#lovequeer

[aroplatonic]

feel like y'all would like this article about how the devaluing of platonic relationships has a lot to do with Western culture:

[delphiniumjoy]

You’ve heard of hopeless romantic? I’m a hopeless platonic

[arofulboyfriend]

"if you tell all your friends you love them all the time, then the word love becomes meaningless" well for one yeah i sure hope it does, and for two, if hearing me tell you i love you every day becomes meaningless to you because i say it too often, then you don't believe my love is valuable and also skill issue

[aro-barrel]

one of the first things any aro wants to know on their journey of discovery is, “what the fuck is romantic love?” so we end up reading alloromantic accounts of romance, just so we can try to understand. and it’s often a failed journey, simply because people describe different experiences or describe sensations that don’t necessarily equate to romantic attraction. sure, people get a warm fuzzy feeling when they look at their spouse, but alloplatonics might describe their platonic feelings the same. and sure, people are struck with a desire to hold someone close and kiss them, but is that really exclusive to romance? after a while, it becomes clear. love filled with subjectivity.

the question then becomes, what do we do with subjectivity? it’s the first step in disassembling "love." when we choose to investigate further, we may come to realize the subjectivities are (too often) conveniently erased to suit popular notions of love—these stem from dominant depictions of love that don’t reflect reality or practice. put simply: people are told how their love is. yes, they're told how to love, but there is the very real assumption that the same feelings underlie every expression of romantic love, no matter who you are. it's in all the tv shows and books, it's parroted by well-meaning people who wish for your happiness, it's sliced ragged until it's a narrow, "correct" form. but no one loves that singular way, even if they warp their own experiences to fit the narrative. if "love" is pared down, concentrated into an impossibly specific expression, we get awful tunnel vision when we try to conceptualize it. the lived, subjective experiences of love elude us.

so as aromantics, we take the abandoned subjectivities and play around with them. we might attempt to separate components of "love" and poke them with a stick, dissect them, take parts out, Frankenstein them. we might heave "love" into a jumbo garbage bin forever or build our own thing from scratch. when people write of love as a law of nature, we tear it to fucking shreds. there are no rules, it's not a sacred thing, not immutable. we fuck around with "love" on purpose. we carve our own space in a society that insists on myopia.

[swordsandflowercrowns]

I was explaining this to a friend recently and I think it's an important distinction to make: not all queerplatonic relationships look the same.

A good way I've found to illustrate what exactly a qpr is, is to say "a qpr is to relationships what nonbinary is to gender". While both of these traditionally function on a binary (male/female, platonic/romantic), by defining our personal outlooks and experiences of the concepts of gender and relationships with new terms, we challenge the boundaries that society has put in place.

And yes, whilst redefining what actually constitutes romantic or platonic relationships, or male and female identities, and what makes them different (and acknowledging where they overlap, or where they can expand past what we traditionally expect) is important to increasing our understanding, so is providing options entirely outside of those two boxes.

And that's what it is - options. It's very easy to trivialise the concept of nonbinary and simply make gender into a trinary, rather than a binary. Male/female/nonbinary, which goes against the very purpose of the nonbinary label. This further erases the spectrum of gender. It's the same with relationships - by giving a strict set of instructions on how a qpr must look and act, you are simply creating a trinary. The point of the concept of qprs is to acknowledge that there are relationships between people that may overlap platonic and romantic, or fall partially within one and partially outside, or ones that are entirely separate from either category.

There are an infinite amount of ways a relationship can manifest, and if the people in the relationship feel that queerplatonic best describes their partnership without romance, or their affection without commitment, or their feelings towards each other that aren't quite what romantic or platonic is to them, or any other reason that rebels against amatonormativity, then they can choose to use that term. Queerplatonic covers the widest range of relationships that come in all shapes and sizes.

I think it's so important when discussing topics like relationships and gender to consciously make the effort to keep queering our ideas of the concepts - to remember that a spectrum is a spectrum. Labels can be useful for finding community, identifying your experiences and validating your struggles, but as soon as you try to start hyper-defining them, you lose the radical nature of queering our understanding of ourselves and our relationships. We name these concepts in order to give a voice to our subversion of society's arbitrary rules and expectations, not to police each other into conforming to a particular understanding of how a person (with a certain label) "should" act or be.

[sallertiafabrica]

When your love is insignificant.

A comic about my relationship with love as an aromantic and low-empathy person.

Just for context: I was having an aro anguish moment in the middle of the night, woke up and couldn’t sleep again, wrote out this poem-thingy so it’d leave my head, fell asleep again, then proceeded to work on this comic all day this evening, cuz I wanted to do an aro comic for the longest so might as well turn my night-anguish-induced-poem into one.

[actuallysafe-for-aro]

I've had 3 people this week do that "buuuut love isn't All ROMANTIC, people have other types of love "

And I'm so sick and tired of this! Fuck you! You don't get to decide what experiences are universal, you don't get to decide what words and concepts people are and aren't comfortable with and do or don't believe in.

I don't care! It's not all love, love isn't what makes someone human, love is not the most important thing, you can go fuck yourself if you think so.

Aros, especially loveless, aplatonic, and lovequeer aros deserve to have their perception of the world respected by other people. We should not have our ideals questioned and told they are straight up wrong or untrue. No one can speak for you on your own experiences and the language that feels good to you.

Aros are important, we deserve respect

[gothfatherr]

[aroacearchangel]

hey who wants to hold hands and play with my hair and be so gentle with me i might shatter into a million pieces

[quiggel]

When I say “I love you” I do not mean it romantically. I don’t even mean it platonically. For me “I love you” is a way of say “I am in love with the universe itself and you are apart of this universe and right now you are reminding me why I love it so. Thank you.”

[aroplatonic]

just like how someone being GNC is not automatically nonbinary, a friendship being unconventional never means it is automatically a QPR. remember that QPRs are defined only by the people in them. there is no such thing as something "friends don't do".

[thatnerdyqueer]

We have to do a course about "love" in Pdh

(by which, of course, they mean healthy relationships, which is important, but you can already tell it's going to be RIDDLED with amanormativity and aphobia)

so to troll my teacher I'm going to mention qprs as often as i possibly can.

I will mention a-spec identity and relationship anarchy once for each note on this post. Reblog to wreak havoc on the allos.

[mossy-aro]

“aromantic people wanting to reclaim love, especially non-romantic love, as an important part of their humanity in the face of dehumanisation” and “a lot of aromantic people have been dehumanised and then forced to justify their humanity to people in the name of love, especially non-romantic love, and have thus rejected the idea of needing love at all to be considered fulfilled or even human” are ideas that must co-exist actually

[templebet]

its so ridiculous that people think aros can't love! listen to aromantic people about love! ask about their relationships and connections because it's beautiful!! its stunning!! my aromantic love means the fucking world to me and i want everyone to know how wonderful!! show different forms of love!! show the way queer people have taken the word love and created magic!!

authors note: learn from people without love too!! learn about loveless aros and heartless aros and non-amourous people! the human experience is amazing and every form of happiness should be cherished!!

[crave-mp3]

I LOVE BEING ARO SO MUCH!!!!!! I WILL NEVER FEEL ROMANTIC ATTRACTION AND THATS BEAUTIFUL AND NATURAL AND SOMETHING I WILL WIELD AS A WEAPON AND A SHIELD AGAINST ANYONE WHO WOULD CHANGE ME OR ERASE ME!!!!!! REALIZING I AM ARO WAS ONE OF THE MOST JOYFUL AND FREEING AND ILLUMINATING EXPERIENCES OF MY LIFE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! MY EXUBERANCE AT LIVING WITHOUT THE NARROW SOCIETAL IDEA OF "LOVE" KNOWS NO BOUNDS AND I SEE BEAUTY IN EVERYTHING!!!!!!!!! MY LIFE OVERFLOWS WITH JOYFUL ABUNDANCE!!!!!!!! I AM BURSTING FOR AFFECTION WITH EVERYTHING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I WILL NEVER BE "ALONE" (I WILL NEVER BE LONELY) BECAUSE I WILL MAKE FOR MYSELF A LIFE THAT SINGS AND SHINES!!!!!!!!!!!!! I LOVE LIVING A LOVELESS LIFE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I LOVE THE SELF RELIANCE OF MY HAPPINESS!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I AM INFINITE AND BOUNDLESS AND DEFY DESCRIPTION OR CATEGORIZATION!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I AM AROMANTIC!!!!!!!! ALL IS JOY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ALL IS LIFE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[aroacespecwithknives-archive]