bringing this back today for the start of pride month. still overwhelmed by how well this comic went down and with how many people relate. it’s easy to think aro-ace people are all totally accepting of their identities and really proud of who they are. i guess on websites like this you see a lot of people proudly putting their identity in their bio, a flag in their profile picture.
in fact i think a lot of aro-ace people really hate that part of themselves, hide it, and struggle for a long time to ‘accept’ who they are and feel any sense of ‘pride’. that’s the feeling i wanted to capture here. the disappointment, the loneliness, upon realising that you can’t feel what is such a wonderful thing. the embarrassment of not being ‘normal’, of being some random sexuality that nobody irl has heard of, and letting down those around you because you can’t be who they want you to be. how desperately you want to change, how desperately you want to feel. but you just can’t.
i know not all aro-ace people feel like this. i know lots of aro and/or ace people feel able to be in relationships, to feel closeness and have partners in other ways. but i think it’s important to be aware that some aro-ace people do feel like this.
the comments on this comic have mostly been great but a few have been very frustrating. a comment it got a lot was along the lines of ‘aw!! you don’t need to have sex to be in a relationship!’. you completely missed the point, hah. this is not a comic about sex. it’s about a lack of feeling, the lack of something beautiful other people seem to have. another comment that popped up a few times was ‘maybe she’s a lesbian’. well maybe lesbians and aro/ace girls have more in common than people think – maybe they both often struggle to accept that they feel no attraction to men, even though society has conditioned them to do so, sometimes spending years trying to force themselves to like men in that way, when they just can’t.
this comic is called ‘wanting and not wanting at the same time’ because she wants to love. but when it comes down to the reality, she can’t fulfil the requirements of that. she wants to love someone forever, to get married and have children and grow old with her soulmate, but she doesn’t want it with this person. or that person. or anyone she meets or will ever meet. a sort of catch 22, i guess.
hope that makes sense. thanks for listening, and have a lovely pride month ❤️
Ace culture is laying in bed at midnight every Wednesday having a crisis because you don’t know what does and doesn’t count as attraction and if you’ve ever felt it before because that shit makes no sense and is confusing as heck.
figuring out you’re asexual is like trying to find a nonexistent needle in a very large haystack except people keep trying to convince you that you’re just not looking hard enough or you’ll find the right needle eventually but the needle just isn’t there and yet everyone else’s is and then you wonder whether or not you actually have a needle and then you spot something that might be a needle but nope it’s just another hay strand and everything is confusing and now the haystack is on fire
so uh. can alloro aces please stop pretending there’s a stereotype that all aces are aro? people either don’t know what either of those words means or they know that ~asexuals can still fall in wuv~ because that’s what you’ve been pushing for years. Maybe people equated those terms back in the day but not anymore unless its their first intro to asexuality, at which point one of you inevitably steps in to make sure they know you’re still human and experience romantic attraction. kindly shut up now please and thank you.
¯_( ಠ_ಠ)_/¯ 