doctor-aro reblogged

This year, right before before pr*de, I reconnected to an old friend. She's ace. She lives with aces, is engaged to a lesbian ace. She's also demisexual and the way she talks about romantic attraction she's most likely demiromantic, too, because she doesn't fall in love without a strong emotional bond first. Her roommate that's not the fiancée is aroace.

I talked to her about my aromanticism. About how I identify as aroflux or maybe grayromantic. She did not know what grayromantic was, asked me if I meant graysexual or gray asexual. What she said exactly was, "Grayro is on the ace spectrum?" She didn't differentiate "grayro" apart from gray ace or asexuality in general because she didn't know? She and her aro roommate are in the aromantic spectrum, she lives in an aspec household, and she didn't or couldn't differentiate the aro identity out of the ace spectrum. I had even clarified that I was allosexual by using the exact word, allosexual, in my paragraph. And she still asked if I meant ace when I told her I felt I was an aro identity.

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Look. I'm not posting this after avoiding this blog for over six months to come back and even to really say anything to start something. And this is bad time in the world, that's why I *-ed up in my first sentence, I don't want tumblr algorithms to pick up that word and take away timeline space for posts that are more important right now.

But I don't have anywhere else to voice my frustration.

And it has been so good to reconnect to this friend!!! I have missed her so much, we used to talk a lot and she was the first to validate my difficulty with romance and even introduced me to asexuality that lead me to aromanticism. I ordered her and her household june stuff, some of it specifically demi and ace, because they've been out helping those who need it and doing good stuff but were sad that they felt the shouldn't post anything june related because of the sad bad and important stuff. Like I know that she would never try to hurt me because we were just today talking about some acephobic asshole earlier and how frustrating that is. She would never meaningly say something to be arophobic.

But.

I'm not ace. I. Am. Not. Ace. None of my identities are asexual identities. I am arospec. I may be grayro, meaning gray aromantic. I am aroallo. Aromantic allosexual.

I've been sitting on this for a few days to decide if it was actually bothering me and it is.

No where is there a place that understands aro only identities. Not on tumblr, and apparently not irl with irl aspecs lol. Seriously, in a household of all aspecs, it wasn't common knowledge that the not asexual version of gray- is just the aromantic one. Like why did she ask me it like that? "Grayro is on the ace spectrum?" No lol, grayro is an aspec identity, but it is on the aro spectrum.

Why is it like this? Why am I constantly stuffed into the ace spectrum when I am not ace? I can't even be a non-sam aro because I still get stuffed into the ace identity when I do not belong there. And I even clarified that I was allosexual and bi questioning and I still was questioned if I was identifying with an ace identity.

Nothing has changed. It's still this stupid fucking mentality that if you're not ace or not aroace, then what are you???

I'm fucking aroallo. I'm aroallo. Aromantic allosexual. I am just ARO.

Please see us, for fucks sake. I know there's other aroallos out there, there are aroallo voices speaking still. We are aro. We are aspec. We are not ace, but we're still aspec. Please see us.

#aro #aroallo #for my aroallo followers #and anyone else who sees this honestly #this is important #aromantic #i'd put this in the ace tag but I'm scared of what might happen

doctor-aro reblogged

arotaro

I tried my hand at making an allosexual aromantic flag, after some discussion with others; It was fairly well received on Arocalypse, so I thought I’d post it here. Obviously, no one has to use this flag if they don’t want to, and if you’re interested, I’ve created a survey to gather input on the flag: https://goo.gl/forms/PFINgMKNDfa0UDLh2

It was important to me that the flag very obviously look like an offshoot of the aro flag, and I kept the shades of green the same as the aro flag for convenience of use. The color gold was chosen as the second color not only because it looks nice with green, but also because it’s the opposite of purple on the color wheel (with purple being the color associated with asexuality). As for what the color stripes represent:

Green - The aromantic community. Our place in this community and the solidarity and support we share with fellow aros. (Aro green.)
Light green - Lack of attraction, differentiating us from others. This obviously includes lack of romantic attraction, but can also include aros who don’t desire close platonic partnerships, aros who identify as ace-spec along with another sexual orientation, etc. (Also aro green, because lack of romantic attraction is what makes us aro.)
White - Diversity of sexuality. For welcoming and uniting all allosexual aros, no matter what their sexual orientation, and for acknowledging a broad range of sexual experiences and relationships with one’s own sexuality. (White, because white light is made up of all other colors of light mixed together.)
Light gold - Relationships, be they sexual relationships, QPRs, romantic relationships, friendships, family bonds, or any other type of relationships. (Light gold, because our relationships are important and precious, but not always necessary or defining of who we are.)
Gold - Inhererent wholeness and worth. We aren’t missing anything. We’re not broken, we don’t need anyone to complete us, and we are born perfect the way we are. We’re individuals and we have just as much worth as anyone else. (Gold, because we’re gold.)

I’m aroace so my opinion shouldn’t really matter buuuuuut

I have seen lots of aro allos pointing out that our overall flag is just the upside down ace flag with two green stripes instead of one purple one and I think this alleviates that some. So I definitely support this new one as a differentiation of that

arotaro

I’m… Not really sure I understand what you’re saying here? I’m a little confused as to what you mean… I’m not proposing this flag as a replacement/alternative to the aro flag, if that’s what you’re thinking. It’s a flag to represent allosexual aros, not the aro community as a whole.

doctor-aro

Oh, yeah I know it’s for allo aros. Sorry if I didn’t make that clear. I think it’s good because the aro flag we use could potentially be alienating to allo aros and this is a good one for y’all to use because it doesn’t feel like a re purposed ace flag and represents more of the things you want to see in a flag.

Again, sorry for the misunderstanding

#aro #aromantic #aroallo #aro-allo

doctor-aro reblogged

aro-love

arotaro

Green - The aromantic community. Our place in this community and the solidarity and support we share with fellow aros. (Aro green.)
Light green - Lack of attraction, differentiating us from others. This obviously includes lack of romantic attraction, but can also include aros who don’t desire close platonic partnerships, aros who identify as ace-spec along with another sexual orientation, etc. (Also aro green, because lack of romantic attraction is what makes us aro.)
White - Diversity of sexuality. For welcoming and uniting all allosexual aros, no matter what their sexual orientation, and for acknowledging a broad range of sexual experiences and relationships with one’s own sexuality. (White, because white light is made up of all other colors of light mixed together.)
Light gold - Relationships, be they sexual relationships, QPRs, romantic relationships, friendships, family bonds, or any other type of relationships. (Light gold, because our relationships are important and precious, but not always necessary or defining of who we are.)
Gold - Inhererent wholeness and worth. We aren’t missing anything. We’re not broken, we don’t need anyone to complete us, and we are born perfect the way we are. We’re individuals and we have just as much worth as anyone else. (Gold, because we’re gold.)

doctor-aro

I’m aroace so my opinion shouldn’t really matter buuuuuut

#aro #aro-allo #aroallo #aro flags

doctor-aro

you know, I don’t really participate in the dishcourse anymore because it’s just really dumb, but a lot of ppl I follow still post content related to the dishcouse, and suddenly I’ve started noticing that a lot of it is really ace centric. Like, even if the user is aro themselves they mostly only talk about ace inclusion, and stop being acephobic and leave aces alone.

And I’m like, yeah, aces deserve to be included, but so do aro people. And I’m not talking about the “aces/aros” that everyone uses when they want to be inclusive of aros too. I mean like, discussion of problems that aros face, negative stereotypes that are assigned not just to aroaces but also aro allos (I would argue aro allo stereotypes are more harmful) Like, you can’t say that cishet stands for Cisgender Heterosexual and say that aces aren’t heterosexual, and therefore deserve to be included. Because that erases aro allos, who deserve to be included just as much as alloaces and aro aces.

So if you’re ace, and you still participate in the dishcourse, just remember that you are fighting for aro heterosexual people too

#aro #ace #aroace #aro allo #allo ace #aroallo #alloace #aromantic #asexual

doctor-aro reblogged

no literally this is the most true meme on the entire internet my mother doesn’t even think there is such a thing as aroallos and that’s just my mom. Imagine what would happen if I actually talked about it with someone my age. No wait I already know what it would be like:

#aro salt #aro memes #aromantic #aroallo