moirails were so good to me as an aro

too-spicy-and-too-queer:

arokaladin:

aro culture is lacking the communication skills to explain and ask for the complex and nuanced relationships you want.

Normally I’d just reply “big mood” to this and move on, which is a
perfectly fine response. But I want to talk about this, especially
because I’m going to start inviting my allo friends to read my blog, and
they need to understand this critically important concept.

Lack of visibility, both because our peers are afraid to come out and because writers of mainstream media don’t think it’s important, is literally hurting us.

Lack of language to both identify and talk about our own experiences is literally hurting us.

To start off, amatonormative culture (definition: the mainstream culture of romance normativity) already severely lacks linguistic nuance and grossly misrepresents romance in particular and interpersonal relationships in general. We’re taught that if you’re in love, “you just know”. What the fuck kind of description of the experience is that?! There are few detailed descriptions of that experience in mainstream media, and a lot of the media narratives of how romantic relationships are supposed to work are rife with poor interpersonal communication and toxic emotional management, not to mention oppressive gender roles and a dozen other things. On top of that, the depictions of romantic relationship models are outrageously narrow and overly glamorized. Like seriously, y’all alloromantics (definition: people who experience romantic attraction) should be outraged at how incredibly narrowly defined romantic relationships are in our culture, and how strict the default boundaries are for those relationships. You have SO LITTLE FLEXIBILITY in what is acceptable or unacceptable, and this is reflected in the language you use to talk about romance. How many of y’all have been near-inconsolably upset the first time you had a fight with a romantic partner? You should be outraged that our society never taught you how to expect, predict, navigate, and communicate interpersonal conflict in a healthy way. And you should be outraged that even the word “love” is primarily associated with romantic love, when I know y’all feel and care deeply about a much wider variety of loves than that.

So take these things, a lack of nuanced language, a lack of commonly taught communication skills, words that by default mean romance often to the exclusion or devaluation of other kinds of love, and incredibly narrow socially-accepted relationship models. Now, our society puts romance on a pedestal and gives us practically NOTHING about how to do it in healthy and mutually beneficial ways, but tells us we should idolize it to the point of not caring about other relationships, and tells us that our value as individuals is dependent on “achieving” a very specific kind of romantic relationship, which is the most important relationship with a human we could ever have. Sucks, right? Raise your hand if you’re an alloromantic who has been harmed by this. Single parents? Divorcees? Alloromantics who our society has deemed for other reasons to be undesirable? Literally anyone who wants to have a nuanced conversation with their romantic partner about breaking down assumptions?

Now imagine people who DO NOT experience the kind of attraction that leads to these relationships in the first place. We get NOTHING, no words to describe our experience, no relationship models, no role models, no visibility, no communication skills, no names for the subtle differences in our desires, little to no exaltation of non-romantic love, little to no overlap in what’s acceptable compared to what we want. Oh, and we’re told our desires don’t matter, because they aren’t romantic. We’re told the relationships we care about don’t matter, because they aren’t romantic. And we don’t have the words or the communication skills to express our desires or navigate the relationships we want (until we develop and invent them with each other, but we aren’t ever told that’s an option, and it shouldn’t be the only option anyway). We’re told all this from a very early age, and we’re given no alternatives, and we internalize it deep down. Many of us struggled to even recognize our own feelings until we met other aromantics BY HAPPENSTANCE. Many of us believed that we were freaks or somehow emotionally damaged until we met people like us, because we were never told people like us exist.

We aromantics have been irreparably harmed by the poor communication skills and the lack of nuanced language about love in our society. And, to a much lesser extent, so have many of you alloromantics.

This is why words matter. This is why labels matter. This is why communication skills matter.