#RELATED TO RECIPROMANTIC but its not really that

[blole-hack]

Requiteromantic

dont kill me please this is just a placeholder flag i will make a new one

while recipromantic is defined that its a requirement for the person to like them first (to reciprocate), a requiteromantic will like the person first, but immediately does not like the person romantically anymore when their romantic attraction cannot be requited or is not requited.

Like, seriously, the romantic attraction will suddenly disappear. no more romantic desire at all. could still have other lingering feelings like emotional attraction, but no more drive for romance

of course, this could work too for the sexual counterpart (and all other attraction types. im just too lazy to edit)

any better term suggestions to fit this definition? please do comment/reblog with it! thank you :)

actual flag coming someday I KNOW PEOPLE LIKE POSTS WITH FLAGS MORE IM SORRY I DONT HAVE ONE RIGHT NOW

updated

[nonnie-the-fuck]

coming on the end of aromantic week, i’d like to talk about how i’ve recently been coming to terms with the fact i am on the aromantic spectrum! welcome to my diary.

for most of my life (that i can remember, the confusing gray area of middle school and high school, where i struggled with not knowing myself and coped by acting like i knew everything), i thought i was a huge romantic. i fell in love fast and fell out of it faster - and painfully. i wanted to keep loving people i rushed into relationships with but ‘lost feelings’ anyway, felt guilty and ended up ghosting them for a few weeks before a confrontation where there was a messy, yet amicable breakup.

i’ve had 17 relationships and none of them lasted more than 6-8 weeks. i thought there was something wrong with me that made me have horrible luck with dating. but recently, i’ve realized that i’m on the aromantic spectrum. with elements of recipriomanticism (in the simplest terms, loving someone only if its mutual/reciprocal), i would mirror people’s romantic feelings for me onto them. but they weren’t really mine, and this faded quickly.

i am not asexual. far from it, really. so whenever i would be attracted to someone in that form, i would assume it came from a place of romantic attraction; surely, interpersonal sexuality COULD NOT exist independently of romance. emotional, not-hookup sex was something that happened only after a romantic pretext was established. even when a crush is truly mine, and i delulu’d my way into beleiving they liked me too and this cemented it, their rejection left me over them in a week (with one notable exception, but that was kinda a messy situation where i knew for a fact that both people liked me, and we talked about a poly relationship, then they went and talked the two of them and decided to date each other and leave me out of it without including me. that was fun and left me with lingering feelings of love and hurt for like a year.)

this is, funny enough, not true. with the powers of hindsight, i can pretty distinctly tell when it was a romantic crush and when i assumed it had to be because i found them hot.

i find it really difficult to relate to a lot of other aromantic’s stories. i am still a hopeless romantic (i dream of stable domestic romantic love, kisses, cuddles, sharing my bed and home with the one(s) i love, and i don’t doubt i’ll find that at some point in my life.) with my specific crossovers of achillian biromantic, demiromantic, recipromantic, and simply having high standards (in the way that i won’t even fall for someone who doesn’t meet them, not that i just won’t date them) i have had genuine romantic interest very few times in my life. while a aromantic who is a hopeless romantic sounds contradictory, that lines up pretty well with the rest of everything going on here.

i definitely understand other aro’s struggles with society forcing romance and love down their throats as a simple given want or even need for every human. but it’s a pretty unique struggle to genuinely want/need that, and to have it so much harder a thing to meet than all of my peers; for that expectation and want of romance and love come not just from society, but from myself.

anyway. happy aro week. if someone relates to my story, im so glad and PLEASE leave a comment or reply or something, because i haven’t seen ANY stories that inrelate to in regards to all this. hope all of you have a good day, respect people ok love ya byeee

[marinsawakening]

Romance and Sex Repulsion in the Aro-Spec Community Survey: Results

Here are the results from the survey about the feelings in the aro-spec community towards romance and sex (which I should’ve given a better name, in hindsight)!

@aromantic-official, would you mind boosting this?

I will put the raw data for this survey above the cut, and speculation, precise data analysis, and the discussion of sample bias and the ways I messed up while conducting this survey below the cut. 

Before we start, I’d like to emphasize that this survey was not professionally conducted, and the results will not be professionally presented. I am in no way a trained researcher (unless you count basic high school research as ‘trained’), and I did not set this survey up with the idea that it would be representative for the whole community. I was simply satisfying my own curiousity on the subject, and honestly did not expect to get more than a few dozen responses. Now that we’re well into the hundreds, many of the mistakes I flippantly made are really embarrassing, but moreover, the fact that I don’t actually know what I’m doing means that this survey should not be used in professional or scholarly essays. 

Instead, try to see this survey as preliminary research. I strongly encourage other people to recreate this research, to research any specific topics that they might find interesting that this survey already covers, and to use this survey’s results narrow down their field while researching similar topics. See these results as a basic start towards researching the aro-spec community’s feelings towards romance and sex, not the conclusive end (if there’s ever such a thing in research).

Now that we’ve gotten that disclaimer out of the way, let’s move on to the results.

Base Numbers

This section will contain the total number of participants, as well as the distribution of aro-spec identities of the people that took this survey. 

Total Number of Participants: 527

Aro-Spec Identities:

309 respondents described themselves as Aromantic, with no attraction at all, no matter how muddled or infrequent (originally described as ‘not on the spectrum’ which is obviously problematic, I’m very sorry for that, it’s discussed under the cut in the section ‘ways I messed up’). This was by far the largest group in the survey. 

135 respondents described themselves as Aromantic, as used as an umbrella term to simplify an aro-spec identity.

66 respondents described themselves as Questioning. 

48 respondents described themselves as Grayromantic. 

39 respondents described themselves as Demiromantic. 

24 respondents described themselves as Aroflux. 

21 respondents described themselves as Quoiromantic. 

15 respondents described themselves as Lithromantic. 

10 respondents described themselves as Arovague. 

and finally, 23 (4.4%) respondents described themselves with identities other than the ones listed above. This group contains all the identities only one or two people identified with. They were:

Nebularomantic (2 respondents)

Nonamorous (2 respondents) (note: nonamorous is not an aro-spec ID on its own, but it can be an important descriptor. One respondent gave no other descriptor, but they might very well still be aro. The other respondent had this in combination with other labels.)

Cupioromantic (2 respondents)

Frayromantic (1 respondent)

Cedromantic (1 respondent)

Aegoromantic (1 respondent)

Arofluid (1 respondent)

Akoiromantic (1 respondent) (note: this is a synonym for lithromantic, but the respondent did not check lithromantic, and I do not feel comfortable assigning this label when they specifically perfer the other term)

Idemromantic (1 respondent)

Recipromantic (1 respondent)

Queer (1 respondent)

‘I don’t care where I am on the spectrum’ (paraphrased) (1 respondent)

All other respondents were questioning and felt the need to describe their questioning status.

Note: this was a checkbox question, and quite a few respondents checked multiple options, which is why the total is more than 527 responses. 

Feelings Towards Romance

This section will examine the results to the four questions that centered around the participants’ feelings towards romance.

NOTE: I did not include any guidelines at all on what does and does not constitute romance-repulsion, romance-positive feelings, or being romance-neutral. This was done intentionally, because I wanted the participants to use their own definitions of the terms. These terms do not, to my knowledge, have any hard-and-fast rules set for them, and the results of this survey correlate with that statement. Many participants mentioned being confused as to what these terms actually meant, and different respondents used wildly different definitions of the terms while answering these questions. I believe that we might benefit from clearer definitions of romance-repulsed/positive/neutral and maybe some additional terms, but I am not comfortable creating those definitions myself without conversation in the community. More on that under the cut. 

Out of the participants, a majority of 43.8% identified as romance-neutral, with 28.3% identifying as romance-repulsed, and 15.7% identifying as romance-positive. 

In addition, 12.2% of the respondents identified as something ‘other’. Of those 64 respondents:

28 respondents (or 43.8%) stated that their feelings towards romance fluctuate

15 respondents (or 23.4%) stated that they felt different about romance under different circumstances (the most common being ‘neutral/positive when not directed at me, repulsed when directed at me’)

9 respondents (or 14.1%) stated that they were somewhere in between romance-repulsed/positive/neutral

12 respondents (or 18.8%) gave a completely different explanation, which included not understanding romance in general, being unsure about your feelings, etc. 

Regardless of their feelings towards romance, a majority of 65.8% of the respondents said that their feelings towards fictional romance are more positive than their feelings towards irl romance. In addition 23.8% said that they felt the same towards fictional and irl romance, and 7.2% said that they felt more positive towards irl romance than fictional romance. 16 people (3%) picked the ‘other’ option; the most frequent answers in that section were ‘it fluctuates’ and ‘it depends on the romance/situation’.

When asked if their aromanticism affects their feelings towards romance, 73.1% answered ‘yes’, 19% answered ‘I don’t know’, 6.5% answered ‘no’, and 1.3% (6 people) picked the ‘other’ option (one person probably answered this question by accident, and everyone else was either still questioning (could’ve picked the ‘I don’t know’ answer) or said it depended on the situation).

When asked if anything other than their aromanticism affects their feelings towars romance, 53.9% answered ‘yes’, 27.1% answered ‘I don’t know’, 17.1% answered ‘no’, and 10 people picked the ‘other’ option, but pretty much all of them were explaining what affected their feelings towards romance other than their aromanticism (which was what the next question asked), and the rest of them said things like ‘maybe’, ‘probably’, etc. 

For the open questions, I do not have precise figures, because, again, I thought I’d get way fewer responses than I actually got, and now I’m in a situation where I need to sort (in total) 1038 responses by hand, and uh. That’s not happening. Instead, I’ve read through the majority of them and picked out the common themes.

When asked how their aromanticism affects their feelings towards romance, people who answered that their aromanticism does affect their feelings towards romance had the following reoccuring reasons:

Romance-positive people named a fascination with romance because they are incapable of experiencing it themselves, an appreciation for the way it makes other people happy, an ability to distance themselves because they don’t experience romantic attraction, and amatonormativity (’society tells me I should be happy with romance, which has influenced me to the point where I am’) as reasons for feeling this way.

Romance-neutral people primarily named an apathy/confusion/inability to relate to romance as a result of their aromanticism as a reason for being romance-neutral. Other reoccuring reasons were: an appreciation for the way it makes other people happy while simultaneously not wanting it themselves, feeling repulsed but only when romance is directed towards themselves and still enjoying romance otherwise, and amatonormativity.

Romance-repulsed people primarily named a confusion/inability to relate to romance and amatonormativity (’society pressures me into a romantic relationship and forces me to see it everywhere, which has led me to despise it’) as reasons for their romance repulsion.

People who felt like they didn’t fit in the above categories didn’t answer this question frequently enough to draw any real results.

People who didn’t feel their aromanticism affected their feelings towards romance gave extremely conflicting accounts that have rendered pretty much all of their responses unusable. By that I mean that during this question, they started describing the ways aromanticism does affect their romance repulsion, only they stated that these reasons were ‘exceptions’. They generally did not give any account as to why they felt their aromanticism specifically didn’t affect their feelings towards romance. This could either be a problem with the way the question was structured, or it could be that the feelings for these respondents were just a lot more complex. For now, I do not feel like I have enough usable responses to notice patterns in their reasoning. I might later do a re-count just to be sure.

When asked if there were other factors affecting their feelings towards romance, the following reasons were given:

Romance-positive people mentioned neurodivergency, amtonormativity, asexuality, and romantic media as reasons.

Romance-neutral people mentioned amatonormativity, neurodivergency, their personality, and asexuality as reasons.

Romance-repulsed people mentioned amatonormativity, neurodivergency, asexuality, and their personality as reasons.

People who felt like they didn’t fit in the above categories mentioned trauma/previous negative experiences with romance, neurodivergency/mental illnesses, and amatonormativity as reasons. 

Feelings Towards Sex

This section will examine the results to the three questions that centered around the participants’ feelings towards sex.

NOTE: as with romance-repulsion/positive/neutrality, I did not provide any definitions for sex-repulsed/neutral/favorable. I also messed up a lot with this section, which will be discussed under the cut.

41.6% of the participants identified as sex-repulsed, making it the majority, followed by a 31.1% of participants who identified as sex-neutral, and 20.3% was sex-favorable. 6.6% (35) of the participants were something other, which most often (15 participants) meant that they fluctuated between two or all three states, were a mix of/somewhere in between two states (7 participants), or experienced different reactions to sex in different circumstances, or were unsure (five participants each). 

However, despite sex repulsion being the majority in the community, only 22.8% of the particpants felt like their aromanticism affected their romance repulsion. A majority of 46.1% felt that it did not, and 30.3% was unsure. For this question, only four people chose the ‘other’ option, one answering ‘possibly’ (aka ‘I don’t know’), and two people were already clarifying that their asexuality affected their romance repulsion, which wasn’t what I asked, so this data is negligible. 

When asked if they felt more positive towards irl or fictional sex, 48.2% stated that they felt more positive towards fictional sex, 44.9% stated that they felt the same towards fictional and irl sex, and only 5% said they felt more positive towards irl sex. Fourteen people used the ‘other’ option, but seven of those seemed to have misunderstood the purpose of the question (I wasn’t asking whether you weren’t repulsed towards either fictional or irl sex, I was asking if you had feelings that were more positive, one way or another) and were easily categorized elsewhere, which I took the liberty of doing, leaving only 1.3% of the participants with an answer that didn’t fall within the already presented categories.

Respondents who felt that their aromanticism didn’t affect their feelings towards sex mentioned the following reasons:

Sex-favourable people primarily mentioned that they distinguished between sex and romance (’you don’t have to be romantically attracted to someone to have sex, so romance and sex have little to do with each other’) and being allosexual as reasons.

Sex-neutral people also mentioned that romance =/= sex as a reason for their neutrality, and many also said that their asexuality affected their feelings towards sex, rather than their aromanticism.

Sex-repulsed people mainly said that they were also asexual and that this affected their feelings towards romance, rather than their aromanticism. Romance =/= sex was also given as a reason.

People who felt they didn’t fit in any of the above categories didn’t give enough answers to give accurate statements.

Respondents who felt that their aromanticism does affect their feelings towards sex mentioned the following reasons:

Sex-favourable respondents said that they associated sex with romance, and that their aromanticism does affect their feelings towards sex because of that.

Sex-neutral respondents noted that sex was normative in the same way that romance is, and that they felt that their aromanticism does affect the way they feel about sex because of that.

Sex-repulsed respondents said that they could only have sex with someone they are close with, and that this ability is affected by their aromanticism.

Respondents who didn’t feel like they fit in any of the above categories stated that they could only have sex with someone they are close with (which is affected by their aromanticism), and the fact that they don’t ‘catch feelings’ after sex in the same way alloro people sometimes do.

Please note that the sample-size for this question was small, and that results may be skewed because of that.

In addition, many aroace respondents mentioned that it was almost impossible to distinguish between their asexuality and aromanticism, and that they therefore didn’t know if their aromanticism affected their feelings towards sex.

And those are the raw results. Under the cut there is discussion about the results, and apologies for the ways I fucked up.

On The Terms Romance-Repulsed/Neutral/Positive 

As I’ve already stated, many of the respondents didn’t actually know what these terms meant, and expected me to provide definitions for them. I didn’t do this, specifically so people would be forced to use their own definitions of these terms. The results were... kind of worrying, honestly.

The vast majority of respondents had completely contradicting ideas of what romance-repulsion/neutrality/positive feelings actually meant. Respondents that felt positive towards fictional romance but repulsed by romance directed at them varied wildly in picking ‘romance-neutral’, ‘romance-repulsed’, and ‘romance-positive’. Many (maybe even the majority) of respondents who identified as romance-neutral specifically described very romance-repulsed feelings, but mentioned that they were okay with other people doing it as long as they kept it away from the respondent, which sounds like textbook repulsion to me. Romance-repulsed people often still described positive feelings towards either irl or fictional romance, and romance-positive people described repulsed feelings towards either irl or fictional romance. People who described the exact same feelings towards romance could either be using ‘romance-repulsed’, ‘romance-neutral’, or ‘romance-positive’ at any point.

What I’m getting at is that the responses were a genuine mess. While people over at the sex-repulsion/neutrality/favourable section at least seemed to have a general idea of what it meant, I honestly did not get that vibe from the romance section at all. In fact, I came extremely close to just declaring this entire survey null and void because of the contradicting definitions of the terms.

If this was just a small group of confused people who had probably not interacted much with the aro community prior to this point, I wouldn’t even be pointing this out. But it was the entire sample size of 527 people. Everyone had ideas that completely contradicted each other.

This speaks of either a lack of definitions, or a lack of proper education about those definitions. 

The main issue that I encountered in the survey was that many people experienced a dichotomy between their feelings towards romance when it was directed at them, and romance that wasn’t directed at them, either in fiction or in real life. To my knowledge, their currently isn’t a way to express this dichotomy, so many people forced themselves into a category that seemed to be picked at complete random.

Another reoccuring theme was of people asking me to use ‘romance-averse/neutral/favourable’ instead of the terms I was using. I have seen these terms used before with some frequency, but, to my knowledge, they are simply synonyms for the terms I was already using. I’ve never heard of a community consensus that we should use these terms instead of the ones that I was using, and I’ve only ever seen them used in ways that are completely interchangeable with repulsion/positive. Am I missing something? Because if so, my bad obviously, but I’m pretty involved in the aro community at this point, I like to think. If I don’t have any idea what the hell is going on here, then how are people newer to the community supposed to figure it out? I checked @aromantic-official‘s glossary and resources, and they say nothing about it. I’m really, really confused.

So, I guess the point I’m trying to make that we, as a community, need to look a little closer at the terms that we’re currently using. We need to start conversations towards a community consensus, because we currently don’t actually seem to have one (at least, according to this survey’s answers). 

I think that using ‘favourable/neutral/averse’ as a descriptor towards romance directed at a person themselves, while using ‘repulsed/neutral/positive’ towards romance not directed specifically at that person might be a decent solution, at least for the time being, but I’m not comfortable proposing that with confidence until I’m absolutely sure that I’m not missing something in the use of these terms.

tl;dr: this is a mess that we probably need to fix sometimes soon.

Discussion: Sample Bias

This section will discuss potential sample bias in the survey that could’ve skewed results.

This survey was only conducted on Tumblr, and as such, will probably have the sample bias that results when you do that (aka the majority of respondents will probably be afab nonbinary people or cis women). This seemed to be confirmed when I still had the question that asked respondents to list their gender (over half of the respondents, probably approaching 75% or even higher, were nonbinary or cis women). This means men and amab nonbinary people are probably underrepresented in this survey.

I never had a question asking about the ethnicity of respondents, meaning I have no way to confirm that there was a good representation for all ethnicities and races in this survey. 

I did, at one point, had a question asking whether or not respondents were on the ace-spectrum, and the vast majority of respondents were. I retracted this question at +- 300 respondents, meaning that I can probably conclude that even with the final numbers, allosexual aros are probably underrepresented in this survey.

The base results proved that the majority of respondents had no attraction whatsoever, meaning that aro-spec identities that still experience some form of attraction are underrepresented in this survey.

Discussion: I’m Not A Trained Researcher And Fucked Up

Alright. I’ll admit that I have not read through all the input people gave when I asked them to give me feedback to improve the survey. This is partially because it really flared up my RSD (rejection sensitive dysphoria), which was incredibly not fun, and partially because conducting this survey really reminded me of why I hate doing research, and I do not plan on conducting follow-up research or any other type of research ever again (which was what I was going to use the feedback for).

That said, I still want to address some major issues with this survey.

The major one is the fact that I defined ‘Aromantic, without any romantic attraction, no matter how muddled or infrequent’ as ‘Aromantic, not on the spectrum’ for the vast majority of the time that this survey was up. This wasn’t out of any intent to devalue aro-spec identities that do experience some kind of romantic attraction, or to imply that they were somehow ‘less aro’, but because I simply didn’t know how to describe that particular type of aromanticism otherwise. It took me way too long to realize that I could literally just describe what I was talking about specifically not experiencing any attraction at all. 

Of course, regardless of intent, this way of describing aromanticism is inevitably dismissive towards aro-spec identities, and respondents were right to point this out and (in some instances) get angry about it. Intent =/= impact, and I sincerely apologize for dismissing and devaluing aro-spec identities. I have no other excuse than the fact that I’m a dumbass sometimes. I will attempt to be more inclusive and supportive of all aro-spec identities in the future, including those that aren’t my own.

Second problem with the survey was the fact that I didn’t originally intend for this to be about anything other than romance-repulsion, and made it a survey about general feelings towards romance at the last second. This is noticeable in both the title and the actual questions, and obviously doesn’t do the survey any favours, and may have skewed results for that. This is wholly my fault and I should’ve done better at proofreading the survey before going live.

The third problem is one I’ve been alluding to a lot alread: I did not expect or intend for this survey to get more than a hundred responses at most. A lot of the survey was based around the idea that I’d be able to spit through the responses by hand, and I ended up being completely overwhelmed when this wasn’t an option anymore. This survey was sloppily and unprofessionally conducted, and I apologize for vague questions, deleted questions, or any other problems that arose from this. 

And, lastly, I apologize for any rambling or vague statements in these results. I’m tired and already a week late and not going to proofread this more than once. If you need clarification, feel free to ask.