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Loveless aro: I don’t really connect with the idea of love. Due to my personal experiences as an aromantic person, I find it uncomfortable to label what I feel as love, and I find it empowering to reject love altogether as a concept.

Non-loveless person: But don’t you love chicken nuggets? Don’t you love your friends and family? Don’t you love the sun on your face? Don’t you love taking a shit when you have a stomach ache? Why won’t you let me force labels onto you?

not every aro person is loveless but everytime someone asks in a concerned and scared way if aro people don't feel love i kind of want to reply 'correct, get scared 👻'

this year my challenge for everyone is to unlearn the association between love and morality. love is not something that is inherently morally good, and the absence of love is not something that is inherently bad. sex without love isn't morally bankrupt, it's just an action. people without love aren't less kind or less good, they're just people. when we can get past this false (and often unnoticed) dichotomy of good love/evil lovelessness then i think we are going to be able to take leaps and bounds in sex positivity, aro advocacy, certain discussions of mental health...

It's always "aros can still date!" "aros can still be in (any type of non-romantic or romantic) relationships!" "aros aren't heartless!" "aros can still love in different ways!"

Well, sure, you do you.

But not all of us. A lot of us are *completely* non-partnering. There's loveless aros. Aplatonic aros. Hell, even heartless is a label some aros use!

We don’t need to do anything to "replace" the romantic relationships we don’t have. People can be completely happy alone! Without a partner! (Shocking, I know!)

I'm just a bit tired of all the amatonormativity I still see under some of the trending aro-positivity posts...

stop telling arospecs there are "other kinds of love! not everything is romantic there's platonic love too!" yes there is but not everyone experiences platonic love. not everyone experiences familial love. not everyone experiences love. it shouldn't be a prerequisite to our validity. we have heard it a hundred times before and we shouldn't have to explain to everyone, including other arospecs, that some of us are loveless.

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.

I know that the term "loveless" can cause a knee jerk reaction with lots of people. I know the term can be tied to hurt feelings, painful accusations, silent worries and a strong urge to defend yourself.

But I need people, especially aros who aren't familiar with the concept, to understand that the reclaiming of that word is born from the very same hurt. Only instead of saying "I'm not loveless, I can still love" which often goes hand in hand with a silent "I am still worthy because I can love", loveless aromanticism asks "why am I, as an aromantic person, constantly having to defend my worth as a human being?" and "why can't we instead have a conversation about how respect for another person should not be tied to whether they feel one emotion?" and "why do you choose to reduce the vast complexity of lived human experience to one feeling?" and "what if I don't feel love? What if I don't understand love? What if I've been hurt by love? What if the concept of love makes me deeply uncomfortable, am I still allowed to exist in peace?"

The point is, I see many aros react in a hurt and defensive manner when confronted with lovelessness, and I see many loveless aros react to that in a similar hurt and defensive manner. and it's just all the same hurt.

The response to "ace people are just virgins who can't get laid!" Shouldn't be "ace people can still have sex!" but instead " being a virgin isn't a bad thing."

The response to "aro people are just heartless freaks!" Shouldn't be "aro people can still feel love!" And instead be "not feeling love or other emotions doesn't make you a bad person."

Instead of pushing the idea that aspec people can be "normal like allos" we should instead be trying to normalize aspec experiences. Yes aspec people can be normal because aspec identities are normal. Some aros fall in love. some aces have sex. but they should not be the only valid aspec experiences. We should not use these experiences to make the aspec identity more palatable to amatonormativity and allos.

"Loveless marriage" except in a joyous, loveless aromantic way instead of a miserable amatonormative way.

loveless aros 🤝 aros who do feel love

"fuck allo people for telling me what i feel and how to feel it"

additionally:

-aros who don't feel love and are proud

-aros who do feel love and are proud

-aros who can't feel proud yet but are trying

you're the backbone of this community and i care you real big

special shoutout to aces , aros , aplatonics , and anyone who is a combination of these , especially if you are loveless , this valentines day ^_^

you are not less than for not experiencing attraction , same goes for not experiencing love . im really bad at cheesy wholesome posts so uhhh chocolate will be on sale soon if you like that . 👍👍👍

it’s actually so baffling me to me that when loveless aros express not wanting their identities to be defined by love ppl will literally whip out the most specific n strange tangents on ‘love’ that you’ve ever heard under like EVERY one of these posts. theres always at least one person going ‘ok but have u ever seen a bee pollinate a flower. have u ever smiled at an old lady on the street. do u not relish the smell of fresh horse shit in the countryside’ like. sorry but appreciating the general world around me isn’t what i’d personally call love and frankly i don’t think it’s what most alloros would either!!! it’s interesting how y’all r suddenly so insistent on expanding the definition of love when and ONLY aros question and/or reject it 🤨

“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

people talk about gay coding villains all the time but never about aro coding villains and it’s honestly everywhere it’s like “oh this terrible guy cannot feel love and it makes them a horrible person”

and before someone tries to debunk this with “oh but theyre not actually aro theyre cant feel any kind of love theyre a psychopath” that’s like saying buffallo bill from silence of the lambs isnt a transphobic caricature because he’s not actually a trans woman

Not to mention that “only” being arophobic to loveless aros specifically is still arophobia

Even if those characters were “just” supposed psychopaths instead of aro it wouldn’t make that kind of depiction okay either. It’s just saying “oh no, it’s not arophobic, it’s actually just ableist” which is still bad.

THANK YOU! It’s time to stop using “psychopath” as a catch-all for morally depraved characters! People who experience psychosis are not violent nutbags, people with DID are not crazy murderers, people with different levels or expressions of empathy are not heartless monsters! Just like aro people are not broken or evil!

Writers need to stop relying on the idea that different = evil/bad, and the rest of us need to stop buying into it so easily.

What if I told you that “aromantic people, by and large, are not inherently incapable of feeling love” and “feeling the emotion of love is not required to be a good person” and “it’s an individual person’s choice whether to call something love or not” and “broadening the definition of love is inherently a resistance against amatonormative systems which seek to control the contexts in which love can be expressed” and “both loving differently and not loving at all are valid and vital methods of resistance against those systems” are all compatible statements that can coexist

actually, while i’m on the topic of aromanticism: i find it funny there are aphobes who hear about loveless aros and aplatonic folk and go “uhm there’s no such thing, that’s just major depression. get therapy.” but finding the loveless aro community and identifying as loveless has made me feel 100x more confident and more secure in my aromanticism? it has strengthened my ability to build and maintain friendships, because i now understand that not feeling platonic love or any other kind of love doesn’t make me some flaky, fake excuse of a person— it just means i don’t experience some emotions that others might. and i can better navigate those experiences instead of feeling guilty and like i’m some horrible, irredeemable person. it sincerely has given me a brighter outlook with how i interact with others socially and build friendships.

i don’t NEED to compensate for something i don’t feel, i can simply just exist as i am.

I love you QPRs, I love you polyamory, I love you relationship anarchy, I love you aromantics with partners, I love you people who don’t want relationships, I love you I admire you loveless community, I love you ignoring amatonormativity <3