Research

The First Aromantic Census

Fellow aros, please participate in this survey I created to collect data on aromantics.

All sexual orientations are welcome.

Please only take the survey if you’re aromantic, meaning you do not experience romantic attraction or a desire for romantic relationships. This survey is not for demiromantics, gray-romantics, quoiromantics, etc. I may make a separate survey for aromantic-spectrum people who aren’t aromantic in the near future and then compare the results of these two surveys.

Please feel free to invite other aros you know to take the survey too!

Thank you!

The Aromantic Census 2015

Relationship Anarchy Wiki Page

Some wonderful person has created a new Wikipedia page for relationship anarchy, and it has some references the old page didn’t have! The article’s pretty short, but I think it’s nicely written. It mentions Andie Nordgren, who could be credited as the person to coin the term, and it mentions a few people and bits of info I was unaware of until now: relationship anarchy was actually the topic of two different Swedish bachelor theses, was discussed in a workshop at OpenCon 2010, and was included in a presentation on nonmonogamies given by Dr. Meg Barker earlier this year at Open University! Dr. Barker’s presentation material, which can be viewed here, is excellent, and I’m going to enjoy chewing on it and formulating a new understanding and new ideas about RA in response.

Thank you, anonymous poster, for putting up this new Wiki page! I’m really pleased to see that relationship anarchy is slowly but surely starting to attract interest and deep thought. Hopefully, this is just the beginning!

Asexual Co-Housing Communities: A New Vision

Bella DePaulo, who I’m a huge fan of for her advocacy of single people and alternatives to traditional, monogamous romantic-sexual couplehood, recently wrote a post over at her Psych Today blog discussing the idea of cooperative co-housing, which I’d never heard of before. Basically, cooperative co-housing communities are places where a group of people live in one neighborhood–usually, one that they built themselves for the specific purpose of living there as a community–with individual housing (or couples/family housing) and at least one “common house” where everybody in the community meets for a meal or other activity at least once a week. This is a way of life that’s about facilitating real community: cooperation, regular interaction between individuals, helping each other out, sharing space and resources, etc. It’s not the same as a commune set-up where everyone’s living in one building and sharing most or all of their possessions, but instead, co-housing is a blend of aloneness and togetherness, personal space and common space.

I absolutely love this concept and feel excited about how the asexual community might use it. One desire I have for my people that’s particularly strong is the desire for more physical spaces that belong exclusively to us: safe spaces for asexuals, places where we can meet each other in person, places where we can be openly ourselves and feel secure, spaces where we can talk about our experiences and identities as asexuals and know that we are being heard, understood, and totally supported. I would love to see an America where there are asexual neighborhoods in all the major cities, not unlike the queer neighborhoods that formed in the late 20th century. I want asexual community centers and other spaces specifically designated for us to gather whenever we want.

Cooperative co-housing is in a different category than such neighborhoods or safe spaces, simply because it’s private instead of public, about people living in the same place rather than meeting up somewhere deliberately because of a common interest or purpose. But it’s something that I know a lot of asexuals, especially aromantic aces, would love–because cooperative co-housing communities provide reliable emotional and physical support and interaction that is totally independent of any community member’s martial status.

Residential communities throughout the U.S. are all built for the isolated nuclear family, married couple, or single person. I’m sure that some people reach out to their neighbors, wanting personal friendship or to create community within their neighborhood or building, but that isn’t the norm. I don’t know if it ever was. I do know that my whole life, growing up in a typical suburban setting within a huge metropolitan city, I barely knew any of my neighbors. My parents sure as hell weren’t friends with any of them and knew maybe the people living in the nearest homes but no one else on the street or the area. Americans are used to living alongside each other without actually connecting. We share streets and apartment buildings, but we don’t care about each other. We don’t get to know each other. We’re not involved in each other’s lives.

Asexuals, particularly the ones who want to stay celibate for life or the aromantics who don’t want to try conventional dating/romantic relationships, are frequently concerned that not only will they have to go through life without any kind of an intimate partner–without someone to meet their emotional and physical needs, beyond common friendship–but that they will also have to live a very lonely lifestyle because of the way sexual society organizes life and relationships around the Couple Relationship. Friendships are weak, at best, in adulthood. Sexual society doesn’t value friendship at all. Biological relatives scatter and aren’t much more reliable, emotionally or physically, than unrelated friends. (You may not even like any of your relatives anyway.) Everybody gets sucked into their one romantic-sexual relationship (married or unmarried, children or no children) and shoves every other relationship they’ve got onto the farthest back burner, only to be attended to on national holidays, birthdays, weddings, funerals, and crises.

Community–its significance and its potential–has been something on the asexual radar since David Jay started AVEN in the early 2000s. He used to talk a lot about intimacy through a community model, vs. the typical intimacy through one romantic/sexual relationship at a time model. There are still plenty of aces, romantic and aromantic, who really value the idea of community (whether its being part of an asexual community or just a community in general), and there are some who don’t even want a typical romantic, monogamous partnership or just one nonromantic partnership. Some aces want a group of relationships that serve their intimacy needs. Some aces don’t want to live with a partner but they do want to live next to a partner or in the same neighborhood as their important people. They want more personal space and solitude than a traditional romantic partnership allows, but they want way more intimacy, connection, love, and care than common friendship offers.

Which is why I got so excited when I read about cooperative co-housing communities. I’m excited about the possibility of asexual co-housing communities forming and giving aces, not just a room once a week or once a month to feel safe and open, but an entire neighborhood that doubles as a safe space. I’m excited about the possibility of asexual co-housing communities offering aromantic aces an easier alternative to seeking committed nonromantic/nonsexual relationships. I’m excited about the possibility of asexual co-housing communities forming through a group of strangers and unintentionally resulting in new, loving, intimate relationships between members that work beautifully as romantic asexual relationships or nonromantic asexual relationships.

And I also love the idea because I think that I would passionately love living in a co-housing community with most or all of the members of my own relationship anarchist family. The combination of solitude and companionship, individual space and common space, privacy and connection with others rings all of my bells and feels like a perfect, healthy lifestyle on every level. I want to live a very mobile life and I have no problem at all traveling back and forth between various locations all over the country to carry on intimate relationships in each of those places, so it isn’t an aversion to travel and part-time homes and partially long-distance relationships that make me love the co-housing community idea. I like the idea of gathering my RA family in one place and settling down there because I’m crazy about the idea of an environment that feels saturated with love and friendship, where there’s always somebody around who you like and love and can connect with for anything, where there are so many loving friendships in one place that you feel like you’re in the most secure, supportive, caring, loving place on earth whenever you’re home.

That’s the core reason I want an RA family instead of just one “partner.” I don’t need every person in my family to have a personal friendship with every other member; I don’t even need them to meet each other, if I form each individual relationship separately from the others. But if I could have even just part of my family living in the same community, harmoniously and cooperatively, that would feel pretty magical.

One of the many reasons I love being asexual so much is because our community is the source of all these ideas and possibilities for doing love and relationships (all of them, not just romantic) in ways totally different than sexual society, and while there are plenty of romantic asexuals looking for a lifestyle not any different than the average romantic-sexual person’s (one romantic monogamous relationship very different from and superior to all the other nonromantic relationships in one’s life), there are also a lot of aces who want something different. Having all the companionship and intimacy and touch and affection and support and care that sexual society limits to romantic-sexual relationships, through relationships that are not romantic OR sexual, or through more than one special relationship (romantic or otherwise) at a time is not only radical but can be so beneficial to everyone involved. Getting our emotional, physical, and psychological needs met through loving connections that don’t ride the Relationship Escalator, that don’t even have to function or be defined as “romantic,” that don’t depend on “monogamy” and therefore don’t play by monogamy’s rules, is something that many aces want and can create.

We CAN create these relationships, these communities that we’re looking for. It doesn’t matter how different they are from the norm. It doesn’t matter if a particular relationship or community or lifestyle has never been done before. (Although, I doubt you can say that of anything.) It doesn’t matter if the number of people alive today who are open and willing and enthusiastic about these alternative relationship styles are 1000 worldwide or 100, out of 7+ billion. We–individuals with free will and imagination and desire–have the power to create anything we want. We have the power to create new ways of living. We have the power to ask for what we want in relationships and to choose not to settle for anything else. Even if it’s never been done before, we can do it. We can be where it starts.

Stay true to your vision and your heart’s desire, aces. If you want a community, not one partnership, then embrace that for yourself. If you want a long-term partnership but you don’t want cohabitation to be a part of that, embrace that desire. If you want a group of committed relationships, all of them or some of them nonromantic, embrace and own that idea.

Anything is possible. We deserve to have what we want, and we don’t have to wait for the rest of the world’s approval, before we start building the relationships and communities and spaces we’re looking for.

For more information on co-housing communities, please visit the American Cohousing Association’s website.

HuffPo: Why Some Straight Men are Romantically or Sexually Attracted to Other Men

The Huffington Post just published an article about straight men who sometimes have sex with other men and how it could be that they identify/are straight yet engage in homosexual activity. On the list of reasons is “sexual attraction toward men but romantic attraction toward women,” which I am thrilled about! These men are heteromantic homosexuals.

The only thing I wish was different about the article is the inclusion of men who are sexually attracted to women but romantically attracted to men: homoromantic heterosexuals or biromantic heterosexuals. It would’ve been particularly good if the author had talked a little bit about that experience of having romantic feelings for someone you don’t want to have sex with and the kind of relationship that might form as a result of that: a nonsexual romantic relationship, a romantic friendship, a partially nonsexual polyamorous configuration, etc.

Nevertheless, I’m happy that this sort of complexity in human sexuality is getting some visibility–regardless of how readers respond.

Sexual Dysfunction in the DSM-5 and Asexuality

First, I want to point everyone in the direction of the official DSM-5 website, where the various sexual dysfunctions are listed: go here. As you can see, listed there are Sexual Interest/Arousal Disorder in Women, Male Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder, and Other Specified Sexual Dysfunction. Those are the ones relevant to asexuals particularly. The others all have to do with more obviously physical/medical issues: erectile dysfunction, early/late ejaculation, genito-pelvic pain during penetration, substance-induced sexual dysfunction, sexual dysfunction related to a known medical issue, etc. I have read the descriptions of MHSDD and SIAD in Women and the “Other” and yes, one of the listed symptoms under each is, “causes clinically significant distress or impairment.”

But here’s the problem. First of all, the world is full of assholes, and some of those assholes are therapists. I can’t even count the number of times I’ve heard from asexuals, male and female and otherwise, who came out to a therapist only to have their identity dismissed, questioned, pathologized, etc. Having these new categories in the DSM? Isn’t going to make those situations any better. Those asshole, ignorant therapists who have never heard of asexuality or who simply don’t take it seriously do not need an official manual circulated throughout their professional community that they can point at and say, “Oh, look, it says right there that if you don’t want to fuck or if you don’t have a libido or if you don’t masturbate or if you don’t get aroused, there is something medically or psychologically wrong with you.” If homosexuality was still listed as a mental disorder or a medical disorder in any sort of major medical text, the queer community would be up in arms about that, and they’d have a right to be. I understand that there are legitimate cases where lack of interest in sex, loss of libido, lack of arousal response, etc are indeed problematic and can be treated and cured, but the asexual community doesn’t have the advantage of being a widely known, widely accepted (as real, not necessarily good) demographic, which means that our orientation and our experiences linked to that orientation can too easily get lost in the sexual majority’s treatment of sexual dysfunction. They’re already inclined to treat asexuality, willful celibacy, sex-aversion, lack of libido, lack of arousal responses, etc as innately pathological without actual medical support for that opinion, just because of our cultural consciousness about sex.

Jesus Christ, some sexual people watched that episode of House, for fuck’s sake, and took it seriously! “Oh, a medical doctor on a TV show said that asexuality is bullshit, so that means it is!” People are idiots. And they’re idiots who are narrow-minded about sex and sexuality and relationships and love and intimacy right out of the gate. Medical doctors and psychologists and psychiatrists who believe that asexuality is bullshit and celibacy is wrong, etc—of which there are many because being a medical professional does not make you infallible or open-minded or anything other than a medical professional, really—only serve to confirm the public’s attitudes about sex and intimacy, etc.

Second of all, being an asexual in this world is fucking hard. And for many, if not most of us, we will inevitably go through a stage or periodic phases, where we DO feel distress about being asexual. Especially those of us who are celibate, sex-aversive, etc. We feel distress because we’re invisible, misunderstood, rejected, isolated from a physical community, have no media representation validating our identities and experiences, and because many of us want to have intimate, loving relationships with other people but can’t or don’t because we’re surrounded by sexual people who have no concept of how to relate to other humans beings in the ways we want to relate. Many of us suffer a lot of emotional pain over the possibility that we will always be alone and unloved and unattached, unless we agree to fuck, and those of us who are sex-aversive or repulsed either don’t want to do that or can’t do that. And that relationship fuckery is a legitimate reason for emotional and psychic pain! Human beings are social creatures. We have built-in intimacy needs. Without love and care and affection, we literally die.

So let’s say you’re a celibate asexual who never wants to have sex and you go to your therapist and you say, “I’m really depressed because I want to be loved but I’m an asexual and I can’t get romantically involved with sexual people, without fucking them, and I can’t form a primary platonic relationship with any of them either because they don’t even understand that concept or accept it and I don’t know any other asexuals and I don’t know how to meet other asexuals in real life, so I feel intensely alone and lonely and I’m afraid I’ll spend the rest of my life this way.”

And your therapist, who’s ignorant or an asshole, says, “Let’s explore why sex is a problem for you because if you can get over that, then you can be normal and have normal romantic-sexual primary relationships and live happily ever after just like the rest of us. Oh, look, the DSM says this is your problem.”

How many therapists are going to question the entire cultural/sociological system of sex supremacy and compulsory sexuality and romance supremacy and the view that sex and romance are innately linked? How many therapists are going to see that the problem isn’t the asexual person’s orientation but the rest of the world’s treatment of everything that orientation implies?

A queer person goes to a therapist and expresses deep psychological suffering over their queer identity, the therapist is quite likely to recognize that the reason this person’s in pain is not because being queer is an innately painful thing but because being queer in a homophobic, heterosexist society is a painful thing. If society were totally cool with queerness on every level—socially, legally, culturally, religiously, etc—how many queer people would you have in therapy, being depressed and suicidal over their sexuality? Probably not that many. And all of that is immediately clear to us. We know homosexuality and bisexuality and transgender identity are not mental illnesses. (Yeah, a lot of homophobic/transphobic people in America would say otherwise, but that’s the point: it’s their own prejudices, not the identities themselves, that are the problem).

But with asexuality? With celibacy? With the idea that romance can be nonsexual and nonromantic love can be primary? How many sexual people get that? How many sexual people have even HEARD of those concepts? A fucking negligible percentage.

This culture is so intensely sex supremacist (and romance supremacist) that no matter where you go and no matter who you talk to, no matter what their backgrounds are—conservative, liberal, gay, straight, male, female, religious, atheist, whatever—the likeliest reaction an asexual (especially a sex-aversive asexual who wants primary nonsexual love and intimacy) will get is something along the lines of, “That’s not normal, that’s not right, that’s unnatural, that’s caused by some separate issue, sex is the greatest and most important thing in the history of existence, why don’t you see that, what’s wrong with you?”

Who wouldn’t feel like shit if that’s what they constantly had to hear about themselves?

And therapy isn’t going to fix that. There is no immediate solution to that. There’s no way to magically snap our fingers and make a loving, compatible partner appear, there’s no way to snap our fingers and change the way our entire society functions and thinks, there’s also not a way to instantly transform ourselves into romantic-sexual people with normative ideas about relationships. So basically, there is justification for a celibate asexual person to feel hopeless and depressed. Our pain is not an overreaction. We are not exaggerating the seriousness of our circumstances. Our pain does not come from chemical imbalances in the brain or an inability to self-soothe or whatever. It comes from being in a really shitty situation, much of which we have no control over.

It’s not a matter of a therapist or anyone else “helping” to make the situation better, to actually change the circumstances or suggest ways for the asexual to change them. All anyone can do is help the celibate asexual make as much peace with the way things are as they can and instill some sense of hope that maybe one day, that individual will find at least one other person who can relate to them in a satisfying way. And they can’t make promises.

And like I said, therapists are people too. They have normative upbringings and normative friends and normative families and normative sexual experiences. They go see mainstream movies and watch mainstream TV and read mainstream books and listen to mainstream music, all of which is saturated with sex and sexual romance and the supremacy of those things. Are they supposed to be professional and impersonal in session with a patient? Yes. But they aren’t infallible. They can’t just leave all of their personal opinions and experiences of humanity at the door of their office and approach each patient with total neutrality and a blank mind.

I haven’t had extensive experience with psychotherapy, but what I’ve had…. I once spoke to the head of health services at my college, when I was a freshman and deeply depressed and suicidal, and tried to explain being asexual and why I was in so much pain over the future of my friendships and my own future in terms of relationships, and I guess she thought she was being nice and sweet but in retrospect, she absolutely did not get it and was totally condescending to me. Following that, I had a therapist I saw on campus for a while who I really liked and who knew about my identity and who I talked to as I was going through relationship angst and bullshit, and he never once made a negative comment about my asexuality or my celibacy or my views of relationships….. But do I know for sure that he was as accepting as he seemed? No. I don’t know. Maybe he was sitting there the whole time thinking, “What the hell is wrong with this girl?” or “She’s just 18, she’ll have sex eventually and find out it’s great and live happily ever after in Normative Relationship Land.” I can never know what he was really thinking. If he was thinking dismissive thoughts, I appreciate that he kept them to himself, but…. My point is, I would never see a therapist again even if I was having psychological distress because I don’t trust them—they being sexual—and I don’t need my therapist of all people making me feel as if there’s something wrong with me and my relationship desires. No, thanks. If I have shit to deal with, I’ll deal with it on my own.