how much I sacrificed myself for my friendships.

Aromantic communities do a lot in debunking amatonormativity, in challenging the norm and asking, “Why? Why do people have to be monogamous? Why do partners have to have sex? Why do people have to have partners?” And I think these conversations have opened a wonderful side dialogue on friendships and whether or not love is what makes someone “human” or “good.” As someone both neurodivergent and on the aroace spectrum, I’ve always occupied the unique intersection of being particularly affected by that message that perpetrates everything in media: “To be good is to be human, and to be human is to love.”

Lately, I’ve been unlearning this thinking. And reading about aplatonic experiences and applying arguments against amatonormativity to my perspective on friendships has helped me so much. I’ve always limited myself to a model for friendships that I perceived as the “good” one. I never trust my own instincts for what I want because I’m half convinced that, as a neurodivergent person, I’m broken. I don’t understand real friendship, I can only hope to imitate it by paying careful attention to how neurotypical people describe the ideal friendship. And I thought it was okay to feel so off kilter all of the time because this was my punishment for being an inherently bad person who didn’t enjoy or desire my “good” friendships.

And I’m realizing that this absolute thinking is incredibly unhealthy. Just like in every other part of life, how good or bad of a person you are is entirely subjective. How good or bad of a friend you are is also subjective. And if you and your friend desire different friendships, that isn’t a sign that you are bad friends who are bad people failing to make it work. You’re just incompatible. Even more than that, you’re just seeking entirely different things.

We use the word “friend” to describe so many things. It captures a breadth of relationships. That’s beautiful, but it also leads to this confusion and breakdown in communication. You wouldn’t expect someone who wants a romantic relationship to stay friends with someone who wants a platonic one. In that same vein, you shouldn’t force yourself to fit your desires from a friendship to someone else’s. You have to recognize the gap, and then you have to compromise or walk away.

I’m trying to teach myself the following: There isn’t morality in friendship. There isn’t a good or bad way to have friends. There’s just the kind of relationship you want with someone and the kind of relationship they want with you and what you make of it together. And that’s not necessarily going to look like friendship to someone else, but it will be yours.