not aromantic but I believe in their beliefs.
"there's no platonic explanation for this" try harder bucko
love is a beautiful wonderful multifaceted nebulous thing that shouldn't be reduced to the strict bounds of Tier One: Romance and Tier Two: Friends. get weird with it. love your friends deeply, wildly, passionately and platonically. cowards
unreliable narrator but it's just an aromantic writing romance
the author's barely concealed aromanticism
this would be hilarious actually
"As they stood together on the balcony, they stopped and stared into each other's eyes. For the fifth time, by the way, because they don't get bored easily, I guess. But who's keeping track."
"And then they kissed or something. I don't know and I don't care. Look, there's a bumblebee in the flowers."
I wish it wasn’t a hot take that a story in which two characters of any gender prioritize their purely platonic relationship over any other romantic or sexual interests they might have is a textually queer story
A lot of people really don’t understand amatonormativity as another dimension of “there is a right way to love people” that we have to dismantle.
Amatonormativity 101: Amatonormativity, a term coined by Elizabeth Brake, is the very prevalent idea that there is one relationship type that is above all others. This relationship is an exclusive/monogamous, committed, romantic and sexual relationship.
According to amatonormativity, this specific kind of relationship:
This goes hand in hand with heteronormativity, which says that this ideal relationship also has to be straight. But if you remove that part, all the normative forces of amatonormativity still exist. And they suck for just about everyone! Amatonormativity says aromantic and asexual people will never experience the “highest” form of love. It says single people are inherently less happy than people in a romantic relationship and should always be actively looking for one. It says sex without romance or romance without sex are both lacking a fundamental part of an ideal relationship. It says polyamorous people are failing to choose the one person they can be fully devoted to. It says that your monogamous, committed, romantic/sexual partner is the most important person in your life—more important than your family, your best friend you’ve known all your life, etc.
I hope we can all agree that is something queer people, and also people in general, would benefit from dismantling!
Now let me talk about an example of what I was referring to in the original post.
If you’re not familiar, Elementary is a TV series based on the Sherlock Holmes stories. It’s a modern day adaptation featuring Sherlock Holmes, consulting detective for the NYPD, and Joan (rather than John) Watson, his sober companion and eventually detective partner.
Sherlock has many casual sexual relationships with women throughout the series, while Joan has a string of romantic relationships with men. Neither of them is textually queer (although Sherlock feels very aromantic-coded, if unintentionally, and I personally think an aro reading of both characters has merit).
However, the two of them share a relationship that defies amatonormativity. Sherlock and Joan share almost every part of their lives together—first because Joan is monitoring Sherlock to help maintain his sobriety, but soon because they have actively chosen to remain in each other’s lives. They eventually become partners as detectives but are also functionally life partners, living together, sharing their resources, taking care of each other emotionally and physically. At multiple turning points in the story, they express their love for each other. Throughout this progression, their relationship never becomes romantic or sexual. While Sherlock continues to have casual sex and Joan continues to go on dates, it’s clear that Sherlock and Joan remain each other’s most important person.
This relationship defies amatonormativity, and in my opinion that makes it queer. Queer as in breaking boundaries, defying norms, challenging the idea that there is any right or wrong way to love someone.
Now it’s time for my real hot take. There is a reason I used Elementary as an example, instead of the many other pieces of fiction that have a very similar dynamic between two characters of the same gender.
Those stories—stories that center a platonic relationship between two characters of the same gender, a relationship that remains platonic but is deep, devoted, and prioritized over other relationships in the character’s lives—are textually queer. They are not textually gay (although yes, many of them are subtextually gay). But that does not stop them from being queer stories.
If you want to read into whatever subtext might be there and interpret that relationship as a gay romantic/sexual relationship, that's great. But I wish more people shared my opinion that this is not making a previously normative story into a queer one. Usually, it’s trading heteronormativity for amatonormativity, creating a relationship that defies different norms.
I’m not saying that one or the other interpretation is more valuable (in general—which one is most meaningful to you is a personal preference). I think they’re both queer interpretations of the story. However, given how often stories like the ones I’m describing get accused of “queerbaiting” or simply “not being canonically queer,” I’m pretty sure my opinion on this is not widely shared.
In conclusion: Queerness is a much broader set of concepts than just gay romance. We should consider amatonormativity another dimension of oppression that queerness is in opposition to. Ship or don’t ship whatever is more fun or meaningful to you but please don’t assign moral righteousness to one kind of queerness while erasing another. Also, please be nice to aro and ace people, we already have enough to deal with. I wish none of this was a hot take. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
an aromantic person is someone who (fill in the blank here) // april 10 2024
petition to pronounce aromantic with a soft a like aromatic
i’m not aromantic but i believe in their beliefs
for me being bi has contributed a huge amount to noticing all the ways in which romance and friendship run together and i think in general people would benefit from recognizing that romance and friendship are socially constructed categories used to describe a vast, nebulous, and often overlapping range of feelings
As someone nonpartnering, I'm always dancing on the razor's edge of relating to and having no patience for "forever alone" sentiments from alloro single people.
Because on the one hand, to be perfectly honest, yes, I am lonely! And while there's numerous factors involved in that, my being single is one of them. It's hard not to feel isolated as a single adult and I'm very cognizant of my friends, coworkers, family members etc... who have this whole category of social life that I do not.
However. While if someone individually happens to want a partner, that's fine and well and good, but 'everyone must partner off' cannot continue to be the broader social model. If your mentality is 'I'll get a romantic partner and that'll be that', then you're contributing to the problem -- for both yourself and everyone else.
Community has to be the real focus. When I think about combatting loneliness, I think about universal basic income and affordable housing, walkable neighbourhoods and robust public transit, free community events (both in-person and online), access to high-quality affordable healthcare, access to public restrooms, etc...
Even if we woke up tomorrow to find sudden cultural acceptance of permanent singlehood as an option, I and many other people would still be lonely! We need to support social infrastructure outside of romantic relationships and nuclear families at the policy level. If you have to work multiple jobs to afford a place to live or if you have a 2 hour commute because the local bus service sucks or if the best spot in town to meet new people is an accessibility nightmare, all of these things are going to stifle community and we're still going to be lonely. I genuinely do sympathize with the plight of the single alloro, but there has to be an understanding that your individual loneliness is not the end of the line.
official aromantic post
unreliable narrator but it's just an aromantic writing romance
the author's barely concealed aromanticism
official aromantic post
funny how my tutor (nice guy, to be clear) accidentally connected love and empathy in a way that suggested i don't feel the latter because im really not sure about the former
which opens up another can of worms: obvs he was saying that love makes us human and that love = empathy (already incorrect), but he's also inferring that to empathise is to be human, and not to empathise is... well, i think to him he'd never imagined that idea before this discussion, but certainly "inhuman"
it's not something that bothered me (or bothers me now) because the amount of unpacking one does around these concepts, especially if they're brand new, will lead to clumsy language, but it's interesting that he considered human connections and good actions and "being human" with empathy, when really all that's required to treat other people well is to... treat other people well, in my experience
plenty of people consider themselves to have an abundance of empathy and they suck. (leaving aside for a second that billions of people have considered themselves to love and out of them many many have sucked as well)
i think there's an interesting thing about language -- putting language to the feelings that, say, move us to speak kindly to a child, to help someone who needs help, to care about the environment, to give of ourselves. and the feelings that inspire us to jealousy, to dehumanisation, to violence, to nationalism....
i think "love" for all of that is imprecise and can lead to dehumanisation. i think "empathy" is probably worse, because empathy says nothing at all about actions (neither, in my opinion, does love, but it sometimes is connected to action in ways i can see)
honestly i'd say im pretty empathetic, personally. i don't think i love. and i don't think said empathy is better or worse an emotion to have in terms of "things that might make you not litter or want to make someone you know well feel better when they're sad." it's just an emotion
but i know now that he's got this running around in his head, at least a little bit. the (mis?)use of the word "love"... the conflation of love = empathy = humanity.... new ideas for the earthling experience
sometimes i think people love the idea of love. the idea of a force that will bring you to a person/s in a way that is at once undefinable, but also worth thousands of words of description, the idea that at the end of the day this force will point you towards your ultimate companion/s and that it is inherently stronger than any other bond you may form throughout your life and so until this crash of True Love has made itself felt you're living half a life and the connections between yourself and people and community are lesser -- less important, less "real," less worthy of putting effort into
when of course the most important things we do come from the things we give back to one another as people, the trust we form, the communities we become a part of, the interests we share, the things we can teach/learn from one another, the responsibility for the planet we have, the basic idea that we exist together
and some people might call that love, because everything worthwhile doing is love and otherwise what are we doing it for, and idk. i think it's just about recognising that we're all people and we deserve dignity and we like finding commonality and learning new things. to me, trying to fit the whole of our species' actions and needs under a nebulous concept of "love" it just... becomes meaningless to me. why would i be looking for that "special connection" with others when to interact with one another, to live together, to help, is special and important innately?
of course enough people need to buy into this shared care, otherwise one ends up giving and giving and giving of oneself until one cannot function anymore, and then allonormativity steps in and leaves one in the lurch, because everyone else is off finding special someones who are more worthy of giving care to by virtue of feeling "love"
think we need to fall more out of love with the idea of love, sometimes
i keep seeing misinformation about this, so: queerplatonic relationships do not have a set definition. the name comes from the idea that it's "queering" the platonic relationship, tailoring it to the individual relationships' own desires. it isn't necessarily romance lite, but it also isn't necessarily whatever definition you want to impose on it. the point of queering the platonic relationship is to break away from strict allonormative views on friendship, romance, and sex, not to make a new categorical box to fit in.
the answer to "what is a qpr?" is "whatever you want it to be." sometimes that is romance lite. sometimes it's a deeply committed friendship. sometimes it's friends who have a sexual relationship. sometimes it's based on an entirely different mode of attraction. sometimes it's fluid and impossible to put into words. it's whatever you want it to be. it's queer.
does anyone have recs to texts that relate to aromantic and/or asexual theory and philosophy?
everything i find/see is more "validation" or "personal testimony" and while those texts are important, they're not what im looking for.
i want to place aspec ideas of various kinds into political and cultural contexts and make arguments for their implementation as something that should influence how we think about our bodies in relationship to other bodies.
things like redefining what "relationship" means, analyses of queerplatonic, kink, community-building outside of nuclear family structures, critiques of love as first principle -- also referencing histories and placing these ideas alongside lesbian, bi, trans, gay communities (like for example "the golden orchid society")
obviously the aromantic manifesto does a bunch of heavy lifting on this front and is wonderfully challenging/in-your-face, but is there more? do we have texts like "gender outlaws"?
being on the aro spectrum would be a lot easier if being single wasn’t made to feel like a literal death sentence
it’s all very well to say “friends are just as important as romantic partners” but in practice this simply is not the case lmao. you can share a flat with a friend but it’s expected that sooner or later that friend will meet someone and will move out to go live with that person instead. if you’re hanging out with friends you can bring your partner along but your friends can’t come on a date night with you because that’s third-wheeling and it’s weird. you can know somebody for most of your life and still be second-best to some guy they met on tinder 6 months ago. you’re meant to just accept without question the fact that your friends will prioritise time with their partners over time with you. being single is treated like a problem that needs to be fixed. we casually use expressions like “just friends” or “more than friends”. everything we read and watch reinforces the idea that romantic love is what gives life meaning and therefore your life is meaningless. i try to keep my chin up but my god it is bleak out there
Also like the economy expects you to have a “household income” that’s >1 person’s, hence cohabitating with roommates -> a partner. If I want to live by myself because I have a low tolerance for other humans’ bullshit then that choice shouldn’t fuck me over as much as it does lmao.
i want to introduce you all to a project that is very close to my heart... or lack of one. anyway. for anyone who has ever wanted to play a poem. i'd like you to meet aromanticism
(link opens itch.io - she'll run on html in your browser! please be nice to her!)
sometimes finding aromanticism in media isn’t literally about aromanticism… sometimes it’s about the deconstruction of love as a concept and the subversion of its perception as inherently humanising. it’s about the decentering of romance as a driving force in the narrative. and also sometimes it’s about love being central to the narrative but in a way that defies all traditional categorisations of romantic / platonic / anything else. it is the secret third thing yet so much more and less at once. the point is aromanticism is everywhere for those with eyes to see
