#autiquoiromantic

[soong-type-notinuse]

autiquoiro

when your quoiromanticism is affected by your autism.

@quoictopus

[soong-type-notinuse]

quoiromantic bliss

the other day i accidentally fell down a quoiromantic history rabbit hole (i was looking for something on the lgbta wiki's page on quoiromanticism and one of the sources looked interesting) and honestly, i have never felt so seen. looking back now, it makes so much more sense why i felt the way i did about aromanticism, especially in combination with asexuality.

i never, ever considered that i could be anything but alloromantic until i made a joke on tiktok in the summer of 2020 about not knowing if i'm arospec or if i only had two crushes in my life and everyone around me was a bully and not worth wasting my feelings on. i wasn't serious at all, i had previously identified as heteroromantic, androromantic, panromantic, biromantic and even bisexual when i casually forgot i was asexual for a year. but never anything that wasn't alloromantic.

it got closer and closer to ace week 2020 and shortly before that i came back into my asexuality and realised that what i thought was sexual was sensual and identified as bi ace (as in biromantic bisensual asexual) for a very short while until everything came crumbling down and i thought about my two crushes again, trying to figure out if it was a "normal" amount of crushes for a then 21 year old. i ended up identifying as greyromantic and angled aroace for a hot second, and then i learned about alterousness and suddenly nothing made sense anymore. now how was i supposed to be able to know if what i feel for my partner was romantic or alterous? so i did what every annoying baby aro does and go bother some other aros: turns out, "romance" as a social construct is actually subjective as fuck, so i decided, since everything that i personally considered to be romantic played no role in my orientation, to use the labels aromantic and bialterous (and later greyalterous). i never met another person who defined their aromanticism that way. everyone had at least some idea of what romance is.

romance and romantic feelings were very confusing to me while i tried to figure myself out. it felt like an awfully long time but i'm pretty sure all of this happened within two weeks or so, as i hate questioning and want answers as fast as possible. but during "i'm confused by romantic feelings" i never once considered quoiromanticism. i did identify as quoisexual for a bit back in 2018, but the most common definitions were "unsure if sexual feelings for others" or "can't tell sexual feelings from others" and since my quoisexuality felt so different from what i was feeling when i questioned my romantic orientation, it felt like it did not fit.

i'm pretty sure the reason i struggled so much with it was because i'm autistic and romance seemed to be such an arbitrary social construct with random rules that also vary from person to person, especially considering that queerplatonicism and alterousness existed. i always felt like romantic orientation was much harder to figure out than sexual orientation because with sexuality at least, there are many things that are undeniably sexual, but with romance, it's subjective and makes no sense. (which is funny because i'm also the person who flipflopped between 5-6 different acespec labels since i was about 14.)

the existence of alterousness and the subjectivity of romance made me realise that i could literally just decide to not frame my relationship or past crush as romantic, to just opt out of romance. and i still didn't think of being quoiromantic because my quoisexual experience was defined by confusion but i was not confused by my romantic orientation anymore. i just decided that because things i consider to be romantic play no role in my life, to reframe myself and my relationships as aromantic and (grey)alterous.

so then i identified as aroace. or aro-ace: or aro ace? because that changed all the time too. "aroace" as one word implies some kind of connection between the two but my experiences with asexuality was very different than with aromanticism. "aro ace" and "aro-ace" kept not feeling right because The Norm™️ is to write it as one word. so i flipflopped between being "aro and ace" and being "aroace", "ay" or "arose".

and then earlier this year, i came across quoiromantic probably for the first time consciously. and one of the definitions was "finding romance inapplicable" and there it was, me! i've already been saying that i'm aro in the way that romance doesn't apply to me. hence none of the favourability terms made sense to me. nothing i do could ever be romantic, because romance doesn't apply to me, so i can't be favourable or indifferent or averse to romance. though i would probably averse to someone calling my relationship, feelings or actions romantic, because again, nothing i do or feel can be romantic. and, seeing a lot of non-sam aros and unit aros, i always thought that if i was non-sam or unit a, it would be ace and not aro.

i absorbed "quoiromantic" into the deltahoard and didn't think about it all that much until the other day when i read up on quoiromantic history and it was fucking brilliant. people who i guess could be called non-sam aces (or solum aces if you wanna be cool and use my term) talked about romance and romantic orientation being inapplicable, confusing, nonsensical. and that was utterly relatable. romance is still confusing to me but i chose to not deal with it by choosing to opt out of romance altogether. sometimes people will ask me if i'm in a "romantic relationship" and i'm thinking to myself "what even is that?" and i've read and heard about people opting out of romantic orientation (such as @queerascat, i miss their content). it was then when i realised that the way i used the term "aromantic" was never to describe a romantic orientation, but my lack thereof, my lack of romance as a whole. that's why my aromanticism always felt so different from my asexuality. because it was never really an orientation. i just found a more useful framework for my feelings and relationship and use that instead. a lot of quoiromantic aces/solum aces/aces without romantic orientation seem to be "fully" non-sam, whereas i have sensual and alterous orientations that are important enough for me to label. in fact, it feels like my alterous orientation is exactly where my romantic orientation "should be". i hope to meet more people like me.