I really like that the aro and ace communities have come up with models of different kinds of attraction and relationships. It’s badly needed in a society that portrays only a tiny handful of incredibly narrow “correct” narratives of intimacy, and these models have clearly helped a lot of people. They fill a need just like how the models of gender made by nonbinary communities have helped people, and have the potential to help society as a whole beyond queer communities. But one thing I don’t see in many discussions about models of attraction is how attraction is super messy and doesn’t neatly fit these models sometimes, or at all for some people.
I would describe a lot of my experiences of attraction as more of a gradient, a spread, a big paint splatter. My attraction for one person is all part of the same splotch, but it might stretch across multiple categories, sometimes neatly, sometimes chaotically or nonsensically. Often the only clearly distinct attraction I feel is sexual, and it tends to be fairly weak, and the others are much stronger. Attraction is different for each person I am close to, and no two experiences have been identical for me. Sometimes trying to describe them using the model of sexual-sensual-romantic-platonic-aesthetic just doesn’t work, the splotch doesn’t follow those lines in any clear way. Some of my feelings of attraction don’t even fit into any of those categories at all. I’m not sure I would describe any of my attraction as platonic, and that’s often the clearest distinction in these models, so trying to think about my experiences in that framework leaves me feeling confused. I experience desires for intimacy, and the specific details of those desires tend to be different towards each individual and don’t follow the lines of these broad categories.
In fact, I don’t even base the boundaries in my relationships on attraction. For me, trust and rational judgment are the key factors. When I consider if I want to have sex with someone, I consider if I trust them enough to participate in consent with me on good faith, if I trust them enough to be emotionally and physically vulnerable with them, and if I think that act will be good for me, good for them, and good for our relationship. If I can answer yes to all these things, then that’s all I really need. Attraction is just icing on the cake beyond that, because I cherish intimacy shared in a spirit of love far more than I care about satisfying attraction-based desires. I use the same process for any kind of intimacy, and often my feelings regarding boundaries with one person are different for different kinds of intimacy, regardless of what kinds of attraction I feel. So, attraction is not the prime motivating factor for my decisions about intimate boundaries. Trust and nurture are.
So, I think that’s another thing these models leave out. Conversations about models of attraction often contain the assumption that we form intimate boundaries based on our experience of attraction, but that isn’t the case for everyone. People seek intimacy for all sorts of reasons. Sometimes it’s just a general desire for a particular kind of intimacy and it doesn’t matter who satisfies it. Sometimes it’s a need to express affection in a particular way towards a particular person. Sometimes it’s for comfort while processing difficult emotions, or relieving stress, or just a distraction. Sometimes it’s to confront an aversion or to seek some kind of emotional catharsis. Often it’s a mix of a whole bunch of motivations. So not only is attraction messy, but intimacy itself and the motivations behind it are also messy and diverse.
So to bring this post back to a more practical note, the takeaway message I want to leave you with is the same message I have for trans people exploring gender identity labels. These models of attraction were developed by the community because they seem to work for a lot of people, but they’re just tools, not rules or guidelines or progress markers. If they work for you, great. If they don’t work for you, discard them. If they work for you temporarily, great, but don’t be afraid to throw them away when they stop working. Find different models, make your own models, or don’t use models at all.
Discovering our own queerness is more about unlearning the unhelpful or untrue or unkind things we have been taught than about learning some specific new knowledge. Queer self-discovery isn’t learning a different set of rules to replace the mainstream rules, it’s changing how we think about the role of rules and models and labels in our lives entirely, and recognizing our own agency and will that have been denied to us for so long for so many reasons. There’s a wildness to being queer that I think shouldn’t be tamed, and I hope it never is.
“Queerness, to me, is about far more than homosexual attraction. It’s about a willingness to see all other taboos broken down. Sure, many of us start on this path when we first feel “same sex” or “same gender” attraction (though what is sex? And what is gender? And does anyone really have the same sex or gender as anyone else?). But queerness doesn’t stop there. This is a somewhat controversial stance, but to me queer means something completely different than “gay” or “lesbian” or “bisexual.” A queer person is usually someone who has come to a non-binary view of gender, who recognizes the validity of all trans identities, and who, given this understanding of infinite gender possibilities, finds it hard to define their sexuality any longer in a gender-based way. Queer people understand and support non-monogamy even if they do not engage in it themselves. They can grok being asexual or aromantic. (What does sex have to do with love, or love with sex, necessarily?) A queer can view promiscuous (protected) public bathhouse sex with strangers and complete abstinence as equally healthy. Queers understand that people have different relationships to their bodies. We get what it means to be stone. We know what body dysphoria is about. We understand that not everyone likes to get touched the same way or to get touched at all. We realize that people with disabilities may have different sexual needs, and that people with survivor histories often have sexual triggers. We can negotiate safe and creative ways to be intimate with people with HIV/AIDs and other STIs. Queers understand the range of power and sensation and the diversity of sexual dynamics. We are tops and bottoms, doms and subs, sadists and masochists and sadomasochists, versatiles and switches. We know what we like and don’t like in bed. We embrace a wide range of relationship types. We can be partners, lovers, friends with benefits, platonic sweethearts, chosen family. We can have very different dynamics with different people, often all at once. We don’t expect one person to be able to fulfill all our diverse needs, fantasies and ideals indefinitely. Because our views on relationships, sex, gender, love, bodies, and family are so unconventional, we are of necessity anti-assimilationist. Because under the kyriarchy we suffer, and watch the people we love suffering, we are political. Because we want to survive, we fight. We only want the freedom to be ourselves, love ourselves, love each other, and live together. Because we are routinely denied that, we are pissed. Queer doesn’t mean “don’t label me,” it means “I am naming myself.” It means “ask me more questions if you’re curious…“”
Go and think about what kinds of relationships you want. Don’t think about labels like romantic or platonic or sexual, think purely about what relationships would make you happiest.
When I realized I was aromantic, I was asked things like “Would you still date? Would you have a QPR? Will you ever kiss?”
But the aromantic community didn’t ask that. Instead, they focused on “What do you want in a world where anything is possible?”
And I realized I want to be alone, surrounded by friends and family I love who are close enough, I can bring them fresh baked scones when I overbake.
They asked me “What do you want?” and the question was so broad, I could weigh labels in my hand like queerplatonic partner and nonpartnering and significant other. I could look at these and shrug and say, “What I want is to not worry about questions I don’t care about.” I could shelve these indefinitely. Maybe even forever. And just enjoy being myself.
The aromantic community celebrates exploration. Tells people asking if they are aromantic, “This is a personal decision. Your personal decision. If this label helps you, take it. If this community helps you, stay as long as you need. You don’t have to be labelled anything, aromantic or otherwise, unless it would bring you comfort. You don’t have to be anything you aren’t.”
It’s a good community with good philosophies born from a unique experience, not rooted in missing out, but in being forced to consider what you want when you don’t want what’s expected.
All queer communities should do these things and it’s a travesty that they don’t.
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.
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.
(I don’t know why my posts have been on the more serious side lately, I swear I’ll get back to additional fun things soon, but there’s something ✨sappy✨ I wanted to note.)
Love is a finicky thing. It takes a lot of guts to put your heart out there, and to bear the ups and downs of a relationship.
It’s a strange thing, when you truly feel so deeply for somebody, to realise that you’d risk that kind of loss for them.
They make you happy, smiling until your cheeks are sore. They make your chest all warm, sweet actions leaving butterflies in your stomach. They light up your day, just the fact that they’re around. And god, that could all be taken away. You’re all too aware that, because you let yourself care so much, it would hurt like hell to lose. It’s terrifying.
But everything is good right now. Genuinely, it is! That isn’t some excuse. You think you’ve learned love again. And that? Oh, that’s fucking glorious.
It’s still scary, of course, to go all in when you know how much you have to lose. But all those moments… they just go to show that sometimes, it’s worth a shot.
Good Advice Interlude: How Do I Tell My Parents I’m in a Queer Relationship?
Readers sometimes send Bad Advisor their real-ass questions to answer, so the Bad Advisor is periodically going to try her hand at answering them. If you’d like to submit a question for a Good Advice Interlude, use the “ask” form!
A reader asks:
I’m not sure if you’re still doing the ‘Good Advice Interlude’, but if you are, I’d like some advice. I’m queer, and I’m currently in a relationship with my partner (whom I love very much). We’ve been dating for a while now, but I haven’t told my parents yet. My parents are both somewhat aware that I’m queer, but they haven’t really acknowledged my gender/sexuality since I came out. My partner is supportive of me telling them about our relationship, but I don’t know how. Any words of wisdom?
Hello, reader! Hooray for your happy and supportive relationship!
In the absence of any bright red flags that you didn’t mention here — such as your parents being actively hostile to you/your identity, or to queer folks in general — rather than “somewhat aware,” (perhaps also avoidantandawkwardabout your identity and sexuality? ask me how I know lolololol) I think you have a high likelihood of a good outcome here by just being matter-of-fact about your relationship’s existence, enthusiastic about your partner, and unavailable for debates or interrogations.
Is it possible this is one of the first serious relationships you’ve told your family about, in addition to being one of the first relationships that you think they’re going to read as queer? If so, we’re probably talking about a couple shifts happening at once in your family dynamic:
Parents shifting from “aware my child is queer, mostly avoiding whatever I think that means” to “accepting my child is queer, and embracing what my child says that means.”
Parents shifting from “child is fundamentally an extension of me, needs constant parenting” to “child is their own person, can do what they want” (please note that depending on your family dynamic and history, this transition can happen literally any time, not just to young adults and their parents. the bad advisor’s parents did not make this transition until she was a grown-ass woman many times over.)
And you’re navigating this too, right? So you might be tempted to (re?)occupy your child-role and over-explain and justify and contextualize and try to find the One Perfect Right Way to give them All The Information At Once to minimize conflict and awkwardness and maybe even minimize anticipated harm. But in the Bad Advisor’s experience, justifying-and-contextualizing is usually preemptive permission-seeking behavior; you do not need permission to be queer, or to love and appreciate your partner, or to be in a relationship with them. And besides, your parents are literally unable to give you permission for this! It is not possible! They do not hold this power, and they could not do so, even if you wanted them to or they wanted to.
Bring this big no-permission-needed energy into introducing your partner and your relationship to your parents. You are going to be the person you are, and have the relationships you have (or don’t!) irrespective of what they think about you or your partner or their own parenting or literally any of it. They can accept and embrace you, or they can get weird about it.
You can minimize opportunities for them to get weird, and give them a million thousand opportunities to be cool. This is more about attitude and approach, and less about literally what you say. If you’re confident, self-assured, and chill about this thing, it’s probably going to go fine. Imagine the best-case scenario (which might genuinely just be “I don’t get interrogated about my gender, my parents retain my partner’s name and pronouns from this conversation”) and assume that’s what you’re going to get, and have some escape hatches ready if shit gets weird.
But if you’re looking for scripts, I’m a big fan of saying the thing you feel awkward about in tandem with a big bright segue into talking about something else.
“Can’t wait to see y'all at Grandma’s birthday Zoom this weekend. Just FYI, I’m planning to bring my partner Kerpuffin to the party — we’ve been seeing each other for a while now and they are really excited to meet you all. I’ve been telling them all about Dad’s epic pandemic beard.”
“Y'all, I am so excited! I met somebody! I want you [get to know them/know about them]. Their name is [Kerpuffin] [plus whatever else Kerpuffin wants your parents to know] and we met [where?]. I think it would be nice if we [came over for dinner/treated y'all to an ice cream/joined together for family game night] sometime soon, what works for you?”
Alternately, if your family is anything like mine, they might actually ask you first about your relationship; this is a curse and a gift. “Yes, Auntie, I actually amseeing someone! We met [wherever/doing what] and their name is [Kerpuffin]. I actually have a picture of us [in our beginners’ curling league, or whatever] — let me find it!”
Your parents will probably want to know more! That’s great, as long as the conversation is a conversation or maybe even an enthusiastic ass-kissing press conference and not a debate/interrogation. There’s regular shit people ask when they first hear about a loved one’s new relationship (Where did you meet? What do you like to do together? Where do they work or go to school, or where are they from?). There’s maybe the shit you might need to explain more than you should or than you want to — “Mom, you know that Kerpuffin and I both use they/them pronouns, please don’t make me remind you again!” — which you might want to loop in some friendly family supporters to help out with, because that shit is exhausting. And then there’s the weird shit people ask queer folks — I bet I don’t need to list any of that out for you here — and any of the weird shit questions get polite deflections — “What a weird question, Mom! Let’s not go there! Anyway, I wanted to show you this funny cross-stitch that Kerpuffin did ….” — until, if they persist, they get “Well, that’s all the time we have for today, gotta go.”
And remember, this is just the first part of a journey. You don’t have to do everything all at once first thing to introduce and establish and solidify your relationship vis a vis your family. It doesn’t have to be perfect from the get-go; you have time to teach each other and learn from each other and figure out what it means for you to be who you are in your family, who you are as a queer person, and who you are as a queer family member in or out of relationships. In all likelihood, this is going to be a process that extends through of the rest of your lives as you all grow and change together.
queer love, romantic or platonic, is so beautiful and cherished in my heart.
i love the bond between queer people thats like siblings. i love watching queer people grin and ramble about their partners. i love how queer people express love that isnt even romantic all the time. its so remarkable.
