#romance mention
Love
Love
Love love love
Sticky stuff poetry’s made of
Shines like syrup in the bottle
Burns like acid, twists and mottles
Curls like ribbon, sweet and charming
Leaves a hollow pit, alarming
Surely this can’t be the stuff
That makes your guts marshmallow fluff
Consider, hollow, haunted, aching,
Certainly they’re not all faking
So what makes you the odd one out?
Disbelief becomes self doubt
Becomes a horror neverending
Destined for a bitter ending–
Maybe something here is broken
A thing that should remain unspoken
Lest they understand what’s missing
And abandon you for touching, kissing–
For partners, bedrooms, dates and marriage
How cruel of you to itch, disparage–
When it’s your turn, you’ll understand,
The promise makes you just feel damned
To be alone, alone, alone,
A fate like death to be bemoaned–
How could you forsake hope like this?
Love is fate, is home, is bliss
Is something you’re allergic to
Something you lack the point of view
To comprehend, to touch, to know,
This fourth-dimension puppet show
You grasp at frames one at a time
They slip away, like jello, slime,
A puzzle missing half the pieces,
Concept as grippable as grease is.
Big picture insight keeps evading
While friends and foes are serenading
You’re doing calculus to appear
Like someday too you’ll be held dear
But ever aching, chilling, howling
The truth is always watching, prowling
The chest hole where your heart should be
It never seems to hear your plea.
Perhaps it isn’t what it seems–
Blow that dream to smithereens
And comb the ashes for some insight
A different game, with effort, still might
Give you something to make sense of
Perspective helps drop pretense of
Love, love, love, love, oh love love love:
End all be all, below, above–
Romance might be for them, but you
Have a life to live for too.
It might take some renovation,
Letting go of a fixation–
The world gave you a gift at birth
Set the orbit of your self worth–
Sweet satellite, my moon, my stars,
The world is theirs as much as ours
For love of flavors vast and varied
And things beyond the hope you carried.
The end is not a bed, a ring,
A galaxy so vast it sings
Awaits your heart, and soul, and feet.
This feast will take a life to eat–
My un-damned creature, your echo
Expects you, and if you let go
You’ll find there’s more than survival.
Go! We expect your arrival.
You do not have to be the same
To live a life without that shame.
It may take time to understand,
But i know you can withstand
A world not built for those like you.
You will find you are not alone,
The shackles shed, the seeds all sown,
Love, love love, love love love love, it
Isn’t fate. Romance can shove it.
I’m doing an assignment where I have to plan a hypothetical social media advocacy campaign and mine’s going to be about fighting amatonormativity and how cultural pressure/expectations around romance can be harmful to everyone. Anyway, I made these weird little logos for it:
[ID: Two images showing a green person inside a heart shape which has lines across it like prison bars. In the first image, the person has their hands resting on the bars. In the second image, the middle two bars have been broken and pushed aside.]
pov an aro person makes a post
Nonsex/nonro normative: when you experience nonsexuality or nonromanticism as 100%, entirely normal, and you experience the idea of sex or romance to be entirely abnormal, unexpected, unrelateable to or odd.
If you’re nonsex/nonro normative, you experience most or all of the following:
- surprised that sex/romance exists
- surprised that anyone actually engages in sex/romance
- surprised that anyone actually takes sex/romance seriously
- weirded out when others around you started caring about sex/romance, or outright didnt even notice because you didnt believe they were serious
- surprised anyone would expect you to be interested in sex/romance
- surprised anyone expected you to find sex/romance normal
- expected your peers to find sex/romance as weird as you do
- didnt expect there to be societal pressure to engage in sex/romance
- instinctually not experience there being anything more normal about being allo than being aspec
- not feel like/relate to why you’re “supposed” to engage in sex/romance
- not feel like there’s anything broken about being aspec
- not relate to how anyone could find being aspec abnormal
- generally didnt expect to live in this world where sex/romance is a norm
Note 1: nonsex/nonro normativity is not a political viewpoint or belief of that allos should be treated worse, its simply an experience.
Note 2: i chose “nonsex” and “nonro” instead of “ace” and “aro” because i know not all aces and aros experience this, and they’re not less ace or aro for that.
The following is an imaginary conversation.
“So, I’m grey-aromantic and demisexual. That means that I only rarely feel romantic attraction to people, and I only feel sexual attraction to someone after I form an emotional connection with them, and even then, it’s pretty rare.”
“But that’s just how everyone is. It’s totally normal to not get crushes on people that often, and I like to get to know people before I want to have sex with them, too.”
“Okay, you’ve brought up a couple different things here. First, there’s a difference between feeling sexual attraction and wanting to have sex with someone. You can feel attraction to a person and decide not to have sex with them until you get to know them. But I don’t feel that sexual attraction at all when I meet someone. Second, sure, it’s normal for me to not get crushes on people that often, and maybe it’s normal for you, too, but it’s not normal for everyone. Just look at all the movies that are about love at first sight.”
“That’s just fiction. That doesn’t really happen to real people.”
“Fiction can be sensational, but it’s inspired by reality. If it had nothing to do with reality, then people wouldn’t be interested, and it wouldn’t sell, and they’d stop making it. But, okay, let’s focus on reality. Real people talk about their crushes all the time. It’s basically all anyone wanted to talk about at my high school – who liked who, who was dating who, how much they loved this celebrity or that celebrity. Was it like that with the people you went to school with, too?”
“Yeah! It could get really annoying. But they were just exaggerating. Teenagers make such a big deal out of everything.”
“Ha! They do. I know I did. So maybe they were exaggerating about how strong their crushes were. But when someone tells me what they’re experiencing, I think it’s important to believe them. And if they’re describing something that doesn’t line up with my own experience, then it’s even more important to believe them.”
“What do you mean?”
“Okay, so, did you know that I don’t have a sense of smell?”
“Really?”
“Really. Born without. Never had it. You could fart right now, and if I didn’t hear it, then I wouldn’t know.”
“That sounds super convenient, actually.”
“It can be. The thing is, I have no idea what it’s like to smell. That’s not a part of my experience at all. So, like, you’re telling me that it’s possible for you to just walk into a room and know what’s for dinner? Without seeing it? You just know? From the air? Like magic?”
“It does sound like magic, when you put it like that.”
“I know, right? Sounds pretty sus! But if I’d gone my whole life saying that smell wasn’t real, if I told everyone that they were lying or delusional because they said they could smell… what would that make me?”
“A jerk.”
“Exactly! I’d be a real jerk. Stuck in my own head, unable to imagine that other people might experience the world differently. So, instead, when someone tells me that they feel something that I don’t feel, or that they feel it more often than I feel it, or more strongly, I believe them. And I hope that they extend me the same courtesy – that they believe me, too, when I tell them that my experience is different from what they experience.”
“But what you described before, how you experience attraction, that didn’t sound different than what I experience.”
“Well, being able to talk about this stuff means that it’s possible to find people who experience the world the same way that you do, or at least in a similar way. That’s why I like these labels so much. They help me find other aro-ace people to talk to.”
“Are you saying I’m aro-ace?”
“I’m not going to try to say what you are. I’m not inside your head. You get to describe your experience the way you want to. But if you find that these labels are useful to you like they’re useful to me, I’d be happy to talk with you about it, as much or as little as you want.”