relationships

Relationship Anarchy is Not About Sex or Polyamory

Some months ago, blogger Rotten Zucchinis published an excellent series of posts about relationship anarchy, and I’ve been meaning to write a response. I was excited to read the whole series because I admire RZ as a writer and thinker and because there’s not enough good content on relationship anarchy.

When I wrote “Relationship Anarchy Basics” three years ago, I did it largely from an aromantic asexual perspective. I spent a lot of words illustrating how and why asexuals and aromantics could use relationship anarchy to experience love, intimacy, and commitment while not having sex or not engaging in romantic relationships. I tried my best to communicate that relationship anarchy could actually be a way that people who aren’t asexual or aromantic could center nonsexual and/or nonromantic relationships in their social life or explore alternative relationships with atypical combinations of sex, celibacy, touch, emotional intensity, commitment, attraction and lack thereof. I wanted to demonstrate that relationship anarchy provides the opportunity to experience more love, affection, companionship, and touch by removing the restrictions that amatonormativity and relationship hierarchy place on them, limiting those things to one (or even multiple) romantic/sexual relationships.

So imagine how hard I rolled my eyes when I discovered that there are straight men out there calling themselves “relationship anarchists” in order to smoothly get away with casual sex. I mean, really? Really? You think fucking somebody you’ve known for less than 24 total hours who you met on a hookup app makes you a “relationship anarchist”? Or that you can make that sexual encounter sound progressive and radical by invoking the “relationship anarchist” label? Please.

I guess nothing about fuckboys or men in general should surprise me, but I honestly never imagined relationship anarchy being used as an excuse or a trendy framing of casual sex when I wrote my original post on the subject. I never imagined that somewhere on this earth, a real live male would look into someone’s eyes and earnestly say that being a relationship anarchist means “having sex with multiple people and not labeling those contacts as [romantic] relationships.” And I don’t mean to have such an inflated sense of my own influence that I take credit for this asshole’s self-identification as a relationship anarchist—he may not have any idea that my blog exists and heard about RA from some other source—but because my post has been shared and linked as many times as it has, I do feel a bit of secondhand embarrassment, reading what is clearly a moment of misappropriating relationship anarchy for the purpose of keeping casual sex casual.

Let me be clear: the problem is not two adults enthusiastically having sex, without any interest in getting to know each other further. The problem is not that men everywhere want to fuck people without commitment, without love, without friendship, without meeting any other expectations or assuming any responsibility. It’s not necessarily bad or wrong to include casual sex as a possibility in relationship anarchy; I think that at least in theory, a person who practices politically grounded RA can have sex outside of romantic relationships that looks and feels and functions differently than most of the casual sex that happens in the world.

The problem here is that people, especially straight men, are creating a false impression of what relationship anarchy is and what it means by misusing the term because they think it sounds cool or “progressive” or whatever. It’s essentially the same problem I see with nonhierarchical polyamorists calling what they do “relationship anarchy” and themselves “relationship anarchists.” Relationship anarchy is not just a shiny, new label that people get to use when they want to sound different or special or better than everyone else. It’s certainly not a label that fuckboys get to use when they want to make themselves sound enlightened for having casual sex or get away with having casual sex that they don’t have to negotiate emotionally with their sexual partners.

If you want to have casual sex, fine. If you don’t want to be romantically involved with anyone, fine. If you’re polyamorous, fine. But the term “relationship anarchy” is not here for you because it’s not just a label. It’s not a fucking identity. It is a set of principles that informs the structure of a person’s relationships and how they experience emotional connection, affection, and commitment with people they care about. Originally, it was the logical result of political anarchists applying their politics to their relationships. (Notice where Andie Nordgren’s RA Manifesto is hosted: theanarchistlibrary.org.) Relationship anarchy doesn’t have to include sex at all, and sometimes it doesn’t. It doesn’t have to include romance at all, and sometimes it doesn’t. What it does have to include, as a practice that is legitimately different from polyamory and other forms of consensual nonmonogamy, is a politics that actively resists relationship hierarchy as a coercive structure reflective of our culture’s value system. That value system includes amatonormativity, compulsory sexuality, heteronormativity, the sexualization and romanticization of touch/affection/emotional connection (for the purpose of reinforcing hetero-patriarchy via homophobia and on the basis of the sexualized inequality between males and females), individualism of the neoliberal sensibility, and above all, capitalism.

My original post on relationship anarchy got pretty popular for some reason, and I haven’t written a whole lot about the subject since that post. Apart from my post calling out polyamorists who erroneously call themselves RAs, I’ve pretty much only alluded to relationship anarchy in passing on this blog. I’m certainly not the only person who has written about it and I’m not an authority on the lifestyle, if anyone can be such a thing. My primary motivation in writing “Relationship Anarchy Basics” was to flesh out, more for myself than anyone reading, what relationship anarchy is in a structural sense, how it differs from polyamory and monogamy, and how it can work for people who don’t do sex or romance. Andie Nordgren’s pamphlet inspired me and got me really thinking about how intentionally single, celibate people could pursue relationships differently than the typical “single without any intimate or committed relationships and a bunch of superficial ‘friendships’” model.

What I haven’t written much about is the ethos of relationship anarchy, the philosophy behind it that must ultimately be at the basis of a person’s daily life if they’re going to attempt RA. I think that Rotten Z did a great job at tackling some of that ethos and the principles that should ideally drive relationship anarchy in their series of posts, and I recommend them to anyone who’s serious about practicing a relationship anarchy that goes deeper than unconscious polyamory.

It does concern me that people out there are doing polyamory or pseudo-“relationship anarchy” without spending any significant time or energy critically thinking about principles, ethics, personal politics, etc. Then again, I can say the same about the conventional monogamists. Most people, whatever their lifestyle, don’t think about their relationships beyond the interpersonal level. They don’t contextualize the sex and romance and friendships they have into the big picture of their national culture and economy, their society’s politics, etc. They don’t even think about their own personal motives and principles, when it comes to their lifestyle choices. They never get past the apolitical, purely individual desire-and-feelings level. They stop at “I want this because it’ll make me happy” and don’t even interrogate why they believe monogamy or polyamory or casual sex or a traditional marriage is the source of happiness and what it means to live your life serving those desires.

I deeply appreciate the information RZ provided on anarchism and relationship anarchy’s natural roots in anarchism. I don’t think you have to be a full-blown political anarchist in order to be a relationship anarchist (I may be wrong), but I do believe it’s worth learning about anarchism and its principles, for the purpose of approaching relationship anarchy with that information in your consciousness. I myself haven’t yet done the extensive reading I want to do on anarchism, but even back when I wrote “Relationship Anarchy Basics,” I had a crude understanding of the politics behind RA, if only because I knew about the political basis of everything that is not RA. Now, I understand even better, despite not being educated on anarchism, because I have a greater grasp on how monogamy (and polyamory) is shaped by the capitalist hetero-patriarchy we all live in. For that matter, I now have a better understanding of how friendship, and friendship in opposition to romance, is shaped by the capitalist hetero-patriarchy.

Real relationship anarchy is political. There’s just no way around it. How could it be otherwise, when it has roots in political anarchism? Relationship anarchy is not about getting your dick wet and looking cool while you do it. It’s not about sounding hipper than all the other polyamorists. You can do polyamory without any political consciousness whatsoever, and you can definitely do monogamy without it. You can be mono or poly in service of the capitalist hetero-patriarchy. Most people are. But you can’t do relationship anarchy without some awareness of the socio-political context you’re operating in and how you’re attempting to go against that grain out of a genuine belief in certain concrete principles. Those concrete principles are nothing so basic and shallow as “freedom” (to fuck) or “honesty.” They’re the kind of political principles that you can base an effective social movement on: a movement that offers an alternative to the capitalist hetero-patriarchy’s commodification of bodies, sex, and love; to the sabotage of female solidarity in friendship and romantic love; to neoliberal capitalism’s goal of the isolated couple and nuclear family; to the homophobia and toxic gender crap that prevents even nonsexual/nonromantic connection and intimacy between members of the same sex.

According to Rotten Z, if we base relationship anarchy on political anarchism’s principles, then relationship anarchy is fundamentally about:

The rejection of all interpersonal coercion, including state intervention
Community
Mutual aid
Commitments made as communication, not as contracts

Looking at that list, it dawned on me that relationship anarchy resonates with me so much because its principles amount to a friendship ethic. The word “friendship” is widely used as a broad, vague, often meaningless term, but to me, friendship as this deep, intimate, important, positive bond between humans is described really well by the above set of principles. Friendship leans away from interpersonal coercion by default and can’t survive under the burden of it for long. Mutual aid and cooperation are in friendship’s very nature; you could even define friendship by those qualities: helping and supporting each other out of desire and not duty. And when friendship is committed, that commitment is done in a spirit of communication, not drawn up as a contract, which what marriage is: a legal contract binding romantic partners.

I love how the blogger queeranarchism defined relationship anarchy:

“Relationship anarchism then, to me, means community. A community of two or of many. A community that rejects the ‘rules’ of relationships, of enforced heterosexuality, enforced monogamy, of partners being entitled to sex, of marriage, of childcare being a two-person job and of the idea that we need a romantic or sexual relationship to be complete. A community that instead chooses care, cooperation, equality, acknowledgement that we are more than our relationship and that we all have different needs. And in that community, we make the rules that suit us, and end them when they no longer suit our community.

By that definition, an anarchist relationship is first and foremost one of cooperation and setting our own rules. By that definition, it is not self-serving but always mutually beneficial.”

I think that’s something I was trying to express in “Relationship Anarchy Basics” but couldn’t quite put my finger on at the time: relationship anarchy is fundamentally about community, as much as monogamous and polyamorous lifestyles are fundamentally about the couple. That doesn’t mean couples can’t exist in relationship anarchy, but it does mean that the focus of a relationship anarchist’s life and emotional energy is not a couple relationship by default, the way it is for monogamists and polyamorists. It also means that two relationship anarchists having a romantic relationship are most likely not doing it the same way most non-anarchist people do couplehood, even if the RA couple is sexually monogamous in the moment. Being a relationship anarchist doesn’t mean you have to fuck more than one person at a time, because relationship anarchy is not about sexual nonmonogamy, even though it is usually inclusive of sexual nonmonogamy. Relationship anarchy is not polyamory sans the obvious hierarchy of romantic partners. It’s about doing relationships with community-centric values, not couple-centric values. Above all, it’s about relating to other human beings without coercive authority in play and without hierarchy in your group of relationships or in any relationship itself.

I fucking cringe when I read about polyamorous people defining “relationship anarchy” using nonhierarchal polyamory’s terms, just as I cringe when I hear stories of men pulling the RA card on their casual sexcapades. Not just because of how unbelievably inaccurate, apolitical, and ignorant it is but because in both cases, “relationship anarchy” is falsely used to describe the kind of romance supremacist, friendship-excluding, sex-centric lifestyles that are diametrically opposed to authentic relationship anarchy.

The capitalist, heteronormative, patriarchal state promotes relationship hierarchies based on romance supremacy and amatonormativity. It endorses treating sex like a product, protects heterosexual men in their consumption of female bodies as sexual objects, promotes the buying and selling of women’s sexualized bodies. The capitalist heteronormative patriarchal state WANTS you to invest all of your free time, energy, resources, and emotion into romantic couplehood, into marriage, into sex. It WANTS you to devalue friendship, to stay isolated from everyone who isn’t your romantic partner, to be a self-interested individual with no ties or commitments to anyone but your spouse. Why? Because friendship could lead to community and community could lead to collective political action, which could turn into revolution. And because friendship and community are almost impossible to commodify and harness for the purpose of feeding into the capitalist economy and creating bigger profits for the wealthy elite. Sex and romance make rich people money all day every day. They sell it to you every waking moment. They can’t use friendship and community to sell you shit. They can’t turn friendship and community into products. If they could, they would’ve spent the last century doing so, instead of teaching the public that friendship is worthless and money is more important than community.

So don’t tell me that you’re entitled to call your polyamory or your casual sex “relationship anarchy,” as you conduct your social life with anti-anarchism principles and the same amatonormativity that all the coupled up monogamists preach and believe in. Don’t tell me you’re a “relationship anarchist” when you don’t give a fuck about friendship or community or political resistance, just sex and romance and your freedom to be nonmonogamous.

Relationship anarchy is not a cover for fuckboys. And it is not nonhierarchical polyamory.

Recommended Reading: Unquiet Pirate’s “Relationship Anarchy is Not Post-Polyamory“

Identity vs. Reality

So it has occurred to me, in lieu of recent conclusions that I’ve drawn about sexuality and identity, that when it comes to creating the kind of relationships I want most, the only thing that matters is personal compatibility, and personal compatibility has nothing to do with identity. Identity is not a reliable or comprehensive indicator of a person’s feelings, desires, or behaviors.

On the one hand, there are people who call themselves asexual and aromantic who are NOT compatible with me in the categories of sexuality because they want sex or they want romantic relationships or they feel sexual and romantic feelings. In my mind, they are not asexual or aromantic at all, but they identify as such.

On the other hand, there are people who DON’T call themselves asexual or aromantic, who identify as straight or gay or bi or maybe nothing at all, but who are intentionally, permanently single and/or celibate and who are open to the kind of friendship I’m looking for.

If I base my relationship-forming decisions on identity alone, I’ll find myself disappointed by some self-professed aromantic asexuals. I’m already not interested or compatible with romantic aces, demiromantic aces, and a lot of gray-romantic aces, despite the fact that we all call ourselves asexual. I know that there are now some self-identified aromantic asexuals who want to date or who want a romantic relationship or who don’t want any kind of intimate friendship at all. That’s not news to me.

On the other hand, what is new to me is the idea that there are some people out there who don’t identify as aromantic (or asexual) but who have feelings, behaviors, and desires that are lined up with my own. There are people who have never heard of asexuality or aromanticism, but who have no interest or inclination to be sexual or romantically involved. There are people who may technically experience sexual desire or romantic attraction, but who don’t care about having sex or dating, who actually prefer not to have sex or who strongly prefer being single. There are people who call themselves straight, gay, or bi who actually have feelings or desires or relationship capabilities that aren’t described by their identity, and the only way one would find out about those feelings, desires, and capabilities is getting to know the person well.

I think it’s still fair and rational to assume that most people are sexual and romantic to some degree, and most people who feel sexual desire and romantic attraction will engage in sex and romance and ultimately want a traditional romantic-sexual relationship at the center of their lives. It appears that most romantic-sexual people harbor beliefs and attitudes that make them fundamentally incompatible with me: like friendship being this superficial, meaningless association or friendship being inferior to romance or physical intimacy being innately romantic and/or sexual.

But there is more diversity in the non-aromantic, non-asexual population than I have previously acknowledged (more than a lot of asexuals acknowledge, for sure). And given that there are plenty of asexuals, aromantics, demis, and grays who are no different than the average allo* person, it’s not like there’s a significantly greater chance of finding the kind of friendship I want in the asexual or aromantic populations than in the allo* population.

In my personal life, I know or have heard about the following people:

A self-identified straight woman who is highly sexual, who is open to sexually experimenting with other women, who has a pattern of feeling more attached and emotional in nonsexual friendships than in sexual relationships, who can’t tell the difference between “romantic relationships” and “friendship” beyond the sexual activity, who doesn’t want to get married, who is not happy without at least one very intimate friendship, who is not willing to make a sexual partner more important than her close friends, who will kiss and cuddle with other women, who strongly prefers living in an intentional community and who would never be happy or satisfied with only a sexual partner as a substitute for that community
A lesbian who is permanently celibate and single because of her faith and who is in a committed companionate friendship with an aromantic asexual woman
A straight woman who has very little, if any, interest or willingness to have sex and who is not driven to date or pursue romantic relationships actively at this time. Ideally, she would have emotionally close, physically affectionate friendships with people besides a romantic partner. She dated someone for six years and that relationship was completely nonsexual because she wanted it to be.
A gay man who will make out heavily with a woman he really likes as a person, even though he’s not interested in having sex with her (or any woman)
A straight man who spent over a decade living with his closest female friend; their friendship never involved any sexual activity
A straight woman who could live without sex for the rest of her life and was open to being in a nonsexual/nonromantic partnership with a female friend, if that opportunity presented itself before a heterosexual relationship did
A woman who doesn’t identify as anything, who is not interested in sex, who is in a long-term romantic (nonsexual) relationship with a man but who could also be happy in a nonsexual partnership with a female friend
A straight man who will cuddle with his female friend, who he doesn’t want to fuck or date
Numerous older married couples who no longer have sex but who are still together by choice and relatively content. The people in these couples don’t identify as asexual and did experience sexual desire in the past but no longer care to have sex.
A gay man and an asexual woman who were married for several years and had a nonsexual relationship

And I am not a highly social person with a big network of friends and acquaintances. I’m sure it’s possible that I attract people with unusual social behavior into my life more than most, but that doesn’t change the fact that for someone who’s young with a small social network, I’ve run into enough romantic-sexual people who deviate from the standard blueprint of sexuality and relationships that I have no choice but to recognize that you don’t have to be an aromantic asexual to deviate from that blueprint. You don’t have to call yourself asexual to dislike sex or to feel indifferent about it. You don’t have to call yourself aromantic to prefer being single long-term or to be incapable of feeling romantic attraction, however you define it. Someone who truly does not experience sexual attraction or romantic attraction may certainly be more likely to have or want relationships that are outside the norm, compared to someone who does experience sexual and romantic attraction, but that doesn’t mean all the people who do experience romantic and/or sexual attraction feel it to the same degree, are equally driven by romantic/sexual desire, or depend on sex and romantic relationships for their happiness.

So like I said in my post “Meaningless Identity,” if you call yourself “asexual” or “aromantic,” that doesn’t tell me anything about what kind of feelings, desires, and relationships you have. It doesn’t tell me that you’re completely uninterested in sex and romance or that you’re looking for nonsexual and/or nonromantic relationships exclusively.

The flipside of that is, if you call yourself straight or gay or bisexual, that doesn’t tell me anything about the feelings, desires, and relationships you have or want to have or are capable of having either. All it tells me is that you probably experience romantic and/or sexual attraction, and if you do, you’re most likely to feel that attraction to people of the opposite sex, same sex, or both sexes.

But as for your actual lifestyle, the way you form relationships, what you value in your social life, how much or how little you enjoy partnered sex, whether your prefer being single or coupled, how physically affectionate you are with friends, what kind of physical and emotional acts you view as strictly romantic or sexual and which ones you see as flexible, what your ideal social life looks like, etc, I have no way of knowing any of that information unless and until you talk to me about it. Statistically, are you most likely to fit a certain profile based on the fact that a large majority of humans do? Sure. And I can assume that most people I come into contact with do fit that common profile, with a high level of accuracy. I just can’t know that every single person matches the common profile of the identity group they place themselves in.

Maybe this is really obvious to a lot of allo* people out there, especially older adults who are not involved with the identity craze that’s so popular online and in the physical world amongst millenials, but it took me a really long time to get here. It took me a long time not only because there is a dominant social profile that many, if not most, people have with regards to sex and relationships, but also because of the dialogue that goes on in the asexual community and the portrayal of sex and romance in popular media. I don’t have to actually talk to the asexual or aromantic communities online to know that most members are going to keep hanging onto their identities and their generalized views of allo* people until they’re cold in the ground, no matter what anyone says. I’m only arriving at this new perspective of allo* folks because I’ve been going through major shifts in my political and social consciousness in the last few months, and I have these personal experiences of self-identified allo* people who don’t fit the rigid and highly specific profile that so many asexuals and some aromantics believe describes allos*. I’ve become increasingly disillusioned with the asexual identity, the concept of the asexual spectrum, and even the aromantic identity and spectrum, and that contributed to this epiphany that sexual identity fails to describe allo* people categorically as much as it now fails to describe asexuals and aromantics categorically.

I’m just really fucking fed up with identity culture, period. And I have to give you this example to illustrate why because it’s relevant to my realization about allo* people: there are a lot of asexuals and aromantics (and demis and grays) who would attempt to tell someone who doesn’t identify as asexual or aromantic that they are in fact asexual or aromantic (or demi or gray) because that person doesn’t like sex or doesn’t want to date or hasn’t fallen in love before or who doesn’t find sex that exciting and doesn’t care about doing it, etc. These aces and aros and demis and grays don’t mean any harm, they’re just trying to be helpful, but the fact is that they have an idea in their minds about who allo* people are, which they then define themselves against as ace, aro, demi, or gray people. So anyone who doesn’t fit that idea of an allo* person that the ace and aro communities believe in must be something other than alloromantic or allosexual, even if they choose to identify as straight or gay or bi without any further qualification. And because the asexual and aromantic identities have become so vague and broad and inclusive of pretty much every fucking kind of sexual and romantic desire and behavior pattern, the definition of allosexual and alloromantic needs to be highly specific, so that all these people who want to identify as asexual or aromantic or demi- or gray- can do so and be able to defend themselves when somebody says their desires, feelings, and behaviors aren’t consistent with their identity.

In other words, asexuals, aromantics, demis, and grays often think: “This person does not need sex on a regular basis, doesn’t think that sex is the greatest thing ever, or doesn’t like sex at all, so therefore, they must not be allosexual. This person has never fallen in love or strongly prefers being single or doesn’t feel romantic attraction the way we’ve defined it, so they must not be alloromantic.”

Instead, it makes a whole lot more sense to say, “This person doesn’t need sex all the time, doesn’t like sex, or doesn’t have sex; therefore, not all allosexual people need, have, or like sex. This person doesn’t like romantic relationships, has never been in love, or is not looking for a romantic partner; therefore, not all alloromantic people want, like, or enter into romantic relationships.”

Taking the second approach eliminates the need to create an infinite number of labels for every fucking possible attraction pattern and set of desires, and it also gives a much more realistic portrayal of the billions of people around the world who don’t identify as asexual or aromantic and never will. It’s not fair or accurate to say that all allo* people on earth have the same level of sexual interest, the same patterns of sexual activity, the same patterns of romantic attraction, the same appetite for sex, the same need or desire for romantic relationships, etc. Convincing people to identify as asexual, aromantic, demi-, or gray-, based on their attraction patterns or desires, isn’t the point. The point is that people don’t have to identify a certain way to have the feelings, desires, and behaviors that they have. The point is that there’s a whole lot more diversity to human sexuality and relationships in the non-asexual, non-aromantic population than most people and certainly most asexuals and aromantics want to acknowledge. And that diversity is ALLOWED within the category of “alloromantic allosexual.”

So, fuck identity. I don’t care what you call yourself. When it comes to my personal relationships, all I care about is that we’re on the same page. I want a female companion who is permanently single and celibate, like I am. I want my closest friends to be people who are intentionally, happily single and who value friendship and nonromantic love as much as I do. I want my closest friends to be people who I can be emotionally and physically intimate with, who share in that intimacy because they love me as their friend, not because of romantic or sexual desires. Compatibility is the only thing that matters. A person’s actual desires, feelings, and behaviors are what matter. Not their label.

To All the Romantics Who Ridicule “Queerplatonic”: A Rant

I’m about 2000% done with the bullshit I’m about to go in on, so strap in for the ride or find the nearest exit.

Ever since aromantic asexuals started using the term “queerplatonic” in public spaces, allos* have pushed against it, criticizing the term as both offensive and unnecessary. Usually, it’s LGBTQ allos* (the * denotes people who are both alloromantic and allosexual) who are bitching and moaning about how no one on the planet can use the word “queer” in any way, shape, or form unless they experience same-sex attraction or they’re trans, but sometimes, it’s allos* ridiculing the idea of queerplatonic relationships as something that people use to make friendship sound unique, different, or special.

Someone mentions queerplatonic relationships and the haters go,

“You mean FRIENDSHIP?!!!11!!? I ThInK yoU meAN FrieDNshiP!!!”

And I’m fucking done watching them pull that smug shit.

1. Queerplatonic relationships are friendships, but we still need the word “queerplatonic.”

First of all, fuck all that noise about queerplatonic relationships being “more than friendship” and “in between friendship and romance” and all the motherfucking implications that queerplatonic relationships are actually some kind of romance lite, diet romance, etc. You know where that thinking comes from? It comes from the fucking amatonormativity that forces aromantic people to come up with a word like “queerplatonic” in the first place. It comes from the insidious amatonormative philosophy that friendship has a ceiling on it that separates it from romance, and only romance can have certain features of social and emotional significance.

Queerplatonic relationships are friendships. Queerplatonic partnerships are friendships.

But guess what? We still need the word “queerplatonic” because there is a huge fucking chasm of difference between the queerplatonic friendships that a lot of aros want and have and the “friendships” that alloromantic people form.

We wouldn’t need a word like “queerplatonic” if you romo assholes were capable of acknowledging that an aro person’s friendships can be on par with romantic relationships, that friendship can be a primary partnership, that friendship can include emotions and affection and commitment identical to the kind you routinely and exclusively practice in romance. We wouldn’t need a word like “queerplatonic” to set our alternative friendships and nonromantic partnerships apart if you narrow-minded fucks didn’t insist that any human relationship of a certain intimacy, involvement, and physicality is romantic whether the people in them actually see it that way or not. YOU and your fucked up social norms are the reason we needed the God damn word in the first place, because what we meant when we talked about friendship was NOTHING like your conceptualization of “friendship.”

2. Our queerplatonic relationships are often nothing like your “friendships” and you damn well know it.

I think what pisses me off the most about all the sarcastic derision that allos* use when they act like “queerplatonic” is a totally unnecessary word for friendship is the fact that unless they’ve never seen or heard an actual aro person talk about their desires for and feelings in queerplatonic relationships, they fucking know that more often than not, what an aro person means by “queerplatonic” is NOTHING like ordinary friendship between romantic people.

“Why don’t you stop trying to be a special snowflake and just call it a friendship like everybody else?????”

Fuck you.

You want to know why we can’t just go around saying we want a “best friend”?

Because you fucking allo* people treat your best friends like backup singers who stay in the dark behind you and your fucking romantic partner as you stare into each other’s eyes in the spotlight and sing every fucking shitty ass love song in the history of the music industry.

OR WORSE, your “best friend” is your FUCKING ROMANTIC PARTNER.

Who the fuck are the ones going around saying “I married my best friend! I fell in love with my best friend!”?

That would be YOU, asshats. Jesus Christ, you don’t even HAVE real nonromantic best friends.

Your “friendships” are a fucking pathetic joke. Half of you don’t even have friends in adulthood. You just have people you know and superficially like who you use to avoid boredom and solitude whenever you’re single or your lover can’t pay attention to you. Outside of fucking and falling in love, you are the emotionally stunted equivalent of a fucking rock.

You want to talk about who the real heartless robots are? Let’s fucking talk. Let’s talk about how you treat your so-called “friends” when you’re dating someone new, when you’re falling in love, when you’re fucking married and shacked up with your spouse. Let’s talk about all the fucking romantic people who can’t even have a God damn social life apart from their romantic partner; they’re not even a fucking person anymore, they’re just fifty percent of a couple that can’t function unless the other fifty is within three feet of them at all times. Let’s talk about how many of you are the reason that I can go swimming in a fucking sea of aromantic sob stories about how you fucked off into another galaxy as soon as you “met someone” and didn’t think twice about treating a so-called friend, even a “best friend,” like last year’s news. Let’s talk about how many “friendships” have died on the road to your One True Love because of your fucking negligence. Let’s talk about how you can’t even sit down with your alleged fucking “friend” for a two hour lunch without texting your new lover every 5 fucking seconds. Let’s talk about how you don’t even fucking ask your “friends” first, before bringing your romantic partner to a social gathering with said friends, because you just assume that they don’t care if your fucking boo gets in the way of you spending quality time with them.

Queerplatonic relationships are just like your “best friendships,” huh?

Tell me how many of you douche bags want to make a nonromantic best friend your primary partner. Tell me how many of you would choose to live with a nonromantic best friend intentionally and permanently, regardless of your romantic relationships, because you want to build and share a home with that best friend. Tell me how many of your “friendships” include cuddling, holding hands, sharing a bed, kissing, massages, frequent hugging, and other kinds of physical intimacy. Tell me how many of you love your “friends” at all, how many of you love a best friend more than any other person, including a romantic partner. Tell me how many of you would raise a child with a friend, move to another state for a friend, turn down a job offer for a friend, become financially supportive of a friend, become a friend’s full-time physical caretaker, even fucking get legally married to a friend. Tell me how many of you would tell a romantic partner to fuck off in order to maintain all of that intimacy and involvement and commitment with a friend.

And don’t you even fucking begin to suggest that any relationship that includes all of those things is definitively romantic, because I will tear down a wall with a baseball bat if I have to hear that one more time.

24 hours a day, 365 days a year, you do nothing but talk and act in ways that express your belief, your TRUTH, that romantic relationships are superior to friendship. That romantic love is better than friendship. Hell, that romantic love is the ONLY love worthy of the fucking word. Your entire culture is a testament to your romance supremacy. Every facet of your media plays nonstop messages about romantic relationships being the point of life itself, and fucking NOWHERE does it ever say that a friendship can be what queerplatonic partnerships are to aromantic people. You can’t even fucking let canonical friendships in TV shows and movies stay friendships; you have to fucking turn EVERYTHING into a romantic relationship, sex or no sex. That’s how obsessed you are with romance. That’s how little you value friendship.

And you want to fucking come up in here and tell aromantic people that we don’t need our own language to describe the nonromantic partnerships we desire because they’re already described by the word “friendship”?

Are you fucking kidding me?

Go to hell.

And if you’re a fucking allo* teenager or college kid on Tumblr, I don’t want to hear a God damn thing out of your mouth about friendship or queerplatonic partnerships or aro people. Every single one of you is going down the same fucking path as your generational predecessors: chasing your fantasy romantic relationship, getting married after a string of temporary romantic relationships and dating, and spending your entire adult life being a shitty friend in your mediocre background friendships while sex and romance stay front and center in your mind and practice. Even those of you who end up getting divorced at least once will never get off the romantic merry-go-round. You’re going to die pursuing romance if you’re not already settled into it, and at no fucking point is friendship ever going to remotely approach romance in your personal life. You are completely and utterly predictable, and you are a complete and utter disappointment to every single aro person who wants and values high-quality friendship, including queerplatonic friendship and partnerships.

The least you can do is shut the fuck up and stay out of aro conversations and aro spaces. You don’t get a fucking say in what language aros use. Your opinion doesn’t fucking matter, on aro issues and aro feelings and aro relationships. You don’t even deserve friendship from us, and God bless and protect the aros who choose to invest themselves emotionally in you at all, because odds you are going to fuck them over and not even feel sorry about it.

Take your bullshit “friendship” and your snide remarks about the queerplatonic idea and shove them up your ass until you choke.

The Romance Monopoly

On the long list of things that romantic people do and say that piss me off, the following has long been near the top of the list:

“I married my best friend!”

“I’m in love with my best friend!”

And any other expression of the idea that one’s romantic partner is also one’s “best friend.”

I acknowledge that friendship can be part of someone’s romantic relationship, and depending on how you look at it, a romantic relationship can actually be better off if friendship is a part of it. I also think that successful, long-term romantic relationships actually do evolve into a kind of friendship over time, shedding much of its romantic energy, and that this is often an inevitable consequence of being close to someone for many years. It’s not that I think there’s a problem with seeing your romantic partner as a friend.

What’s so annoying and sometimes even offensive to me about people who claim that their romantic partner is also their best friend comes down to the common social model of Romance Monopoly.

Merriam-Webster defines “monopoly” as: exclusive ownership through legal privilege, command of supply, or concerted action; exclusive possession or control; a commodity controlled by one party. Usually, this is a term or phenomenon used in economics, and in the American economy, monopolies are frowned upon (and even illegal) because if you can only purchase a necessary good or service from one provider, that provider can overcharge their customers and still successfully turn a profit. Introducing a competitor in a particular market means that every company in that market has to keep their prices within range of each other; obviously, if you charge twice or three times as much as your competition when providing the same product or service at comparable quality, you’ll lose buyers. If you have no competition, you can charge whatever you want, you can under-produce which makes your product a limited resource that not everybody can access, you can get away with producing a product or service of lower quality, etc—because no matter what you do or don’t do, people are going to buy from you. There is no incentive to improve your product or service, to meet consumer demand, or set reasonable prices. Prohibiting monopolies is a way of preventing unethical or unreasonable behavior on the part of businesses.

So what do I mean by “The Romance Monopoly”?

The concept behind the romance monopoly is essentially:

By restricting access to commonly desired experiences, both behavioral and emotional, to romantic relationships, romantic people create a social system in which a person’s well-being and happiness is often dependent upon their participating in romantic relationships. The consequences of this are twofold: people often have a bullshit threshold in romantic relationships that is astronomically high, making it easier for abuse, unhappiness, and general dysfunction to continue unchecked or much longer than it would otherwise, because people are willing to put up with the negativity for the sake of maintaining access to those emotional and practical resources they can’t get anywhere else; second, the restriction of desirable resources to romantic relationships makes it possible and logical for romantic relationships to maintain its position at the top of the relationship hierarchy (both on an individual basis and on a broad, cultural level) regardless of how well that organization of relationships actually serves people involved. When romance monopolizes positive social experiences, friendship automatically has little value in comparison.

The Romantic-Sexual Relationship Hierarchy is intimately connected to amatonormativity. Let me remind you that amatonormativity is “the assumption that a central, exclusive, amorous (romantic) relationship is normal for humans, in that it is a universally shared goal, and that such a relationship is normative, in the sense that it should be aimed at in preference to other relationship types,” and that this is not just a personal attitude but a cultural paradigm, like heteronormativity. In fact, romance supremacy (the belief that romance is intrinsically superior to and more valuable than friendship and should be treated as such) and amatonormativity depend on each other for survival. Amatonormativity makes romance supremacy possible and vice versa, and if you destroy one, you inevitably destroy the other.

So here’s what society brainwashes you into believing: you should want and have romantic relationships, because that’s the only way to be “normal,” and you should see romantic relationships as superior to all other types, because romantic relationships are the one and only source of everything positive you need and desire to experience interactively with other human beings. All the affection, connection, intimacy, quality time, touch, trust, support, attention, sex, and commitment you might want or need to feel fulfilled, secure, valuable, etc can only come through romantic relationships, so if you reject romantic relationships, you reject all of those resources that you want and need for happiness and well-being. Because romantic relationships are the exclusive wellspring of these desired and necessary experiences, you should consider them significantly better and more important than any other kind of relationship, and if you don’t act like it, you’re a bad person who doesn’t deserve romantic relationships.

Then, we have pop culture’s messages about romance. The Romantic Happily Ever After Fantasy. Your One True Romantic Love is the only person you should want, the only person you should need, the only person who can or should satisfy your every physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual need and desire. And if the romantic partner you’ve got doesn’t meet those standards, you’re not with the right one. It’s wrong to want or need more than one romantic partner, and it’s wrong to want or need anything from anyone who is not your romantic partner. That’s part of the fantasy, after all, part of what makes the True Love story so romantic: the idea that once, you were an empty, incomplete, sad excuse for a person who was tortured with unfulfilled desire, and along came your One True Romantic Love, who had the sole power to complete, fulfill, and satisfy you, and with them, you experience a joy that is not otherwise possible.

That shit falls totally flat if you have more than one romantic partner that pleases you—or God forbid, you can find joy and fulfillment without romance. As it goes in economics, exclusivity and scarcity increase the value of a particular product or service. One way we determine specialness, whether we’re talking about a person, a diamond, or a type of relationship, is by how rare the thing in question is. The more common a thing, the lower its worth. Your average romantic monogamist can have 20 so-called “friends” but only one romantic partner, and that contrast increases the perceived worth and specialness of their romantic relationship. Notice how monogamous skeptics of polyamory often challenge poly people by asking, “Doesn’t adding a second (or third, etc) romantic partner to your life make your original romantic relationship less special?” The same sentiment is often taught regarding sex: “You should only have sex with someone you’re in love with, so that the sex is special. It’s not special if you’re screwing around with multiple people.” The rhetoric of romantic relationships, monogamy, romance supremacy, ideal sexual conduct, etc is more reflective of economics than anybody cares to acknowledge, but it should come as no surprise to you, considering how closely intertwined sex and romance are with capitalism in American culture. Sex sells, after all, and so does romance.

Romantic people who say their romantic partners are their best friends piss me off for a variety of reasons. First of all, this is the ultimate expression of romance monopoly: not only do these people reserve the vast majority of positive social experience to their romantic relationship but they take it so far as to bleed romance into friendship territory, creating a situation in which their romantic relationship quiet literally takes away most of the potential that their nonromantic friendships might have to provide desired experiences and resources. They don’t need or want anything significant from anyone on planet Earth besides their romantic partner, because they place both romantic and best friend expectations onto the same person, and by comparison, everybody else they know or might know is worthless. As a friend, you have nothing to offer someone who subscribes to romance monopoly, because everything they perceive as valuable comes only through their romantic relationship. You could offer all the love, care, affection, attention, trust, and intimacy in the world, and it will be met with indifference and ingratitude.

Second of all, naming your romantic partner as your best friend is a cop-out. You don’t have to actually do any of the emotional or practical work to create and maintain a real, nonromantic best friendship with someone because you have your romantic partner working double duty. You isolate yourself on a sort of emotional island with your romantic partner, so that nobody else can engage with you in meaningful ways or experience real intimacy and connection with you, maybe even out of the insecurity that if you or your romantic partner form friendships with other people equal or almost equal to your romantic relationship, that will somehow detract from the “specialness” of your romantic relationship. It’s a kind of emotional and social greed, mutually shared between romantic partners. (And there’s a lot of overlap between this and monogamy.)

Third, the idea that your romantic partner and your closest friend can or even should be the same person is a major reinforcement of romance monopoly on a functional level. Where there could be and once was a division of social roles in a person’s life, a distribution of emotional and behavioral functions amongst a network of lovers, friends, and family members, now there’s just this concentration of everything into one person, one relationship. That funneling of all positive experiences, responsibilities, and functions into the romantic relationship basically renders friendships and familial relationships superfluous. Unnecessary. Disposable. Easily neglected. And the flipside of this is, if your romantic relationship fails, you’re fucked. You lose not only the innate benefits of romance, but all those other emotional and practical resources that could’ve been reaped from friendship and family.

What does it say about you, if the only “best friend” you ever have is your romantic partner? You can only manage to create a best friendship with someone if you’re fucking the person and causing them to experience romantic feelings? Do you even know how to be close friends with another human being, in a nonsexual and nonromantic context? Do you have anything to offer someone in friendship, when you take the sexual and romantic elements away? Are you actually capable of loving another person, for nonsexual and nonromantic reasons? Are you yourself lovable nonromantically and nonsexually?

Because here’s the thing: romantic and sexual attraction often skew a person’s perception of someone else. It distorts your judgment of someone else’s character, their behavior, their treatment of you, their overall attractiveness and desirability. Sex and romance fool people into thinking that their lovers are better than they are, convince them into accepting treatment and behavior they would never otherwise accept. Friendship does no such thing. Nonromantic, nonsexual friendship is built on reality, not fantasy. We see our nonromantic, nonsexual friends for who they are, not who we want them to be. Sex and romance have a neurochemical power to build a kind of instant and/or pseudo-intimacy and closeness between people, people who don’t actually know each other; that intimacy and closeness are not earned, the way they are in nonromantic, nonsexual friendship. So, if you can only build intimacy and connection with someone if sex and romance do all the heavy-lifting for you, if sex and romance are necessary causes of someone else loving you and feeling attached to you, you’re probably not someone worth being close friends with, frankly.

One of two things must be true of people whose romantic partners are also their best friends:

1. They can’t actually form a best or particularly close friendship with someone in a nonromantic, nonsexual context—or they simply don’t value friendship, of the nonromantic and nonsexual variety. (Maybe both.) They only value romantic relationships, and calling their romantic partner their “best friend” is really just a nice way of saying that their romantic partner is the only person they have a close, meaningful relationship with.

2. They had a nonromantic, nonsexual best friend prior to getting married or pairing up with their romantic partner, and upon entering their romantic relationship, they basically demoted their ex-best friend to a lower friendship status, so they could rank their romantic partner at the top of both their overall social pyramid and at the top of their friendship group.

In either case, these people are not ones you want to get mixed up with if you’re looking for serious, meaningful friendship and if you actually highly value and even prioritize friendship in your own life. They’re a major waste of friendly love. They’re acquaintance material, and that’s all.

People who are guilty of the second scenario are especially vile, in my book. If you subordinate a best friend—who your probably knew much longer than you did your romantic partner, who invested their time and energy and emotions into your friendship, who is more likely to outlast your romantic relationship than vice versa—to a romantic partner, even to the point of throwing the best friend out of their role amongst your friend group just to place your romantic partner in BOTH slots, for no reason other than your romantic partner is your romantic partner, you are a traitor of the highest order. You’re trash. You don’t deserve good friendship. Fuck off into your romantic relationship and leave friendship to people who actually value it as important.

If romance is only “special,” meaningful, and satisfying when it monopolizes positive social experience and degrades friendship, then at its core, romance ain’t shit. And in all likelihood, if we could ever live in a world where all the positive emotional and social experiences we desire were available in friendship and family relationships, romance would no longer be the ultimate fairy tale to obsess over, but just one option on the buffet table. We wouldn’t see romance as the ultimate prize; instead, the prize would be love, in whatever form it takes. People wouldn’t have to feel so dependent on romantic relationships for happiness or love or companionship or sex or family or anything other than romantic feelings and romantic expression. Friendship would matter just as much, if not more, as romance to romantic people—something I can hardly imagine.

A Response to Blueberry Overlord: On Cupioromanticism

So, I see that a self-identified cupioromantic took the time to respond to my post protesting the cupioromantic identity. I have some things to say, in reply to their defense of the concept.

I appreciate that in this instance, the person identifying as cupioromantic openly acknowledges that in fact, amatonormativity is behind their desire for romantic relationships. I understand where they’re coming from, in terms of the emotional and psychological struggle to accept being aromantic, especially with a coinciding desire for loving primary relationships/partnerships. I understand, better than perhaps people have previously realized, the way being aromantic and wanting love and living in this aggressively amatonormative society all come together and interact in emotionally explosive and/or cognitively dissonant ways.

It occurs to me that all the emotional and psychological suffering that many people experience upon realizing they’re aromantic, I experienced through the lens of asexuality instead. I’ve been identifying as asexual since I was 15, but it took me until about a year ago to finally accept my aromanticism, after going through a transitional phase of not specifying romantic orientation at all. I grew up thinking I was romantic, but in retrospect, I doubt that was ever true. At best, I might have been grayromantic in childhood and in my teen years. See, when I was younger, I made the mistake of believing that it was my asexuality–not aromanticism–that made me want passionate friendship and value nonsexual love so much. I thought I was going to be alone forever because I was asexual and didn’t want to have sex, not because I’m aromantic and want passionate friendship instead of romance. By the time I got to aromanticism, I’d already spent all my social deviant misery chips on the asexuality portion of my identification journey, and frankly, I’d already become someone who doesn’t give a rat’s ass about being part of the Normal Crowd and having my existence and choices validated by total strangers. Picking up the “aromantic” identity was easy.

I know what it is to be in deep psycho-emotional agony caused by my own deviant desires and nature, and to be beyond anyone else’s ability to help or comfort. I grew up living with untreated, intense depression that was constant for about 11 years, and there was always a strong connection and interaction between the depression and my desire for love, the love I actually felt that was almost always unrequited. I used my asexuality and my unique relationship desires as fuel for the fire of my pain and grief. I was the most pessimistic kid you could possibly imagine–and in true depressed, pessimist fashion, I was spectacular at twisting anything and everything into doom and gloom, into the worst case scenario, into more reason for misery. “Nobody loves me, and nobody will ever love me, and there’s nothing I can do about it.” That was my story.

I spent most of those 11 years being profoundly, passionately suicidal. I wanted to kill myself so much that I thought about it daily, wrote about it endlessly in diaries and poems and social media messages, fantasized about dying and about my funeral, which I planned in some detail when I was still a high school student. Suicide became my default response to anything painful that happened to me: “If I were dead, I wouldn’t have to deal with this. If I kill myself now, I’ll never feel pain again. Death is the only solution.” I got as far as choosing a method and window shopping for the tools, but I never made a serious attempt. I think the reason for that is, as strong as my desire to die was, all of my other desires were stronger, and maybe because I was a kid or a repressed optimist, part of me never quit hoping that if I stuck it out a little longer, life would eventually get better. I was in a wrestling match with the Universe, and maybe if I made it very clear that I was going to commit suicide in lieu of being happy, it would finally cry uncle and throw me a bone.

I wanted love more than almost anything, when I was growing up. I spent all those years writing love poems to people who weren’t even my friends and sometimes to people who were, crying on a fairly regular basis because I always loved and wanted someone somewhere who didn’t reciprocate or because I wanted to meet somebody I hadn’t met yet and didn’t know if I ever would. I went to college, and it didn’t get any better. In fact, that first year was horrifically devastating on an emotional level. I had meltdowns over my own deep knowing that my oldest friendships were all going to disintegrate in the near future, because my romantic-sexual friends were going to get sucked into the black hole of romantic relationships and marriage. I got my heart broken by someone I loved who didn’t understand me or what I wanted in friendship, not for the first time or the last, but it felt more like a nuclear bomb had gone off and left me with nothing but a burnt soul.

After that, when I turned 19, I reached a point where I realized that I couldn’t keep living the way I had been for so long. I couldn’t keep being that depressed, in that much pain all the time. I had to find a way to feel better, or I had to die. So, I decided to feel better–and slowly, gradually, I did. I didn’t see a therapist or get on medication or use recreational narcotics. I didn’t suddenly meet the perfect person for me with whom to share my ideal friendship. The world didn’t change, there wasn’t suddenly millions more asexuals and aromantics, people around me did not suddenly understand me and support me. I changed. I did everything I could, on my own, to feel relief mentally and emotionally. Somewhere during this process, I developed a real self-esteem, I really got to liking myself and loving myself, and life did improve.

So I understand, clearly and intimately, what it feels like to be a major outcast living in a society that completely opposes who you are and what you want at every turn. I understand what it feels like to have no one in your life who is like you, to not know anybody who understands who you are and what you want and why. I understand what it feels like to be the weirdo in every room, to not see yourself anywhere: in TV, movies, music, books, commercials, magazines, or the radio. I understand what it feels like to be totally turned off and fed up with all the crap that the rest of the world considers “normal” and to want nothing more than to go live on a deserted island somewhere cut off from mainstream media and 99.9% of mankind. I’ve been alone with my pain and my sorrow too many days and nights to count, and I’m sure there’s more of those moments in my future: where I cry in private over shit that I can’t change or control, then eventually pick myself up and keep going because ain’t nobody here to call on for comfort, and even if there was, I never really liked empty platitudes. I understand the deep, simmering rage and frustration. I understand loneliness. I’ve had my times of asking God why they would create someone like me and then put me in a world like this one.

I’m going to be 25 this year. I know exactly what I want, relationship-wise. More clearly and specifically than ever before. I am at peace with my asexuality and my aromanticism. I’m proud, actually. I am at peace with being permanently celibate and permanently single (romantically). I know who I am, and I like who I am. I haven’t been depressed in years, and I rarely angst about being who I am in the context of this romance supremacist, sex-normative world. I’m mostly hopeful about meeting the right people for me and having the kind of friendships I desire. I realize I am young and I have most of my life ahead of me. I’m trying not to be in a hurry for any particular relationship, especially because friendship is slow to build.

I gave you all that information so that you know I’m not ignorant or inexperienced with whatever pain and turmoil that you felt in the past or feel now, which contributes to your choosing of the cupioromantic identity or the desire for romantic relationships in general.

Now, I’ll respond to specific points in the post.

“The thing is, the people I become close to are not necessarily going to be aromantic. The things they want out of a relationship may be things that I can’t give them. Yes, I have an intense friendship with someone I value with everything I’ve got. But it’s platonic, non-exclusive. Whether I like it or not, amatonormativity does exist, and we exist alongside it, so when she begins to go out with someone, and maybe someday marries them, that will be the relationship that society prioritizes, and potentially the one that she and I will prioritize as well, because we both grew up in a society that values romantic relationships above all others. It’s just how our society works, and it’s not likely to change drastically in the next several years.”

Well, if I were you, I would make a decision to seek out perma-single aromantics who you CAN count on in friendship. That’s the decision I’ve made, and I’m convinced that it will change the course of my life from what it would’ve been were I just going to passively make friends with whatever individual I happen to bump into. If you don’t actively look for and reach out to other perma-single aro people, if you don’t make noise about the fact that you are one of those people and want a certain kind of friendship, well, then no shit your odds of meeting a whole bunch of average romantic-sexual people are much greater than meeting people you can actually have satisfying, reliable friendships with. When you’re part of a very small minority, as aros and aces are, you have to be exponentially more proactive than just about any other group of people, about meeting and connecting with others like you. Heterosexuals can’t walk a fucking block without meeting each other, but that’s not how it is for aros, aces, and permanently single people. We have to look, we have to advertise, we have to talk about ourselves, we have to go to meet-ups and the right online spaces. We have to try. And no, it’s not as easy as flushing a toilet, but trying does increase your chances of meeting other aros/perma-singles.

And not only do you have to take initiative and seek out the right people, but you also have to be willing to set boundaries and stick to your standards. You are not obligated to be friends with romantic people. You are not obligated to get close to someone who’s regularly in romantic relationships. You are not obligated to emotionally invest yourself into a friendship that realistically doesn’t have a future beyond the standard, shallow, meaningless, inferior “We’re just friends, let’s hang out once a month when my romantic other is busy and can’t be with me” scenario. If you choose to spend all your emotional energy and all your social hours on ordinary romantic people, that’s your choice, but don’t pretend that it’s the only option or that you’re the only aromantic person on the planet. Because none of that is true. You choose who to spend time with, you choose whether or not to set standards in your personal relationships, you choose whether to continue or terminate any given friendship, and you choose what kind of treatment you’re going to accept in your friendships. Society may set the environment and rig the game, but you’re not some helpless robot lacking the agency to deny your programming. You’re responsible for your life, your relationships, and your choices. Now that you know what amatonormativity is, you’re also responsible for the beliefs you hold about relationships.

“And here is exactly why I disagree with the charges raised against cupioromanticism: amatonormativity exists whether we like it or not. It’s not something that exists in our pasts, it’s something that exists in the present, in the society we live in on a day-to-day basis, and probably in our futures. To say that we have been affected by it would be inaccurate: we are being affected by it, and we almost certainly will continue to be affected by it. But we didn’t set it up, and there is absolutely no reason we should be responsible for tearing it down in a way that denies the effect it has had (and continues to have) on our identities. Do not ask us not to identify as cupioromantic because that identity shows the effect amatonormativity has on us.”

Here’s where you lose me completely. What the fuck is this, “that’s just the way things are” bullshit? Is that the attitude we should adopt about all the unacceptable norms alive and well in our world? By this logic, we should all resign to racism and sexism and transphobia and heterosexism. By this logic, everybody guilty of those -isms get to excuse themselves because they’re just products of their social conditioning, and there’s nothing they can do about it because they have to live in this racist, sexist, heterosexist, transphobic society and can’t single-handedly dismantle those harmful paradigms.

We shouldn’t be responsible for tearing down the systems of oppression that affect us on a daily basis? Oh, really? Who should be responsible, then? The people who benefit from those systems? Yeah, I’m sure making the world a better place for other people by abdicating their own privilege is at the top of their priority list.

Maybe you haven’t noticed, but white people are not the ones who originally wanted the end of slavery, segregation, and Jim Crow laws. Heterosexuals are not the ones who originally wanted to throw gay pride parades in city streets and legalize same-sex marriage and feature queer characters in media that don’t die at the end of the story. Cisgender people are not the ones who first started to push for justice, equality, safety, and medical care for trans people and other gender nonconforming individuals. Men did not come up with the idea of allowing women to vote and go to college and own property and work any job they wanted.

Every social justice movement in the history of the fucking world has been led by the people who have the most to gain from it. Every improvement we’ve achieved as a society since 1900 happened because black people and women and queers and transgender people and other people of color put themselves on the front lines, showed up and demanded that they get their rights and representation. Nobody handed that shit to them. They died for progress, they went to prison unjustly for progress, they got beat up by cops and people who opposed them for progress. Whites have never given black people anything out of the goodness of their hearts, and men didn’t suddenly quit treating women like cattle because they had an epiphany in the night. There is not a single nice or fair or just thing that LGBTQI people or POC or women or any other disadvantaged group have secured for themselves that they didn’t have to fight for, tooth and nail, for YEARS. And they’re STILL fighting. They’re going to be fighting the rest of the century and most likely the one after this and the one after that. Even after all the progress made, they still have to combat the system, and they’re not done getting what they deserve.

So, why you think it would be or should be any different for aromantics is beyond me. Romantic people aren’t looking out for us. They’re not the ones who are going to tear down amatonormativity and trash their romance supremacist movies, TV shows, books, and music. They’re not the ones who are going to create legal support and protection for nonromantic/nonsexual relationships. They’re not going to become better friends of their own volition or turn their backs on traditional romantic relationships because they just randomly feel like it. They’re not going to hand us anything on a silver platter, at their own expense.

If you want the world to be better, if you want things to be different, you’re damn right you have to do something about it. Somebody has to. If you want to sit back and let other people like me do the hard labor of accomplishing change by sheer force of will and being an unrelenting pain in the ass of everybody who stands in my way, so be it, but don’t think for one second that amatonormativity and romance supremacy and all their manifestations are going to spontaneously evaporate one day or that the romantic population is going to experience enlightenment and correct the system themselves.

“I may be cupioromantic because of amatonormativity, but that in no way invalidates my identity as a cupioromantic person.”

Actually, yeah, amatonormativity invalidates the cupioromantic identity in general. You don’t have to deny that you’re someone who doesn’t experience romantic attraction yet desires romantic relationships–because that’s a fact–but you don’t need to create a new category, a new identity, to accommodate a fucked up head space that’s more a condition to be resolved than a place to set up camp and nest. I’ve said elsewhere on my blog that I think if you don’t experience romantic attraction but desire romantic relationships, you can and should use the grayromantic identity, which already exists and predates “cupioromantic” and covers a wide variety of experiences fitting in between the aromantic or alloromantic categories. The danger in legitimizing “cupioromantic” as its own unique identity is allowing people to believe that wanting romantic relationships for fucked up reasons is a state of being that can and should be permanent, accepted uncritically instead of worked through.

I’ve already acknowledged that there are valid reasons why someone aromantic would choose to get into romantic relationships, but ending up in them because of extenuating circumstances–like being sexual and fucking just one person at a time, or not knowing you’re aro, or not wanting to disappoint a friend who asks you out, etc–is very different than having an abstract, ongoing desire for romantic relationships that can’t be satisfied by anything else and is purely for your own happiness. It’s the difference between an asexual who has sex because they have to do it for the sake of dating, and someone who doesn’t experience sexual attraction but actively wants partnered sex for their own personal satisfaction (which I consider to be a type of gray-asexuality). So we’re not talking about participating in romantic relationships as aromantics; we’re talking about wanting romantic relationships for their own sake, as people who don’t actually feel romantic attraction, love, etc. The motive is what we’re discussing, and motive is important.

“We cannot fully reject amatonormativity anyway until society also does, because regardless of whether or not we acknowledge it, it affects us every day, so saying that people shouldn’t identify as cupioromantic because the orientation reinforces the idea of amatonormativity is very much not ok.”

False. If we all waited for society to get its shit together on all fronts, nothing would EVER fucking improve anywhere. I reject amatonormativity, here and now, every day. I reject it when I call it out for the bullshit it is. I reject it when I criticize romantic narratives for being toxic, ridiculous, and unrealistic. I reject it by choosing not to date. I reject it by choosing not to get married and advocating for the abolition of marriage. I reject it by not consuming romantic media whenever I can avoid it. I reject it be rejecting the bullshit conduct of romantic people in friendship, letting them know that it’s bullshit or otherwise rejecting them as friends completely. I reject amatonormativity by believing in the core of my being that my ideal friendships are beautiful, desirable, possible, real, and valid, and that I am a human being who is intrinsically worthy of the love and joy I desire, even though I am aromantic and permanently single and asexual and celibate. I reject it by writing about friendship in my creative fiction, not romance. I reject it by trying to be the kind of friend I want to be and forming the kind of friendships I want to form, even if there’s always a chance I’ll be misunderstood or misread or turned down. I reject amatonormativity by saying to the world, “No! I’m not the one who’s the problem here, you are!” I reject amatonormativity every day of my life, and I will continue to reject it until I breathe my last breath. I don’t care whether I do this alone forever or not. I’m doing it.

“Yes, amatonormativity sucks. But when we have been conditioned and conditioned to value romantic relationships and then eventually find out that we’re aromantic, are you really going to tell us that the desire for romantic relationships that we’ve been conditioned to have our entire lives should just…stop on a dime? That we can’t want romantic relationships anyway? That they’re Not For Us because of something beyond our control and anyway honey, you can always have something else, even while society is screaming at us in a hundred different ways that non-romantic relationships just aren’t quite as good?”

Stop on a dime, no. Personal development is a process. It does take time. But actively engaging in the process of deconstructing your internalized poisonous beliefs is something you have to choose to do, not something that magically happens all by itself. Acknowledging that you’ve got a problem isn’t enough; you have to do the work. And if you do the work, yeah, eventually you will think and feel differently.

This is probably not going to be helpful to you at this moment in your life, but I need to say it anyway because it’s true: you really need to get over caring what society thinks. Easier said than done, sure, but it can be done. That’s the real problem here, with cupioromantics in general, along with most people: caring more about what society says instead of what you feel, caring more about what other people think you should want instead of what you actually want, looking out instead of in. Society doesn’t give a fuck about you. Society doesn’t care if you’re happy or unhappy, if you’re well or unwell, if you’re living with authenticity or not. Society only cares about using you as a tool to perpetuate its systems of power and control, for the benefit of the ruling classes. Society only cares about profiting off of you. Other people care more about using your conformity to their rules to makes themselves feel better about what they’re doing than they will ever care about you. Everybody’s out for their own personal gain, and their telling you how to live, what to think, what to feel, etc is virtually always motivated by their own selfish desires.

So the sooner you dedicate yourself to liberating your psyche, to watching less TV, to spending less time monitoring what other people are saying, the sooner you can start paying exclusive attention to your true self, which you may not yet know because you haven’t bothered to get in touch.

“Yes, there are lots of other kinds of wonderful relationships out there, and objectively they’re worth every bit as much as romantic relationships, but don’t you dare tell me I can’t wish I could just introduce somebody as my wife or my girlfriend. Don’t you dare tell me I can’t feel a little twinge of hurt when the only words I can use to explain how I feel about someone are all related to romance, or when I introduce the people closest to me as my “friend,” the same word you might use to introduce an acquaintance, because nobody outside the internet has a goddamn clue what queerplatonic means. I don’t want to have to give a vocabulary lesson when I want to explain what someone means to me. I just want to spend the rest of my life with someone in a loving relationship that I don’t have to explain or justify. I don’t want to make a statement with the way that I love people, or to see my relationships as secondary over and over and over again. I just want society to value my relationships the way I do. And for that, I would need a romantic relationship.”

You don’t want to have to do the work to make the world a more hospitable place for people like you, and you don’t want to deal with the shitty reality of being outside the privileged group in society. You want to have been born into a life where everything is easy for you, and you’re part of the “normal,” dominant majority. You wish you were an ordinary romantic-sexual person who wanted traditional romantic-sexual primary relationships, so that you could live your live oblivious that anyone unlike you exists or has problems because of the very culture that you directly benefit from and fit into without even trying.

And I’m sure every person who isn’t a white, cis, heterosexual male has felt similarly at least once in their life. You think people of color want to devote time and energy to fighting racism? You think women want to devote time to fighting sexism and putting up with bullshit from men? You think queer and trans people want to spend time and energy fighting against queerphobia and transphobia, socially, culturally, and legally? Don’t you think all of these people wish they could just live their lives in an environment where they are respected, supported, secure, and equal by default? Of course, they do.

Instead, we live in a world where not being a white, cishet man means you’re going to have issues. We live in a world where being aromantic and wanting a long-term, stable, loving friendship with someone who is committed to you, prioritizes you, and treats you like a partner is harder than being any kind of romantic-sexual person who wants a conventional romantic-sexual relationship and a conventional romance-centric lifestyle, harder even than being asexual and romantic and dating conventionally. If you want to pretend to be something you aren’t and try to find happiness within the bullshit system that rejects who you really are and what you really want, that’s your choice. You can be aromantic and pretend to be romantic and date and get married, just like a queer person can pretend to be straight or a trans person can pretend to be cis or an asexual can pretend to be sexual or have partnered sex for the rest of their lives just to appease someone who doesn’t love them enough to stay in a nonsexual romantic relationship. Nobody’s going to stop you, and sure, on some level, you’d benefit from living life like a member of a privileged group, a group that is considered acceptable and normal. Instead of being single and unpartnered for who knows how long as you look for a compatible friend, you could ride the dating merry-go-round instead and have <50% chance of living happily ever after in a long-term monogamous romantic relationship. You can get together with your romantic friends and bitch about being single or bitch about that recent breakup or bitch about how your current romance is no longer satisfying. You can get married just like all your romantic-sexual friends and then get divorced at least once like half of your romantic-sexual friends. You can turn your back on friendship and all the alternatives to traditional romance completely, not even bother looking for anything else, write off queerplatonic partnerships as mythical pipe dreams, and pretend that the Romantic Fantasy really is the only thing you’ve ever wanted and could ever want and you would be incomplete without it.

And at the end of the day, you’re just one more person feeding amatonormativity, one more person perpetuating The Way Things Are, one more person standing in the way of all the permanently single aromantics who want to be respected and supported in our own right and do relationships our way and have our primary or domestic or committed friendships respected–not because they’re like romantic relationships but because friendship fucking deserves equality for being what it is.

You want to spend the rest of your life in a loving relationship that you don’t have to explain or justify? Great. So do I.

And I’m not going to fold to Romantic Society’s gospel of romantic relationships just to get it. I’m not going to date a bunch of romance supremacists and pretend to like it, to compensate for a lack of faith in friendship and the possibility of the kind of nonromantic relationships I really want. I’m not going to close myself off from other aromantic people who want the kind of friendship I want, by burying myself in romantic relationships.

I’d rather die alone.

You do what you want. But “cupioromantic” is an unnecessary term.

Queer Christians: Celibacy and Sexuality as Choice

I stay relatively out of touch with mainstream media, including TV, movies, and music, but recently, I heard about this upcoming reality TV show scheduled to air on TLC called “My Husband is Not Gay.” Apparently, it’s about Mormon families in which the husband acknowledges that he experiences sexual attraction to men, but has chosen to live in a heterosexual marriage because of his religious beliefs. A lot of people are upset about the show and want it cancelled, on the grounds that it presents negative messages to LGBQ people about queer sexuality and endorses the idea promoted in most Christian churches that homosexuality is a choice.

I’ve been thinking about writing a post on voluntary celibacy as a valid choice for sexual people to make, especially in the form of choosing a nonromantic + nonsexual primary relationship, ever since I discovered the blog A Queer Calling. The writers of this blog are two self-identified lesbian women who are also Christians and feel that they are called to celibacy; they’re also a couple, whether romantic or nonromantic. They do not support gay marriage because it is, in their eyes, at odds with the Biblical definition of marriage. They wouldn’t marry each other even if they legally could. I’ve read through several of their posts, and I really appreciate their perspective on celibacy, friendship, family, etc. I myself am not Christian and don’t participate in organized religion, but I am spiritual, have religious family members, and am familiar enough with Christianity that I can find it truly fascinating such people like Sarah and Lindsay exist.

Most Americans, whether they’re straight or queer, don’t expect anyone from the LGBTQ population to be Christian. It’s common knowledge that Christianity is, for the most part, very anti-queer and holds a lot of false, toxic beliefs about queer sexuality and gender. Christian parents have done a lot of terrible things to their queer children: disowning them and throwing them into the street while they’re still underage, sending them to straight conversion camps, bullying them, abusing them, etc. So the story everybody expects to hear is that a queer person born into a Christian household grows up having a terrible experience, becomes an adult (if they’re fortunate enough to survive youth), leaves the religion and their family, and basically becomes an atheist or as good as—because Christianity and queerness repel each other.

But in fact, there are queer adults in this country who are Christian because they want to be, because they choose to be, because they really do believe in the Bible and Christ. There are queer youth who are Christian and have no wish to give up their faith, even though they know that they aren’t welcome in it as openly queer individuals. It may completely baffle nonreligious queer people, and obviously most straight Christians, but it’s true. You can have or want queer sex, and still have a relationship with Jesus Christ. Go figure.

There’s not a whole lot of resources or support for queer Christians. Anywhere. The Church mostly condemns queerness and otherwise ignores or politely dismisses queer Christians who go looking for inclusion in the Christian community while living a queer life. The secular world and mainstream LGBTQ population doesn’t acknowledge that queer Christians exist, or if they do, they can only question why anyone would want to be associated with a religion that hates queerness. Basically, the Church says: stop being queer, and the LGBTQ population says: stop being Christian. Queer Christians are left to figure things out alone, whether they choose to live as heterosexuals or live as queer people and still find some kind of acceptance in their religious community.

What I’ve noticed in comments left on news articles and links about this reality TV show is a whole lot of what I expected from the average, nonreligious sexual person: a lot of criticism about how the straight wives of these non-straight men are in denial, how could they want to be married to someone who doesn’t desire them, the husbands are just sexually repressed victims of their religion, it’s inevitable that they’re going to have gay sex outside their marriages, nobody should have to deny who they really are and pretend to be something they’re not, etc.

And the mainstream (nonreligious) LGBTQ population has made it very clear that they think choosing to live like a straight person when you’re gay or queer is a horrific catastrophe that’s only happening to these men because they’ve been brainwashed by religion to believe that homosexuality is sinful, and nobody should support or promote that idea, when a lot of queer people are still struggling with queerphobia, homophobia, transphobia, etc. As far as they’re concerned, these men never should’ve married women in the first place, and the only way for them to be free and healthy is to divorce their wives and have all the gay sex their hearts desire.

As an outsider to all of this—I’m not straight, I’m not gay or bisexual, I’m not romantic, I’m not Christian, I’m not an atheist, I’m not sexual at all—my opinion is at odds with both the heterosexist Christian community and the secular LGBTQ population. I find Christianity’s condemnation of queer sexuality and gender extremely toxic, oppressive, irrational, ridiculous, and devoid of any reason or even sufficient Biblical backup. I think it’s a travesty when Christian parents treat their own children like garbage just for being queer, and I think that Christianity’s political vendetta to make this country as legally dangerous and hostile toward queer people as possible is totally fucked up and inexcusable. However—I also disagree with secular LGBTQ people who are so quick to criticize and condemn the choices of these queer Christian adults who choose either to be celibate and single forever or to enter heterosexual marriages, based on their religious beliefs. I think that if you’re an adult who is independent of your parents and you choose to not only believe in your particular God and religion as it is commonly practiced but also to make lifestyle choices that honor your faith, there is nothing wrong with that, especially if it doesn’t cause you constant distress and you aren’t campaigning to get all the other queer people in the world to do the same.

I believe in freedom. Period. I believe that every person should get to pursue their own joy. Even though I’m not religious and disagree with a lot of what Christianity teaches, I can’t tell anyone that they should abandon their faith because they would be better off without it. I don’t know that they would be, and neither does anyone else. Spirituality is a very personal, intimate thing, and nobody can know what’s best for another person when it comes to spirituality, or anything else. While organized religion and Christianity in particular does a lot of damage to people, it also does a lot of good. You don’t have to look hard to find someone, even a queer Christian, who feels convinced that they are better off for having their faith than they would be without it. And it is a fundamental right of living in this country to believe in whatever God—or no god—that you choose.

I’m very skeptical of anyone who tries to simplify something so complicated as the relationship between religion and sexuality. A lot of nonreligious sexual people, straight and queer alike, are adamant that if everyone would just turn their backs on Christianity or any religion that seeks to control and deny sexuality, that their problems would be solved, and they would be exponentially happier, more at peace, etc. All these Mormon husbands have to do is give into their homosexual desires, and they’ll live happily ever after as liberated people. If Sarah and Linsday, the couple behind A Queer Calling, would just have hot lesbian sex all the time, they would be so much happier and more satisfied with their lives and each other. Throw off the yoke of oppressive religion, march in the gay pride parades, fly your rainbow flags from your car antennas, fuck anyone you want, and you’ll be happy!

I don’t think denying your sexuality for the wrong reasons is ever positive, but I’m not buying all of that. Forcing someone to be in the closet or to deny their sexuality is a violation of their freedom. But forcing them to have sex that they don’t feel comfortable with or to live a lifestyle they don’t even want is a violation of their freedom too.

You can’t pretend that you care about the health, well-being, and happiness of a person while ignoring or trying to excise a part of who they are that is extremely important to them: their faith, their relationship with God. Trying to convince them that their religion is bullshit and that being an openly and sexually active queer is the gateway to eternal joy isn’t actually the help they need. What they need is support in reconciling these two parts of them, these two identities they have.

The following are observations I’ve made in response to both A Queer Calling and My Husband Isn’t Gay:

1. You can truly love someone that you aren’t attracted to, even if it’s nonsexually and nonromantically, in a couple relationship and experience happiness and fulfillment in that context. I don’t know what the hell all these romantic-sexual people who criticize the gay Mormon husbands married to women are smoking, but I’m not seeing a whole lot of evidence that living happily ever after is as simple as coupling with someone you’re fucking and romantically involved with and pursuing a normative primary romantic-sexual marriage. That shit fails a lot. It makes people miserable, in fact. Why you think these gay men would have any more long-term, stable happiness by pursuing romantic-sexual relationships with other men than they might have in their straight marriages is beyond me. Furthermore, just because these men are not sexually (or romantically?) attracted to their wives, doesn’t mean they feel nothing at all for them. This goes back to romance supremacist bullshit that suggests friendship is innately inferior and unloving compared to romantic relationships: these men have very real friendships with their wives that likely include feelings of emotional attachment, warmth, appreciation, caring, love, etc, and none of that is invalidated by the lack of sexual and/or romantic attraction.

Throughout most of history, marriage was not about Romance or spending your life with somebody you’re hot for; it was about money, politics, raising children, and creating a stable, efficient work relationship between two people. Yeah, you had sex, but only because you were supposed to procreate. Nobody cared if you were attracted to each other or not, and nobody cared if you were in love. It’s an entirely modern notion that marriage is supposed to be some kind of paradise of romantic love and lust that completely fulfills both people emotionally, sexually, spiritually, and psychologically forevermore. Maybe that’s why so many people have fucking failed at marriage since 1900, and for every person who’s in a happy, long-term, monogamous romantic-sexual relationship in this country, there are at least 10 other ones that aren’t and can’t find any lasting happiness or satisfaction in romantic sexual relationships whatsoever.

Maybe people should consider the possibility that a gay Mormon man choosing to live in a heterosexual marriage has priorities and desires other than fulfilling his sexual fantasies. Maybe he cares more about his children or about experiencing the kind of nuclear family he grew up dreaming about or about belonging to the community that he is attached to. Maybe he is satisfied by having a partner and friend he can depend on, who loves him, and giving his children a two-parent home and seeing them happy and thriving. Maybe he is satisfied by the sense that he’s doing what he thinks is right and that he’s pleasing the god he believes in.

Would gay sex and gay romance be able to replace all of that in the big picture? Would it make up for all the struggle and pain he would inevitably create for himself and his family, if he decided to leave the Church and leave his wife and leave his kids and leave his community to go be an openly gay man? How can anyone know that, except for him?

Romantic-sexual people, whether straight or queer, are very attached to the fantasy they have of that romantic-sexual happily ever after, and they cling to it even when it fails them continuously over the course of decades, even though they all know several people who have also had no luck with that fantasy. They perpetuate the idea that this fantasy is the only way to be happy and that if you can find it, you’ll be all set for the rest of your life. But if half or more of you can be well into middle-age and still obviously have no idea how to make that fantasy a reality that works for you in the long-term, why should anyone follow your advice on choosing a lifestyle or building relationships?

2. Celibacy is a valid choice. Long-term celibacy is a valid choice. It doesn’t matter if you’re straight, gay, bisexual, pansexual, queer, or asexual. Celibacy is a valid choice. You are not obligated to have sex. Ever. Even if you experience sexual attraction, even if you have a sex drive, even if you feel a physical desire for partnered sex. Celibacy is always a valid choice. It is monumentally important that society starts to understand and accept that, because the well-being of asexuals and sex-repulsed gray-asexuals and sexual people such as queer Christians depends on it. Without the freedom to be celibate, the freedom to have sex is meaningless. It isn’t freedom at all. It’s compulsory sexuality.

And you have to ask yourself on a regular basis: who are you having sex for? Yourself? Or society? As far as I’m concerned, queer Christians having queer sex to please the secular LGBTQ population is no different than asexuals having sex to please sexual society: it’s all disingenuous, self-denying, approval-seeking bullshit. If you aren’t fucking for the joy of it, you’re doing it for the wrong reasons. Or at the very least, you’re doing it for flawed reasons. And the reward, if there’s any at all, is sure to be fleeting and hollow.

Sex is not a guarantee of happiness and satisfaction in life even if you’re allosexual! It’s not a guarantee of a happy romantic relationship, it’s not a guarantee of a successful marriage, it’s not some magical cure-all for your problems. And celibacy, if freely chosen, is not repression. There are a million reasons why a sexual person would choose to be celibate, and religious persuasion is one of them. I can’t imagine that anybody who experiences sexual attraction and desire on a regular basis would choose to become celibate lightly or impulsively, especially at this time in history. People who make this decision put a lot of thought into it over time, and they usually do it because they have a goal that is very important to them.

3. Which brings me to a significant point: some people care about God more than they care about sex, and there’s nothing wrong with them for that. They have a right to prioritize their spirituality, their religion, their faith, their relationship with God over their sexuality, over romance, over their lifestyle. You don’t have to agree with it, understand it, or like it, and you certainly don’t have to follow in their footsteps. But that decision to put their religious convictions over their sexual feelings is extremely personal and within their right to make, for whatever reasons they have. If you don’t support their right to choose celibacy or even to choose heterosexuality for faith-based reasons, you don’t support true sexual freedom, and frankly you’re not a true ally or friend to queer people, even if you’re queer too. A true ally and friend of queer people supports all of them regardless of how they live their lives, how they do relationships, what they value, and what their sexual practices are. Only supporting the LGBTQ individuals who routinely fuck people in queer situations doesn’t make you any better than only supporting the LGBTQ individuals who live like Normal romantic-sexual monogamous married with kids straight people. Doesn’t make you any better than the straight, homophobic Christians who only support LGBTQ people who renounce their queerness and live like heterosexuals just to please the Church.

Freedom for all really does mean freedom for all. Not just for who you agree with. Not just for the people who live like you do.

In my post on political lesbianism, I argued that sometimes a person can choose to build relationships contrary to their romantic and sexual orientations because that’s actually the path that serves their well-being the most. It’s the path that actually gives them the most happiness, not the least. I stand by that argument here, when it comes to queer romantic-sexual Christians.

If your heart tells you to leave the Church and live as an openly and sexually active queer person, then you should do that. If your heart tells you to be celibate or to choose a heterosexual partner, then you should do that. In any case, you’re the only person who can know what’s right for you, because you’re the only person who can feel your feelings. If it feels right, it is, and if it feels off, it is. Make your decisions accordingly.

You Are Not Entitled to Friendship.

I’ve seen some romantic-sexual people, both in my own personal life and online, complain about aromantic and/or asexual friends of theirs withdrawing from, diminishing, or ending the friendship(s) they share, seemingly without reason or cause. Most recently, someone was complaining in an aromantic/asexual space–a person self-identified as alloromantic allosexual–about their aro-ace friends dropping them completely after behaving in a particularly needy or clingy fashion and getting upset about the alloromantic allosexual person spending more time with a romantic/sexual partner or even another friend. I agree that expectations, boundaries, needs, and relationship status should be clearly communicated and agreed upon between any two people, and no one has the right to get upset over disappointed desires if those desires were never communicated or agreed upon with their friend. But I think the incompatibility between romantic-sexual people and aromantic asexuals, in friendship, usually goes deeper than miscommunication.

I just have to get this off my chest, as someone who has desired really deep, intense friendships all my life and someone who has also always prioritized my friendships above and beyond where and how romantic-sexual people place them.

I am not obligated to be your friend, to love you, to make you important, to be actively invested in the survival and growth of a friendship with you, or to unconditionally tolerate your romance and sex supremacist behavior. Neither is any other aromantic and/or asexual person. We are not obligated to prioritize you, focus on you, treat you any better than your other friends do, treat you better than you treat us, or be friends with you at all. We are not obligated to tolerate your behavior, just because everyone else does or because your conduct in a friendship is considered normative in broader society. If we’re not happy with you and the way you’re participating in friendship with us, we have the right and the freedom to walk away from you or put however much distance we see fit between us.

I’ve made a conscious decision in my personal life to only pursue real, deep, serious, loving friendship with other perma-single aromantic people, regardless of sexual orientation. Any romantic person or person in romantic relationships would have to prove to me that they are capable of my kind of friendship and trustworthy in friendship for me to make an exception for them, and needless to say, they’d have to bust their ass to prove it. I know what I want in my relationships, and I am not willing to settle for anything less. I’m also totally unwilling to invite or tolerate romance supremacist bullshit in my life. I don’t want that around me anymore than is absolutely necessary. Romantic-sexual people may think I’m being unrealistic in these decisions or unfair or too demanding, but I don’t give a fuck what they think. There are more than enough perma-single aromantics in the world for me to have a satisfying social life on my own terms; I don’t have to settle for mediocre normative friendships with coupled romantic people just because they’re the most available.

I think that people frequently see friendship and friendly associations as relationships where:

a) there are minimal expectations and desires

b) the default inferior status of the friendship is normal and natural, just because everyone is supposed to be a romantic hierarchist

c) a “chill” or laid-back or “cool” friend is one who doesn’t have any rules or boundaries in a friendship, which means they’re going to always be okay and accepting of however you choose to treat them and the friendship, as long as you aren’t outright abusing them or being an obvious dick

So in other words, friendship is intrinsically low-maintenance or no-maintenance, and in comparison to romantic relationships, anything goes in a friendship. Because anything goes, you’re expected to stay friends with someone unless they do something specifically offensive or hurtful to you and that thing is unforgivable. Sure, people can drift apart unintentionally and passively, but if you’re going to deliberately end a friendship, you’re supposed to have a really compelling reason that can’t be ignored or resolved. Anybody can have a million and one reasons why they might dump a romantic partner, but because friendship is supposed to be Not Serious, because you aren’t supposed to have needs or expectations in friendship, you’re also supposed to be content with just about any kind of friendship that isn’t all out physically, emotionally, or psychologically damaging.

So if your close friend suddenly disappears off the face of the fucking earth because they start dating someone new, you’re supposed to just let that slide–for weeks, months, forever–because that’s “normal” and “natural” and you’re supposed to be happy for them, never making your friend at all responsible for your happiness and satisfaction. If you want a certain amount of physical affection in your friendship or a certain amount of one-on-one time, and your friend doesn’t want to give it you, you’re supposed to just let it go and be their friend anyway, on their terms. That’s totally opposite of romantic relationship protocol, which basically states, “If your romantic partner isn’t doing everything in their power to please you 24/7, just dump them and go get someone new, because they are supposed to make you happy and obey your rules and respect your boundaries.”

People are not expected to earn good friendship, the way they have to earn good romantic relationships. There is no standard that people are held to in friendship, the way they are in romantic relationships. Being nice is pretty much the only thing you have to do, in society’s estimation, to deserve friends. Meanwhile, there’s a never ending list of shit you have to do to hook and keep a romantic partner. It’s almost like people in romantic relationships are looking for reasons to leave, and it’s your job to give them more reasons to stay. You have to impress a romantic partner. You have to be abnormally kind and sweet and generous and considerate, to convince someone to commit to you romantically. But you don’t have to do jack shit to convince a person to be your friend. All you gotta do is like the same sport or the same TV show, go to the same school or work at the same place of employment. You can be a total asshole and still qualify for “friendship.”

I think in some cases, when an alloromantic allosexual person makes friends with an aromantic asexual who is very much friendship-oriented and is unusually attentive, loving, emotional, invested, etc in friendship–more than the alloromantic allosexual’s other friends–that alloromantic allosexual can get used to being the object of that exceptional friendly attention and love and obviously grow to like it, whether they’re reciprocating adequately or not. So if their aromantic asexual friend suddenly decides the friendship is over or they would rather focus on other friends, the alloromantic allosexual person feels particularly offended and disappointed. They were spoiled by the kind of friendship that the aro ace offered, took it for granted, and now feel like they got cheated somehow when it goes away. There might even be an undercurrent of singlism, a belief that because an aro ace is perpetually single and sexless, they should be more available and engaged as a friend than all the other alloromantic allosexuals who are dating and fucking and married are.

There seems to be a sense of entitlement, is what I’m saying. It’s like romantic-sexual people think,

“I haven’t done anything wrong, I haven’t been a bad friend according to my own standards, so you should be my friend and you should pay attention to me and you should treat me like I’m important to you, just like you always have. And I still get to date and have sex with other people and do whatever I want and treat you in whatever way is convenient for me, and you’re supposed to accept that because that’s the way friendship works.”

Well, guys, I have a newsflash for you: no one is entitled to friendship. And romantic-sexual people are sure as hell not entitled to friendship from aromantic and/or asexual people, especially if they fail to meet the standards that aromantics and/or asexuals set in their friendships. You can’t compare aromantic asexuals to your other romantic-sexual friends and say, “Well, my romantic-sexual friends are cool with being my friend according to these conditions, so you should be too.” If you want to be friends with people who have no expectations of you, who are cool with the most superficial and unemotional kind of interaction, who don’t care if you treat friendship like it’s this insignificant footnote unnoticeable under the altar of romance and sex where you worship, then go be friends with people who are just like you and don’t fucking complain about aromantics/asexuals peaceing out of your life or actively avoiding you.

To the aromantic and/or asexual people out there: don’t settle for shitty friendship from romantic-sexual people (or even romantic asexuals!) just because the world says it’s the norm and you can’t do any better. Of course, you can do better. You have the right to discuss the terms of your friendship with anyone and everyone you know, and you have the right to terminate a friendship if it isn’t satisfying to you. You have the right to set specific boundaries in friendship, to let your friends know what you like and dislike, to notify them when they’ve hurt or offended or disrespected you and to receive a sincere apology for it. If it becomes clear to you that you are fundamentally incompatible with another person, don’t try to be their friend. If you’re already friends with them, then please feel free to end that friendship.

Romantic-sexual society loves to treat friendship and romance like two colossally different things, but the truth is, they work the same way because human relationships in general all require the same things to succeed: compatibility, teamwork, respect, communication, and love. A friendship isn’t any easier or simpler or lower-maintenance than romantic relationships, unless you’re talking about very casual friendly acquintanceships that are more about activity sharing than they are about emotional connection. Incompatibility–whether between personalities, relationship style, relationship desires, needs and expectations–is not always fixable, and if it’s not fixable, you shouldn’t be connected to that other person. Period. Doesn’t matter if your relationship is romantic or friendly. If you want x, y, z from the relationship and the other person wants a, b, c, then you’re fucking wrong for each other. Get over it and move on.

I, as a permanently single aromantic asexual, do not and should not have to do all or most of the emotional labor in my friendships, nor settle for some bullshit from romantic-sexual people just because their bullshit is culturally acceptable and normalized.

No, I don’t have to be your friend.

A Response to rotten-zucchinis, on the cupioromanticism debate

I recently submitted a post to Asexual Advice explaining my problem with cupioromanticism, and Tumblr user rotten-zucchinis responded to me. The following is my reply to their response.

Basically, I vehemently disagree with your suggestion that romantic attraction does not define romantic relationships and in fact has nothing at all to do with whether or not a relationship is romantic.

Go ask 100 alloromantics if they would call a relationship they have with someone who they are not romantically attracted to, who is also not romantically attracted to them, “romantic.” Ask them if they’ve ever wanted a romantic relationship with someone they are not romantically attracted to. I would bet money every single one of them would wrinkle their nose and go, “That doesn’t make any damn sense.” And without asking them directly, we can observe them in romantic relationships which have gone flat or bad, where romantic or even affectionate and loving behaviors are scarce or nonexistent, yet they still define that relationship as romantic because their feelings for each other are romantic to them.

rotten-zucchninis said: “The “romantic” nature of a romantic relationship is not about the presence or absence of specific acts, behaviours, or attractions ( which are in turn different from romantic feelings for someone, which are in turn different from a relationship feeling romantic ).

A relationship is “romantic” if and only if the relationship feels romantic. And that’s going to mean and look like a whole bunch of different things for a whole bunch of different people.*”

What you just said doesn’t actually mean anything. A relationship in which both people are not romantically attracted to each other can’t “feel romantic” to them, unless they believe that specific behaviors are innately romantic, which is the false premise that I’ve been trying to bust all along. What the hell does it mean for a relationship to “feel romantic” independent of romantic attraction AND behavior? Attraction IS a feeling. That’s all it is. You can’t say that romantic attraction and romantic feelings are different and separate. That’s totally illogical. And again, go find alloromantics and run this by them, considering they’re the ones who definitely know what romantic attraction feels like and how it compares to not feeling romantic about someone at all.

By the way, your suggestion that romantic feelings are different than romantic attraction–I’d love to see you try to actually explain that one–would still ultimately invalidate cupioromanticism. If you have romantic feelings for anyone, you’re not aromantic. Period. You could be gray-romantic. You could be demiromantic. But you’re not aromantic. Aromanticism is about not feeling romantic attraction, that’s it. So trying to pass off cupioromanticism as “wanting a relationship that feels romantic, even though you don’t experience romantic attraction” just doesn’t make any sense.

And if you’re aromantic, supposedly, you can’t even know what “romantic” feels like in the first place! The only way you can formulate a theoretical “romantic” feeling in your head is if you go by romantic society’s presentation of romance and romantic relationships, which again heavily rests on behaviors and gestures, and which brings us right back to my bottom line about the amatonormative premise of “romantic relationships are superior to nonromantic relationships, in part because they are the only kind in which these behaviors and emotions can happen” being the fuel of self-identified cupioromantics thinking they want “romantic” relationships.

Nonromantic love exists.

Nonromantic passion exists.

Nonromantic intimacy exists.

Nonromantic caring and kindness exists.

Nonromantic emotional attachment exists.

If it doesn’t exist for alloromantic people, fine, but a lot of aromantics CAN and DO experience those things in their nonromantic relationships, whether toward desired partners or friends or whoever. The combination of all those emotional experiences cannot and do not amount to a universal “romantic” attraction or feeling, and therefore cannot warrant the labeling of a relationship with all of those feelings in them as “romantic” without the agreement and consent of the people actually in the relationship.

That leaves behaviors: living together, the full range of physical affection and intimacy, spending quality time together, making a formal commitment to each other, co-parenting children together, legal marriage, etc. And every single one of those behaviors can happen nonromantically, between two people who are not romantically attracted to each other and never will be and have no interest in romantic relationships.

So my definition stands. Romantic relationships are defined by romantic attraction present in at least one person and the mutual agreement that the relationship is romantic and will be publicly declared as such. Without romantic attraction in at least one party, there’s no motive to label the relationship “romantic” and nothing to separate it from any queerplatonic or otherwise nonromantic partnership that exists. Likewise, those queerplatonic relationships and other nonromantic partnerships are defined as nonromantic because they DON’T include romantic attraction and are not presented to society as being romantic in nature.

If you have two different people approach you, one is romantic and one is aromantic, both want to be your partner and both would behave in exactly the same ways toward you and in the partnership, then the only difference is the presence or absence of romantic attraction and the label. If both relationships would be primary, if both relationships would function as a partnership, if both relationships would include love and bonding and affection, if both relationships would have the same level of involvement and commitment, then yeah, the two people are offering the same relationship but with different names and different personal motive. From your perspective as an aromantic, there is absolutely no reason why the romantic person offering a romantic relationship should be more desirable than the aromantic person offering a queerplatonic or nonromantic partnership. You can’t feel anyone else’s feelings but your own anyway. So always preferring the romantic person and relationship can only come from a place of believing that romantic relationships are automatically superior, more valuable, more meaningful, more serious, etc than nonromantic relationships, and that is romance supremacy be definition and a message handed down by an amatonormative society.

You didn’t actually explain how the two relationships in my example would be “different,” so I don’t know how else to refute your objection to my example. All I can say is that if the two are behaviorally identical and equally loving, then the only difference would be the romantic attraction of lack thereof your partner feels and what they want to label the relationship. You’re telling me not to “disregard potential differences in different kind of relationships,” but you don’t actually list what those differences are. And you’re ignoring my original example in which there are NOT behavioral or emotional differences between a romantic person’s romantic relationship and an aromantic person’s nonromantic relationship/partnership, so I don’t see how your comment makes sense.

I haven’t seen a single self-identified cupiromantic person provide a positive, rational reason why they would want a romantic relationship, that has nothing to do with assumptions about romantic relationships being the only kind of primary partnerships, romantic relationships being more involved or loving or emotional than nonromantic partnerships, romantic relationships being the only source of commitment or physical affection or some other desirable behavior, romantic love being more compelling or emotional or passionate or deep than nonromantic love, etc. All of those assumptions are bullshit, all of them are toxic, and all of them come from amatonormativity and romance supremacy. If and when someone can come up with a reason for an aromantic person wanting a romantic relationship with someone who is romantically attracted to them that is NOT based on any of those assumptions, I’ll take it into consideration as a possible justification for the cupioromantic identity. Until then, I stand by my critique of it.

We agree that amatonormativity is the problem here. But an aromantic person gunning for romantic relationships in their own life as a coping mechanism, to deal with a fear of being alone or socially insignificant or a desire for physical intimacy or a desire for a primary partner, IS problematic and contributing to amatanormativity. There is nothing benign about it. The belief and assumption of “No one will want to be primary partners with me or give me the priority, affection, and emotional intimacy I desire unless I enter romantic relationships” is contributing to amatonormativity, even as it comes from there, by erasing and invalidating queerplatonic and other nonromantic partnerships and friendship.

P.S. If you’re suggesting that two aromantic people could be in a “romantic” relationship with each other, I’m going to stop you right there and call bullshit. Why any two aros would come to that conclusion about their relationship is beyond me–as someone on the aro spectrum and someone who talks to aros of all sexual orientations and degrees of romance-repulsion–and I think the idea goes back to the same problematic idea underlying cupioromanticism that I’ve already pointed out: that romantic relationships can be identified or categorized as such independent of feelings, which only leaves behavior to work with. And that feeds into the amatonormative and yes, romance supremacist, attitude that romantic relationships exclusively hoard certain desirable features by nature and that those features cannot exist in nonromantic contexts.

Guess what? I only want to be partners and queerplatonic friends with other aromantic people, and I also want my relationships to be emotionally passionate, deep, expressive, caring, tender, super loving, intimate, and affectionate. I can and will live with partners long-term in a committed and intentional fashion, be very physically and sensually intimate with them, behave lovingly toward them, demonstrate my feelings through letters or love poems or gifts or doing something special for them or saying “I love you” for no reason on a regular basis, etc. I don’t care if the world codes any or all of this as “romantic,” I don’t care if romantic people think that I’m not supposed to feel or do them in friendships, and I don’t care if romantic people mistake my queerplatonic friendships for romantic relationships–I’ll correct them straight up. This is a free universe, and I can do whatever the fuck I want in my relationships, regardless of whether it lines up with mainstream social norms or whether romantic people get it or not.

I know what it is to feel powerful love in a friendship, what it feels like to be passionate and intimate and deeply bonded to someone else in friendship, what it feels like to be joyful in friendship, even blissful. I know none of those feelings are romantic by default, at least for someone who is aromantic–and we are talking about aromantic people here, not alloromantics or even demiromantics and grayromantics experiencing romantic attraction. I also know what it’s like to have ignorant, narrow-minded alloromantic people try to tell me that I’m in denial about my own feelings or about love and friendship in general, because this laundry list of emotions and behaviors are “romantic” by nature, according to them.

Do I think the kind of friendships + partnerships I desire can be formed with alloromantics? No. I don’t. And I realize that they’re the overwhelming majority of the species. But that sure as fuck doesn’t mean that I’m going to go out there and try to date and find a romantic partner, out of desperation for something more rewarding than common friendliness/friendship. I know I want domestic partnerships, passionate friendships, queerplatonic friendships, friendships that are sensually physical and emotional. I don’t want anyone to be romantically attracted to me or to offer me the kind of relationship I want because of romantic attraction. I sure as fuck would never prefer some romantic person’s romantic love over a fellow aromantic person’s love.

And why should I? Romance is not better than friendship. Romantic love is not better or deeper or more intense than nonromantic love. Romantic relationships are not the only kind of relationships that can be partnerships. Romance has nothing to offer me or any other aromantic person that we can’t get from friendship/queerplatonic relationships/other nonromantic relationships.

Except the other person’s romantic attraction and society’s blessing that we’re living acceptable lives. And I don’t give a single fuck about that shit.

Amatanormativity, Romance, and Partnership: My Problem with “Cupioromanticism”

Some months ago, a new term and identity emerged out of the aromantic/asexual communities on Tumblr: cupioromantic, denoting a person who is aromantic (does not experience romantic attraction) but desires a romantic relationship. Several asexuals (aromantic and alloromantic) in the Tumblr community seemed to disapprove of the term/concept or disagreed with the idea of it being necessary as a sub-identity under the aromantic umbrella. “Cupioromantic” is supposed to be the romantic orientation version of “cupiosexual,” which describes asexuals who want sexual relationships—although most asexuals who like sex don’t bother using any other label except for “asexual.” Most asexuals, including ones who don’t like or have or want sex, believe that you can be asexual and still want sex to be a regular part of your life and relationships. I’m not interested in touching that subject in this post, although I will say that the idea of an asexual wanting sex is a lot more reasonable and justifiable than cupioromanticism.

As an aromantic-spectrum asexual and a radical relationship anarchist, I take major issue with “cupioromanticism” as a concept. I think it’s a mostly useless identity, although if you want to use it, no one can stop you. But the idea behind the identity is what’s so problematic, and that’s what I want to dig into in this post, because it’s connected to other issues in aromantic politics.

So, first let’s set a foundation. In order to understand why cupioromanticism is problematic, you need to know about amatonormativity, which is a word coined by professor and philosopher Elizabeth Brake in her book Minimizing Marriage: Marriage, Morality, and the Law. She defines amatonormativity as: “the assumption that a central, exclusive, amorous relationship is normal for humans, in that it is a universally shared goal, and that such a relationship is normative, in the sense that it should be aimed at in preference to other relationship types.” Amatonormativity perpetuates romance supremacy, or the belief that romantic relationships and love are superior to all relationships and love and should not only be desired above all relationships but prioritized above everything else by default. Amatonormativity is a paradigm installed and institutionalized into our culture, primarily perpetuated by the mainstream media, that teaches us to idolize, desire, and depend on romantic relationships and view ourselves as either loved or unloved through our status as someone else’s romantic other.

Understand that aromanticism is a very recent concept and identity, and the dialogue going on within and because of the aromantic population is extremely new. Aromantic identity originally cohered in the asexual community, but it has since become clear that aromanticism is not exclusive to asexuality and describes people of all sexual orientations. The vast majority of mankind doesn’t know aromanticism exists. This is not popular knowledge. Aromanticism is not represented in the media, in text books, in sexuality classes, in the mainstream LGBTQ movement, or anywhere else. Aromanticism is pretty much only alive online and in asexual education efforts, at this point. Most people, who are predominantly romantic, are completely ignorant of aromanticism and everything connected to it, and they have not yet been challenged or presented with the opportunity to deconstruct or even critically think about amatonormativity, romance supremacy, or common ideas of romance in general.

Aromanticism—aromantic love, feelings, relationships, emotion, identity, sexuality, and experience—is invisible in our culture. In every culture. It is imperative that you understand that, whether you’re aromantic or romantic and especially if you’ve ever even remotely identified with “cupioromanticism.” Invisibility is disempowerment. While aromantics don’t experience specific, directed, and intentional oppression and violence at the hands of the romantic majority or their cultural hegemonies, the total invisibility of aromantics is representative of their disempowerment, and that invisibility does nothing to protect them from amatonormativity. In fact, the invisibility of aromanticism is essential to the survival of amatonormativity.

As far as I’m concerned, the idea of cupioromanticism, of aromantics wanting romantic relationships, comes from a misguided place of internalized amatonormativity and romance supremacy. It comes from unquestioned adoption of mainstream relationship norms. It comes from anti-aromanticism. And it is perfectly logical that some aromantic-spectrum people carry enough of that baggage, that they’re telling themselves and the world that they want “romantic” relationships even though they don’t feel romantic attraction. If you don’t do the work of breaking all this social conditioning down in your own mind, you will be controlled by it. Aromantics who think they want or need romantic relationships aren’t much different than asexuals who believe they have to be okay with sex, that they should be willing and able to have sex in romantic relationships. Both sets of people are expressing their social programming, their internalized amatonormativity and compulsory sexuality.

Cupioromanticism, the idea that someone could be aromantic but want romantic relationships, is extremely problematic because it rests on the belief that there are unalterable criteria that separates “romantic” relationships from “nonromantic” relationships,” “romantic” love from “nonromantic” love, that certain emotions and behaviors can only be experienced in romantic relationship. Cupioromanticism invalidates queerplatonic friendships, passionate friendship, and primary nonromantic partnerships, even if unintentionally.

Cupioromanticism doesn’t make any sense because the only thing that defines romantic relationships as romantic is romantic attraction. That’s it. The feeling of romantic attraction. Not love, not prioritization, not emotional intimacy, not touch, not commitment, not cohabitation or coparenting or anything else. The only thing that makes a relationship romantic is romantic attraction, and romantic attraction is a completely subjective feeling that varies by person. The only way that you could be aromantic and want romantic relationships is if you specifically want to “date” someone who is romantically attracted to you, if you want your primary partner in life to be someone who is romantically attracted to you. You can find everything else except for romantic attraction outside of romantic relationships, if you look and if you want it, so a desire for closeness or love or primary partnership cannot be reasons you specifically want romantic relationships as opposed to queerplatonic relationships or any other kind of nonromantic friendship.

If you are aromantic but want to have a partner who’s romantically in love with you, I would think long and hard about why. Again, that desire—while technically the only good reason for identifying as “cupioromantic”—is pretty much rooted in romance supremacy. If you’re aromantic but the only kind of partner good enough for you is someone who’s romantically attracted to you, you must believe on some level that romantic love is better than nonromantic love. And that’s fucked up. You should work on scrapping that belief.

I can see how some aromantics who very much want a primary partner, a life partner/long-term partner, some kind of relationship that is very close and intimate and loving and meets their needs for touch, quality time, and priority would believe that the only way to get that kind of connection and commitment from someone is to enter into romantic relationship. In other words, I can see how a desire for romantic relationship may come from fear of having no significant relationship or partnership at all. We live in a world where most people are romantic, and in accordance with amatonormativity, most if not all romantic people do believe that romantic relationships are not only superior to friendship but the only kind of relationship that matters and the only kind that can be a primary/committed partnership. It’s always going to be easier to find someone who wants you for romantic partnership than it is to find someone who wants you for nonromantic/queerplatonic partnership or committed, passionate friendship.

But this fear shouldn’t and doesn’t need to be the basis of an identity. Convincing yourself that you need to get involved in a kind of relationship you don’t naturally feel interested in, just because you think there’s nothing else available, is a bad idea and not a reason to create some new label. Yes, some aromantic people get into romantic relationships with people they care about, who have romantic feelings for them, because they do want a partner and don’t mind if their partner is technically into them romantically. But unintentionally ending up in romantic relationship—especially if you’re sexual and want a steady sexual partner anyway—is not the same thing as actively wanting romantic relationship, as an aromantic person, because you think it can offer you something you can’t get anywhere else.

There is NOTHING that you can get from romantic relationships, that you can’t get from nonromantic friendship, except for your partner’s romantic attraction to you. I’m going to say it until you accept it. No behavior is inherently romantic. Love is not inherently, exclusively romantic. A primary partnership is not definitively romantic. You can have sex with a nonromantic partner, you can be committed to a nonromantic partner, you can kiss and cuddle and hug a nonromantic partner, you can live with a nonromantic partner, you can raise kids with nonromantic partners, you can mutually put each other first in a nonromantic relationship. Everything and anything you could possibly do or feel can be experienced in friendship and nonromantic partnership, except for romantic attraction.

Now, obviously, for many romantic people, certain things are romantic to them and therefore will only happen in their romantic relationships. But an individual’s perception of specific behaviors, relationship orchestration, and feelings as “romantic” never, ever functions as universal truth. Our personal feelings determine what is “romantic” and not romantic, nothing else. We cannot even define what romantic attraction is or feels like, in a way that applies to all human beings. Different romantic people experience romantic attraction differently, and what is “romantic” for some romantic people is nonromantic for some aromantic people. The pursuit of a singular and official definition for romantic attraction is futile. It doesn’t exist. It’s an emotion, and like all emotions, it’s totally subjective and internal and ultimately indescribable. Be skeptical of anyone who tries to tell you that their personal definition of romantic attraction is universally applicable. Romantic attraction is an abstract, instinctual sensation—not one you can define with a checklist of certain desires, interests, or physical symptoms.

Where so many romantic people tend to fuck up is in their assumption that romantic attraction is universal and experienced in just one way, that certain behaviors can only be motivated by romantic attraction—for all people—and therefore are defined as romantic in and of themselves. Instead of investigating a person’s feelings, apart from their behavior, we assume what their feelings are by looking at their behavior.

“A kiss is romantic, so if you kiss someone, you’re romantically attracted to them.”

“Primary partnerships are romantic, so if you want to be someone’s primary partner, you must have romantic feelings for them.”

This erroneous logic is based on a false premise: that both romantic behaviors and romantic feelings are uniform throughout the human species and that romantic behaviors are romantic independent of individual intent and attraction. In addition to the invisibility of aromanticism, romantic society doesn’t acknowledge these nonromantic phenomena because it teaches that certain behaviors and ways of relating have global romantic meaning regardless of anyone’s actual feelings. In reality, no behavior has meaning outside of personal intent, perception, and feeling—and the meaning of any given behavior changes according to individual and circumstance.

When aromantics desire, participate in, or feel things that are coded as romantic by mainstream society, romantic people falsely interpret the aromantic person’s feelings and intentions as romantic in nature. Romantic people are superimposing their own feelings, their own experiences of relating to others, onto aromantics and suggesting that aromantics are confused or in denial about who they are and what they want.

“You can’t be aromantic if you want a partner, if you feel strong emotion toward someone, if you love to cuddle and kiss people, if you love anyone who isn’t family, if you want to live with someone in a committed way, etc, etc—because all of that stuff is romantic.”

This is erasure of nonromantic love, nonromantic partnership, nonromantic touch and intimacy, and it is closely connected to romantic-sexual supremacy. It is very much in the interest of amatonormativity and romance supremacy to create the illusion that many desirable experiences can only be accessed through romance, because if they can be accessed through nonromantic relationship, all of a sudden romantic relationships are not so worth coveting or glorifying as extraordinary. By making positive emotional and relational resources scarce and limited to romantic relationships, society ensures that nonromantic friendship is continually subordinated to romance and devalued, which serves the patriarchal heteronormative capitalistic political machine in various ways. Deromanticizing and desexualizing love, touch, intimacy, commitment, and partnership would not only empower and liberate aromantics, but destroy amatonormativity and dismantle the romantic-sexual relationship hierarchy on a broad cultural scale.

When romantic people attempt to deny aromantic experiences that contradict the premise of loving connection only existing in romance, they’re performing a kind of orientation centrism: the refusal to acknowledge socio-emotional experiences outside of one’s own orientation(s), believing in the superiority and exclusive normalcy of one’s own experiences and practices, and believing that everyone else should be and live and feel like you. Forcefully romanticizing other people’s nonromantic relationships, love, intimacies, and identities is relational and emotional imperialism, an extension of the cultural, linguistic, ontological, and historical imperialism that goes on in the international political arena and the academic world. There is an ongoing tradition of distorting relationships, sexuality, and ways of loving in other time periods and parts of the world, for the purpose of making them fit into mainstream, contemporary, white, Anglo-Saxon, romantic-sexual realities—and most everyone is guilty of it to one degree or another, regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, etc. Instead of accepting that there are realities different, even incompatible, with our own and trying our best to see them for what they are instead of what we want them to be, we often filter them through our personal biases for the purpose of serving and reinforcing our own desires, our own experiences, our own identities. All romantic-sexual people—straight, gay, bisexual, queer—have done this to friendship, to nonromantic and nonsexual relationships of the past and the present, in their own countries and in other countries. Instead of looking at other people’s feelings, relationships, and behaviors in the context of their time and place, romantic-sexual people assume romantic and sexual attraction and involvement are behind any non-familial love, intimacy, partnership, touch, and strong emotional connection because they themselves believe that romantic-sexual relationships are superior to nonromantic and/or nonsexual friendship.

Romantic people erasing, denying, and romanticizing aromantic relationships, love, and desire for connection is similar to English speaking societies ignoring and erasing words and concepts in other languages that cannot be directly translated into English, which is linguistic imperialism. It is similar to spreading English into other societies without bridging or encouraging a bridge between language differences, and dismissing the legitimacy of other languages’ unique features. The attitude is, “If it doesn’t exist in English, it doesn’t exist or it isn’t relevant,” because English has become the default “normal” language, the language that ought to be universal. Likewise, there is an attitude in romantic-dominated society that anything out of sync with the romance paradigm and its supporting constructs doesn’t exist, is illegitimate, abnormal, or confused. Any feeling, relationship, or person that doesn’t fit into romantic society’s amatonormative reality is buried in invisibility and inaccurately repackaged as romantic. Romantic society has no interest in learning how to speak aromanticism. It only insists on spreading the language, the culture, of romance, and just like with English-speaking white nations and their otherized counterparts, many aromantics actually find themselves willing to submit to their own erasure, seduced into a desire for assimilation into the powerful and visible normative majority. If romantic relationships are superior to nonromantic relationships and if romance is the only source of love and if romance is the defining characteristic of a person’s humanity, then pretending to be romantic and entering into romantic relationships after convincing yourself that’s what you want become logical acts of self-denial.

Speaking of language, it must be understood that power and freedom do not exist without the ability to effectively communicate and express one’s truth, which is why the labels and other words aromantic people use to describe their feelings, desires, and relationships are necessary and important. Funnily enough, English—which has become the one and only global language—includes a handful of sexualized and romanticized words that linguistically create and support the actual system of relationships normative in English-speaking nations, a system that is intensely amatonormative and saturated with compulsory sexuality and romance supremacy. Our own language erases and shuts down aromantic and asexual experiences, lives, relationships, and emotions. As we speak it on a daily basis, we are reinforcing the very romantic-sexual paradigm that denies our existence as aromantic people. The words we invent to describe and navigate our feelings and relationships and even the identity term “aromantic” are not just silly internet neologisms that have no real meaning. They are tools aromantics need to assert our own reality and the realness of our selves. They are a form of resistance to amatonormativity, romance supremacy, the idea that all people are romantic and only romantic relationships are legitimate sources of love, intimacy, and partnership.

I have to emphasize that romanticizing emotion is just as harmful and ridiculous as romanticizing behaviors and language, and this act on the part of romantic society explains why so many romantic people make assumptions about aromantic people’s emotional lives. It’s pretty common for aromantic people to see and hear romantics objecting to the existence of aromanticism with comments like: “You mean you don’t have feelings?” or “These people must be sociopaths.” As if romantic attraction is the sum total of human emotion. (Frankly, we should be more disturbed about what that says of romantic people than offended as aromantics.) As if romantic love is the only kind of love that exists. As if romantic attraction is the only thing that enables a person to be warm, kind, friendly, passionate, deeply emotional, and empathetic.

Aromantics are not emotionally stunted. We don’t have a shorter emotional range than romantic people do. We just don’t experience romantic attraction. That’s it. That’s the only categorical difference between aromantics and romantics. Romantic attraction has nothing to do with love, emotional attachment, empathy, fear, anger, desire, sadness, sensitivity, or even sexuality. There are aromantics in every sexual orientation and just as much variety in the aromantic population, in terms of social and emotional style and tendencies, as there is in the romantic population. An aromantic’s preferences and desires when it comes to having a partner, being a parent, engaging in emotional connection, talking about feelings, engaging in physical affection and intimacy, and everything else under the umbrella of personal relationships vary from person to person.

As for the debate about what makes “romantic” relationships vs. nonromantic relationships and where an aromantic person’s desires for closeness and partnership fall, I have to hammer home this fact that nothing is naturally romantic except romantic attraction, and that aromantics can participate in any behavior they like with a friend or partner, regardless of the absence of romantic attraction. The aromantic section of the asexual community created the word and concept of queerplatonic relationships precisely because many aromantic people want relationships that go beyond common friendship but are not romantic. Queerplatonic friendship can include anything typically found in romantic relationships, and their defining characteristic is that no romantic attraction is present between the two friends in the relationship. Queerplatonic relationships can be anything you want. Some of them are primary partnerships, and some aren’t. Some are physically affectionate, and some aren’t. Some are exclusive, and some aren’t. Some are even sexual, though most are not.

The idea of queerplatonic relationships, of aromantic love and partnership, is so radical and significant—more than any of us who have become used to the concept realize—for many reasons but particularly because it illuminates the truth that there is indeed love, intimacy, connection, and partnership outside of romance. Romance is not the source of these things and never has been. That’s what is so important to understand, for cupioromantic-identifying aros and people who support that identity. If you can access everything you desire from a friend or partner in queerplatonic relationship or other forms of friendship, except for romantic attraction, why would you want romantic relationships as a self-identified aromantic person? If you acknowledge that queerplatonic and passionate friendships exist and are possible, if you acknowledge that nonromantic primary partnerships can happen, why would you want a romantic relationship as a self-identified aromantic person? If you, as an aromantic person, were presented with the options of a conventional romantic relationship and a queerplatonic partnership, both of them offering everything you want in a significant relationship, the only difference being the presence or absence of romantic attraction from your partner, why would you choose the romantic relationship?

Unconditional Love and Long-Term, Committed Relationships

Longevity has always been really important to me when it comes to relationships. (I mean, interpersonal relationships generally, not romantic relationships specifically.) I want passionate friends who I can happily live with and love for the rest of my life. I want deeply loving friendships that last until death and continue to grow stronger and more meaningful over time. I want commitment from my domestic partners. I want loyalty from every friend I love. I want to know that if I love someone, that person is still going to be in my life 30+ years from now, still connected to me, still caring about and loving me—just as I expect myself to do for them.

I’ve had discussions with people of all ages online about the topic of relationships (not just romantic ones) ending in break-up, and I’ve often been at odds with many of them. I see a severed relationship as a failed relationship. Something went wrong, and that’s why it dissolved. I define “successful relationship” as one that lasts happily until death. People who disagree with me believe that a relationship’s success is based only on how well it served its purpose however long it lasted. They also argue that a relationship that is unhappy but continues is not successful at all, which I agree with. To me, both happiness and endurance define a successful relationship. To the people who disagree with me—and there seem to be a lot, particularly in my age group—happiness in the moment is the only thing that defines whether a relationship was a good one or a successful one. Commitment and loyalty aren’t important or necessary to them.

These people likely don’t understand why I place such an emphasis on longevity. If they knew me personally, maybe they would ask, “Why do you care so much about your friendships and partnerships lasting forever? Why don’t you just let go of that need and be satisfied if you get something that’s good for a couple years and when it ends, just get a replacement? Why can’t you be happy with a bunch of pretty good short-term relationships instead of a few long-term ones?”

Simple. I want long-term, committed relationships with friends because I want unconditional love. When I commit to someone, I’m not committing to the relationship itself so much as I’m making a commitment to love that other person no matter what happens. Staying with someone, a friend or a partner, is about loyalty, sure. Loyalty’s important. It’s a great character trait and one that I want to possess. But more important than loyalty, more important than keeping a promise or commitment for it’s own sake, more important than anything is love.

There are only two kinds of love: conditional and unconditional. That’s the bottom line.

Conditional love says: “Do what I want you to do, make me feel good, and then I’ll love you. As soon as you quit behaving yourself for me, as soon as it’s not effortless to feel good with you, I don’t love you anymore.”

Unconditional love is: “I love you. Not because of anything you do or say or feel. I love you because I choose to love you. I love you because love feels good to me. You don’t have the power to take my love away, nor does any event in our relationship.”

Here’s the thing: it’s easy to love someone when they’re acting the way you want and giving you everything you want and when nothing challenging is going on in your life or theirs. It’s easy to love someone when everything around you and between you is going smoothly all by itself. It’s easy to love someone when all you do is have fun together. It’s easy to love someone who’s loving you all the time, just the way you like.

But the love you feel in those circumstances is not unconditional. That love doesn’t require any focus or effort of you. That love doesn’t even necessarily coincide with loyalty or commitment; you’re there loving that person because it’s easy to do so, not because you’ve chosen to be loyal or committed.

Unconditional love is proven through the testing of it. And I’m not just talking about commitment or loyalty in times of trouble. I’m talking about loving someone when it requires your focus, your will, your deliberate intent, your commitment to the feeling of love—not just to the relationship agreement. I’m talking about appreciating another person’s positive aspects and their presence in your life, even when they’ve said or done something you don’t like. I’m talking about forgiving someone when they hurt your feelings or make a mistake. I’m talking about deciding that you’re going to feel good, about yourself and them and the relationship, without asking them to change or behave differently. I’m talking about deciding that you’re going to look at them and feel love—not just say the word, not just intellectually think you love them in the abstract—but feel the emotion of love, because you want to. Not because they did something lovable.

And I’m talking about staying tuned in to that emotion of love, even when something difficult happens in the life you share with the other person. This is especially relevant to primary partnerships/domestic partnerships. When you are someone else’s main source of support, when you’re really in this life together—financially, physically, emotionally, etc—unconditional love keeps you there even when you’re both facing a challenge that makes it harder for you to feel good on a daily basis. Anyone can bail when shit hits the fan. Bailing’s easy. Leaving the problem with your friend is easy. Moving on to someone else who’s in a better situation is easy. Staying and making the best of things and being happy with your imperfect circumstances requires love. Your love, your positive focus. Not your partner’s or anyone else’s.

If you’re young and figuring out what you want or if you don’t have any interest in long-term primary partnerships or you’re not yet ready to commit to somebody, that’s all well and good, but if you do want a long-term partnership of some kind, you need to realize that there is no perfect person, there is no guarantee of a problem-free life or problem-free partnership for anyone on the planet, and your happiness is not dependent on anyone except you. You’re not going to find someone who’s flawless, who’s always well-behaved by your standards, who never makes mistakes and never challenges your patience. You’re not going to ever find a relationship that’s sunshine and rainbows all day every day forever. You cannot prevent challenging things from happening to you or any other person in the future, so you aren’t going to meet someone whose life is guaranteed to be always smooth and easy and comfortable that you can effortlessly participate in. None of that shit exists.

So, at some point, you either decide that you’re going to be committed to someone you do love and stick it out when shit temporarily sucks, or you just never experience a long-term partnership. If you can’t be loving and loyal to another person even when it’s hard as fuck, you aren’t long-term partner material. If you’re waiting for someone else to please you all the time or most of the time and you make your commitment conditional upon that, you are not long-term partner material.

Having a happy, loving, satisfying, long-term partner isn’t about finding the perfect person. It’s about finding a person you adore who has flaws and bullshit you can live with indefinitely. Personal growth and improvement happens; human perfection doesn’t. The happy long-term partnership isn’t about bitterly resigning to the other person’s flaws or bitching about them until something changes. It isn’t the denial of romantic infatuation that goes, “This person is perfect in every way!” It’s loving acceptance that sounds like, “Yeah, I know my partner is weak in those ways, but that’s okay. Not a big deal. They have so many positive qualities, that I don’t mind the negative ones, and I’m not going to pay the negative ones much attention.”

And here’s the flaw in logic that all those people who say “leave unhappy relationships no matter what, commitment is bullshit!” fail to understand: being happy in a long-term, committed partnership or friendship is not about your partner pleasing you or life being perfect. It’s about you deciding to be happy. That’s all. The only thing happiness takes is your intent and focus. Sure, it’s easier to be happy with someone when everything’s exactly the way you want it to be, but when things are not the way you want, you still have the power and the capability to be happy anyway.

I’m not saying, “Stay in a miserable, unfulfilling partnership/friendship until you die.” I’m saying, “Find a way to be happy independent of the conditions and partner changing.” There’s a huge difference. Happiness is the only thing that matters, you should be happy, you deserve to be happy, but you don’t need anything or anyone to be a certain way in order to feel happiness. Most people believe that happiness is a reaction, so if something isn’t pleasing to them, they have no choice but to leave the situation and go find a better one. But we have so much more power than that—power to emotionally focus ourselves however we want, power to think better-feeling thoughts instead of wallowing in a negative loop, power to distract ourselves from conditions that feel bad, power to find the good in everything and everyone.

I want long-term partnerships and intimate friendships because I want to feel unconditional love for other people and I want to receive it from them. I want domestic life partners who I’m passionate friends with because I want the sweetness and fun and love of sharing home with them, and I want long-term loving friendships because I want to just keep mining them for more joy and more fun and more affection and more intimacy and more connection and more growth. I want my relationships to last forever because I want to love forever because love is the best feeling in the world. I want my life partnerships to last forever because I want to show myself and my partners that I can be unconditionally loving, that I can love them and be happy with them no matter what’s going on, that I can find the good in them over and over again.

I know that I am capable of being committed to my domestic life partners and my intimate friends until I die, regardless of the conditions. I know I am. And I want to do it. I am 100% serious, and I would never make a commitment to someone otherwise. Of course, I prefer it if my life and my relationships are mostly easy and comfortable and smooth, just like everyone else. But I’m not afraid of challenges in my partnerships or other friendships, because I know that I can feel love anyway, and if my partners and friends want to stay with me, I’ll never back down. I sure as hell would never abandon someone I love when they’re going through a tough time.

I’m not interested in marriage, the relationships I desire are nonromantic, but I want to say to my life partners and my other beloved friends (and really mean it):

“I love you, and I’m going to love you until I check out of this world. I adore you, just as you are. I take responsibility for my own feelings and my own happiness, so you’re off the hook there. I’m going to look for the positive aspects in you and in our relationship as much as I can, and I’m not going to ask you to change for me. I will always forgive you and I will always do my best to show you kindness and love and respect and I will promote your freedom and independence unconditionally. I love you so much that I’ll let go of things that don’t matter. I love you whether you have money or not, whether you have a job or not, whether you’re healthy or sick, whether you’re happy or unhappy, whether you agree with me or disagree with me, whether we’re together every day or not. I love you no matter what you look like. I love you, and I’m going to always make the best of everything and try to nurture positive energy between us, even if it takes work. And I will get bucked off the horse more than once, I’m sure, but I am not going to give up in a moment where I feel anything less than blissful love. If I feel bad, I’m going to find a way to make myself feel better, and then I’ll give you and our relationship my attention again.

And I want you to hold me to this unconditional love. I want you to remind me when I forget, that this is what I want and this is what I signed up for.”

So, do I think that people should stay in toxic, unethical, or abusive friendships and partnerships? No. Of course not. But there’s a difference between a rotten relationship and an imperfect relationship that challenges you sometimes. I refuse to live my life as someone who’s only committed to a partner or friend if it’s effortless to follow through with that commitment. If life wants to test my love and commitment in my partnerships and friendships, I’ll welcome it from the standpoint of wanting to master unconditional love. You never get good at anything without practice.