Aromanticism is often more difficult for me to discuss because it is less tangible for me than my asexuality, and yet more emotionally intense than any other part of my identity. Romance is a very abstract concept, but in order to justify myself as aromantic I am often asked to examine what romance is or isn’t.
Romance is so much an accepted part of every day life for a large number of people, that they probably don’t spend hours of their day trying to quantify it or qualify it. It is already done for them by our romance obsessed culture. When this is challenged by aromantic people, we’re asked to defend ourselves.
Romance is something that I’m equally hyper-aware of and emotionally distant from. I am both extremely familiar with the culture of romance and extremely unfamiliar with romantic feelings. I know romance without knowing romance, because I’m often required to just to exist.
The great irony is that while I am often asked to quantify and qualify romance in order to prove that I am aromantic, my familiarity with it as a concept can call into question the validity of my aromanticism to those adamant about disproving it. This can certainly be frustrating.
However, what people who are not aromantic don’t seem to realize is that being aromantic in a largely romantic culture can be very challenging mentally and emotionally outside of these identity debates. My aromanticism comes with a lot of paranoia and a preoccupation with analyzing my social interactions.
My inability to understand and feel romantic feelings firsthand not only leads to awkward uncomfortable interactions with peers, but it can also cause a strain in my working relationships and it can actually impede my ability to succeed in a work environment.
For me, a paranoia over how my own feelings and behavior will be read by my peers has led to an identifiable strain or distance between myself and my peers. I am emotionally distant from many people, and it is very difficult for people to truly know and understand me without knowing my aromanticism.
My peers often don’t know about my aromanticism, because 1) we live in a culture where aromanticism “shouldn’t” exist, 2) I spent the majority of my child and teenage years fighting against my peers forcibly misinterpreting my feelings, and 3) my lack of romantic feelings has been treated as a threat.
I have been set up and pushed into relationships that I did not want and/or that I refused, with resentment and blame shifted onto me because of an inability on my part to return romantic feelings. My awkwardness re: romance can be misinterpreted as attraction or jealousy, straining professional relationships.
This isn’t the way with all aromantic people, but my feelings towards romance as directed at me is literally met with a panicked stress response in which my social interactions will play on loop in my head and every word and every action I make will be analyzed to ensure that I am safe.
I have been put into romantic situations where I do not feel safe, because they have involved me feeling as if I need to change who I am for the happiness of other people or else receive negative consequences in the way of abandonment, isolation, humiliation, guilt-tripping, and even physical violence.
This is what it means to be aromantic, for me, in a romantic culture. It means stress, obsession, paranoia, panic, frustration, anger, and an incredible amount of sadness that I cannot be who I am and be accepted for who I am without others insisting they have control of me emotionally or physically.
Published
¯_( ಠ_ಠ)_/¯ 