idkeither223

[idkeither223]

"what do you mean you read/write romance related fanfiction, but you're aroace?"

because its a nice concept in ✨️theory✨️, not in practice, you silly goose

[idkeither223]

Im sorry but being aromantic and/or asexual is such a beautiful, complex identity that opens up almost endless possibilities and interpretations about sex and romance and relationships and struggles within those,

and i will always absolutely LOATHE how both the outside and the aro/ace community itself have boiled these identities down to just "doesnt have sex" and "doesnt date"

[idkeither223]

At the moment I’ve seen a lot of videos of women in their twenties (or even thirties) being like “I’ve never had a boyfriend, it just hasn’t happened, and I’m thriving anyway as a single person”. And don’t get me wrong I’m happy for them and singleness being more normalised. But nine times out of ten they always end on the fact that they want a relationship in the future to fulfil their ideals of happiness etc and as an aromantic I want to scream. Can people ever consider that some people want to be single because maybe they don’t experience romantic attraction??? Like just use your brain cells for two seconds and consider the prospect of the aromantics out there… smh

[idkeither223]

"aroaces can still date!" like okay?? then have you ever considered that allos can still want to be single as well but i guess ppl don't talk about that for some reason.

[idkeither223]

My toxic aroace trait is that I have only ever seen evidence that a grand total of two (2) people in the universe actually experience romantic and sexual attraction on a scale that everyone insists as normal, and that is Gomez and Morticia Addams

[idkeither223]

[idkeither223]

What I mean when I say "Im a green flag"

[idkeither223]

there he is

[idkeither223]

it really does bother me how no one can seem to answer the question “what even is romantic attraction, really.” like some people are like “it’s who you wanna kiss and cuddle <3” and I’m like ok well kisses and cuddles can be either sexual or platonic depending on context. “It’s who you feel passion/desire/arousal for” well that just sounds like sexual attraction which you can have without even knowing somebody so I fail to see how that’s romantic. “It’s who you want to go on dates with” I go on dates with friends all the time plus “date” is a social construct anyway there’s really no innate difference between a date and hanging out. “it’s who you have deep feelings for” great news for you that can be literally any type of relationship. my friend told me she defined it as “who you wanna give roses to” and I’m like do u hear urself??? like the more I talk to people the more I’m convinced romance and romantic attraction is an elaborate socially fabricated illusion that has no real defining characteristics. and like there’s nothing Wrong with it being a constuct but why people are so attached to defending the supremacy of it is something I cannot for the life of me figure out

[idkeither223]

Life is weird as arospec asexual bc there's no good way to use words to describe what I feel and my experience that properly conveys it to allosexual alloromantic people

Even if I use vocabulary meant for this there's no way to grasp what it truly feels like, what the lived experience is like for me, because the allosexual doesn't experience it doesn't understand it

And so it's like trying to convey colors to someone with a different perception of color. They experience a reality different to mine. And maybe perception and sensation is the wrong allegory to use, even. Maybe the stimuli we experience is different in the first place. Maybe the sensation is different. But perception is definitely different. And it's hard to tell at which point do things start to differ.

But either way it's hard and I find it increasingly hard to explain myself or want to explain myself. It's so much easier to adopt that language and that culture aside from the gaping feeling that it's not exactly what you're experiencing. I can co-opt the term crush but what I feel. I know. Is not romantic attraction. Maybe some elements are the same but it's definitely diverged somewhere. But is there really a point in explaining the differences or clarifying that it's different? As long as the final goal is achieved does it really matter? Why am I doing this again.

[idkeither223]

tfw you try to for real date people but youre actually too aroace for this shit and you realize that no in fact you cant just keep praying you end up feeling something soon

[idkeither223]

this but the aromantic and lesbian version

I am once again having a sexuality crisis (read: wondering if I’m a lesbian or just have been stuck in my hometown for too long yet again and therefore haven’t seen a man who doesn’t look vaguely like a fish in years)

[idkeither223]

These are so beautiful.

Credit goes to the wonderful artist: ChibiGreen

[idkeither223]

can’t believe I have to say this but it’s completely okay to question your own sexuality as an adult. you don’t have to have every single thing in your life figured out before you turn 18 babe. those socially deadlines are not real. there’s actually no such thing as deadline for learning new things about yourself as long as you’re alive

[idkeither223]

So I went digging around for aromantic history and came across the term “limerence” as a sort of precursor to the word aromantic. Of course, this immediately caught my interest and I went looking for more to support that claim. In doing so, I cam across the study "Love and Limerence: The Experience of Being in Love" published by Dorothy Tennov in 1979 in which the word limerence was coined.

Limerence is defined by Tennov to mean a state of obsessive infatuation with someone else (which Tennov dubs the "limerent object" or "LO"). This obession is akin to what alloromantics describe when they have a crush on someone else. Throughout Tennov's study, she found that limerence was an incredibly common phenomenon across a wide variety of people regardless of age or background. But, of more interest to me, there were also people who attested to have never experienced a state of limerence (including a close friend of Tennov) and rather were burdened by the expectation to behave as if they have/were in such a state when pursuing romantic relations.

To be clear, a lack of limerence (as Tennov repeatedly emphasizes) does not mean that a person doesn't have romantic feelings. It just means that these feelings have never become a whole-hearted obsession as is commonly portrayed in media. Yet, I do think that the distinction between limerence and romance could have been one way for aromantic people of the time to understand their lack of romantic feelings in a more socially acceptable way.

I'm still reading through the study and I hope to make a longer post once I'm done with the whole thing because there are some really interesting concepts and some things I take issue with (as with probably any study from this time period). So stay tuned for that! (<- It may take me a while though...)

[idkeither223]

hmm thinking about the idea of love songs. i think the idea of what a love song is that we have in our culture is inherently a little bit flawed because we have the idea that any song written about romantic feelings is a love song and im thinking thats not exactly true because there is a difference between "romance" and "love". what i'm saying is not that love is a broader category and applies to things that are not romantic in nature. this is in fact true, but it's not what makes the important distinction here. the true distinction between "romance" and "love" is that romance is a societally defined type of interest in another person, whereas love is, essentially, a promise that you make when you build a relationship.

as such, what i call "love" here might be better defined as "care", as that implies more time and effort, but that's a different suitcase to unpack and largely unimportant to my point here, which is more about the societal conventions of what we call love songs. the point is, relationships can be built with other people, yes, but also animals, places, organizations, ideas, so on and so on, whereas romance requires another person, hence the difference between the ideas of "romance" and "love".

with that in mind, there are two types of songs we in western, english speaking, society call "love songs":

1) songs that are about a person's romantic interest in someone that is either definitively known to be unrequited (existing monogamous relationship, sexuality that doesn't align, etc) or simply not requited (aka romantic interest being unknown); and

2) songs about an existing relationship (keeping in mind my points about relationships not just being with people, but also places, things, etcetera) as is.

(some examples of the latter category: mountaintop by relient k, which defines the relationship in question as non-romantic; or i miss my mum by cavetown, which is - as the title implies - a song about the singer missing their mother.)

now, the thing that makes distinguishing these two difficult is the fact that songs about an existing relationship CAN be about wanting certain aspects of that relationship to change. in these cases, determining that a song is one or the other will hinge either on a) authorial intent or b) whether the song is more about what the singer wants (thereby implying #1) or the lack thereof in that relationship (which would imply #2).

to get back to the subject at hand: the term "love song", as we think of it, is an umbrella term that include both of these two categories, and i think that perhaps it is reductive to do so. with that in mind, i think perhaps it would be more appropriate for "love song" to mean only the latter, whereas the former is a category of its own. WHICH is not to say that the two can't overlap — just that if a song is about a person with whom the singer has no relationship, it cannot be considered a love song due to the fact that it is a song about infatuation, not love.

(another interesting wrinkle this provides is the fact that a song might start out in the first category and, as the writer develops a relationship with a person, might move into the second category as they write more.)

[idkeither223]

"aros/aces can still date and/or have sex!" i think it's really fucking weird that you guys always jump to the possibility that an aro/ace can feel attraction and hardly focus on the parts that don't feel attraction (aka the parts that make an aro/ace, you know, ARO/ACE).

why must you always assume that wherever an aro/ace lands on the spectrum can fit your expectations???