This post was inspired by a recent article published on Everyday Feminism, entitled “Why We Need Mental Healthcare Without Asexual Erasure—And How to Get There.”

Way back when, I wrote about how important it is that asexuality be recognized and respected as a sexual orientation in the field of psychology. That was before the DSM-V came out, which does list asexuality as a legitimate orientation. In the first four versions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, lack of interest in sex or lack of desire for sex was listed as a symptom or sign of different illnesses, in addition to being its own kind of disorder (hypoactive sexual desire disorder), and there was no acknowledgment of sex-repulsion or sexual disinterest as healthy states of being. This contributed to and supported the mistreatment of asexuals who would come out in therapy as being disinterested in having sex or uncomfortable when having it, allowing their therapists to approach their asexuality and/or sex-repulsion as a symptom of a bigger mental problem or a dysfunction itself. The DSM-V still lists the sexual disorders that appeared in the first four versions, but it clearly states that “lack of sexual desire” must be something that actually causes a person distress for it to count as a symptom and does specifically list asexuality as an identity that cancels out a diagnosis of female or male sexual desire disorder

The acknowledgement, acceptance, and support of aromanticism in psychotherapy are inevitably harder to secure because singlism is already deeply embedded in our culture at every level. Singlism—a word coined by Dr. Bella DePaulo, a social scientist who has spent decades writing about singles—is defined as “the stigmatizing of adults who are single. It includes negative stereotyping of singles and discrimination against singles.” Long before “aromantic” became an identity, singlism was alive and dominant in our amatonormative culture, and while singlehood is dramatically more common in adults now than it was in the early and mid-20^th century, singlism hasn’t changed much in the last hundred years. Singlism—which is the flipside of amatonormativity—is present in our legal system, the workforce, mainstream media, religion, the gay rights movement, the medical establishment, and just about everywhere that counts. Singlism poses social, legal, medical, and economic ramifications for anyone who is single-unmarried or single-uncoupled.

Amatonormativity can operate with or without sexuality in the picture, because it is primarily concerned with romantic relationships, not sexual activity alone. Notice that accepting asexuality does absolutely no damage to amatonormativity. Our society is no less amatonormative now than it was 15 years ago, before asexuality had some degree of visibility and acceptance, and in fact, amatonormativity has been used—both by romantic asexuals and allo* people—to make asexuality more palatable.

“Asexuals may not like sex, but they can still fall in love! They can still have healthy, normal romantic relationships! You can still date an asexual, even if they’re not attracted to you sexually!”

This is the reason why aromantic asexuals have barely gotten any air time in asexual visibility/education efforts, why romantic relationships are often a major feature of media pieces about asexuals, and why navigating romantic relationships is a more popular topic in conversations about asexuality than topics such as “empowered celibacy” or “dismantling compulsory sexuality in our media” or “creating feminist images of asexual celibates.” Romantic relationships are the primary tool used to normalize asexuality. Romantic love becomes the thing that makes asexuality (and the sex-repulsion and celibacy that often accompany it) acceptable as a human condition instead of a dysfunction, disorder, or pathology that needs to be cured.

If you do romance but not sex or sex but not romance, you’re never quite “right” in society’s eyes, but if you don’t want or perform either, you’re a freak that nobody knows what to do with. Usually, they just pretend you don’t exist: they mislabel you “straight,” they decide you haven’t met the “right person” yet who’s going to awaken your romantic feelings and sexual desire, they believe you’re gay and in the closet or in denial. Being an aromantic asexual comes with its own unique discrimination that gets loaded onto the already persistent singlism and compulsory sexuality that plagues anyone who isn’t coupled up or sexually active. If you’re ace but you still date and fall in love, you can live in the closet more easily. No one needs to know you’re asexual, except the people you actually date, and if you’re romantically involved, the world will assume you’re sexually active and attracted to your partner. But when you’re not interested in sex or romance and you remain single, without any interest in dating or finding a romantic partner, that immediately calls into question both your sex life (and lack thereof) and your attitude about romance.

The flip side is that if you want and have sex, but you’re not interested in romantic relationships, you’re demonized, criticized, and shamed with accusations of commitment phobia, immaturity, promiscuity, using people for sex without caring about or respecting them, acting out sexually because of emotional or psychological distress, “emotional terrorism,” abuse, etc. There’s a sexist element to this too: women are criticized and condemned far more harshly and more frequently than men for having sex outside of romantic relationships and with multiple partners. While having casual sex is acceptable in American culture to a degree, it’s generally expected to be limited to youth and a temporary situation prior to falling in love and marrying. Beyond a certain age, pursuing sex without any interest in romance is frowned upon regardless of a person’s gender, and one way that society shames and bullies people out of it is putting a pseudo-psychological spin on their criticism, to make the sexual activity look like a symptom of developmental, emotional, or mental abnormality.

The difference between the single aromantic’s experience and the single alloromantic’s experience is that being aromantic often means that singlehood is a permanent, voluntary lifestyle that is truly independent of who you meet in life. When you’re aro, not only are you disinterested in falling in love—you’re incapable of it. And no person in the world can change that, no matter how much you like them or even love them (nonromantically). An aro person is far more likely to be romance-repulsed, not just happily single, and to express that repulsion when asked about romantic relationships. If we’re being honest as aromantic people, our singlehood is not just an involuntary, default state that we happen to be in because we haven’t met anybody who attracts us; our singlehood is voluntary, intentional, desired. And for many of us, it is permanent.

So what does all this have to do with psychotherapy? There are several different aspects of aromanticism that can come up in therapy and that could be horrifically mishandled:

1. Wanting to stay single long-term
2. Having sex while deliberately maintaining single status
3. Not wanting sex in combination with not wanting to be romantically involved
4. Wanting queerplatonic partnership or friendship
5. Emotional distress about friendships with romantic people breaking down or not matching the aro person’s desire
6. Negative responses from sexual partners (or dating partners) because of the aro’s choice to stay single or their lack of romantic behavior in “dating” relationships
7. Harassment from family, friends, co-workers, employers, etc about one’s single status and when that status will change to “coupled”

Any and all of these issues provoke negative responses in daily life from pretty much all romantic people and romantic culture at large, which is why an aro person might bring them up in therapy in the first place. If the therapist responds to these issues with amatonormative thinking, with singlism, with romance supremacy, with a fundamental misunderstanding of or disagreement with alternative friendship or nonromantic partnership, it will exacerbate the aro’s sense of isolation from the rest of the world, encourage internalized amatonormativity and singlism, and potentially lead to behaving contrary to the aro person’s actual desires, feelings, and personal comfort.

Furthermore, if an aro does have mental illness, viewing their aromanticism or their desire to stay single as a symptom of that illness—a symptom that can and should be cured—can be very hurtful and damaging, especially if the aro walks into the therapist’s office without actually feeling distressed by their aromanticism or their singlehood.

In other words, if an aromantic person goes to their psychotherapist and says,

“Help me figure out how to have a happy life as a single person who doesn’t fall in love. How can I create the kind of nonromantic relationships I desire? How can I make peace with being aromantic and single? Show me how to negotiate with the world in order to be treated with respect and care, as a single person. Help me sort out my feelings about sex and my own sexuality, in the context of being aromantic and comfortably single. Help me create a queerplatonic partnership and make it work. Help me with my feelings of hurt, rejection, abandonment, and/or betrayal on the subject of my friends devaluing my friendship and leaving me behind for romance.”

And the therapist says:

“We need to figure out why you don’t want to be romantically involved with anyone. We have to get you on a path to a healthy, normal romantic relationship. We have to get you to understand that friendship is only supposed to look this particular way, and anything else is unhealthy and abnormal. We have to figure out why you’re not willing to be truly “intimate” with sexual partners. We have to treat your sexual promiscuity as a symptom of psychological problems. You’re not being a good friend or sexual partner to anyone by having the expectations and desires and feelings you’ve got.”

That is a hugely negative experience for the aromantic, and if they actually sit there and listen to that bullshit or continue seeing that therapist, all that’s going to happen is a denial of self and a deepening of internalized arophobia.

Psychotherapists need to leave their singlism and amatonormativity at the door of their office. The literature of psychology should not consider romantic relationships a staple of a sane, stable, healthy, happy person’s life or a way to measure someone’s progress in healing or living with a mental illness.

We can’t have mental health professionals diagnosing patients with disorders and conditions because said patients have a sex life totally divorced from romance or telling their patients that fusing sex with romance is a sign of progress and better health. That’s not any better than telling a patient their lack of desire for sex is a symptom of illness or something be cured and overcome.

And just as importantly, psychotherapists needs to be aware of alternative relationships that don’t fit into the popular, common, mainstream model of human social life and actually come to accept and respect those relationships as valid, healthy, and positive in their own right. We can’t have mental health professionals thinking that nonromantic relationships can only work the way alloromantic people believe they should. We can’t have them trying to twist nonromantic relationships into romance or steering aro patients away from friendships and family relationships that are different than the norm or attempting to redirect an aro person’s feelings and relationship goals for a friend to a romance with someone else.

In other words, we can’t allow the psychological establishment to pathologize and destroy friendship and family relationships that contradict amatonormativity, nor can we allow them to use their positions of power to reinforce amatonormativity in the lives of aro patients. There’s already a lot of narrow-minded, blindly conformist attitude out there, amongst common allo* people, concerning what friendship can and should look like, what family can and should look like, what behaviors and experiences are inherently “romantic,” how people should be sexually active, and what “healthy,” “normal” human relationships look like in general. The last thing we need is the mental health field confirming that ignorant bullshit, only to have the general public point at their confirmation and go, “See? This is how relationships are supposed to work! This is what you’re supposed to want and do and feel! The professionals say so!” We’ve already seen the nasty effects of that sort of thing, in the history of homosexuality being medically pathologized–which goes to show that mental health professionals are absolutely capable of and vulnerable to allowing cultural and personal ideology infect their work, to the detriment of their patients.

A good therapist will listen with an open-mind to what their patient actually thinks and feels regarding relationships and their own sexuality, and that’s certainly a great place to start. But beyond that open-minded acceptance and cooperation in treatment, aromantic people need mental health literature to acknowledge them, their feelings, and their nonromantic relationships in a positive way. That step will go a long way in destroying amatonormativity and singlism and creating an aro-friendly society and culture instead.