Asexuality and Aromanticism

June came around real fast this year…

Wikipedia pages for asexuals and aromantics. I don’t know what else to link but I feel like I need to link something.

I think I first learned about asexuality when I was… 12? A very online friend started referring to me as asexual as a joke because I never got celebrity crushes. At the time I obviously didn’t connect with that label*. This was when I started mulling over the idea of being not straight, though, so in a way I was open to such things.

A few years had to pass before I settled into that label. It’s much easier to figure yourself out when your outside influence isn’t trying to push you into a corner, whether or not they believe it’s for your own benefit. Maybe it wasn’t a hard push or anything, but it still felt weird having someone else choose that label for me.

I really don’t know when I learned about being aromantic - all I know is that I saw the word and thought, ‘oh, that’s me.’ It’s a good feeling. It still took me a few years to decide that I should identify with it in any way.

For most of my teen years - I’m only 20 as of writing this - I fussed over whether I ought to call myself aroace. I’m still so young! I could just be a late bloomer! I’m probably, fucking, mentally ill or something. No matter what, I didn’t allow myself to use the term, even when no other term felt right. I was confident that I didn’t like guys, so that’s most labels off the table. Calling myself a lesbian both confined me and gave me imposter syndrome, because I couldn’t name a woman that I was genuinely attracted to. I hardly knew what it meant to be attracted to someone, no matter how many times I’d read about it and listened to people talk.

What actually happened, then…? As far as I can tell, a part of me just… allowed me to call myself aspec for once.

I always knew that I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life tied to one person that I held up above the rest. That too felt constricting. It took me ages to find out that there were other people who agreed with me on that in any way. The idea of one partner being the most important thing in your life no matter what, with everyone and everything else being second, is something that I think more people should reflect on, even if you’re very much attracted to other people.

It’s completely normal for feelings to change, and then for the words to describe those feelings to change alongside them. I know there can be a lot of history behind certain labels, but it’s fine if you get them wrong sometimes. Maybe it was the right one at some point but you realised something about yourself and now need to put it down. I only bring this up because so much of the discussion around asexuality revolves around the idea of someone deciding that they’re not asexual later on, and… so what? What’s the issue? It happens all the time. We can apply that logic to everything that anyone can ever call themselves, but we don’t, because it’s stupid.

There’s a lot of, uh, microlabels I think they’re called? Especially under the aroace umbrella. As much as they get mocked at times, I don’t see any point in judging. If they help someone to find other people like themselves, what does it matter to me? I used to see label discourse near daily and, like, who cares. I still don’t know what cupioromantic means, but I doubt it’s hurting anyone.

I see people who identify as having only partial attraction to others while being aspec, and people who still associate with being aromantic even if they find themselves attracted to a person, and having non-romantic partners, and I love to see that sort of… weirdness. I love it so much. I love it when people have contradictory labels or reject them entirely and make themselves confusing. I love seeing things out of the norm and having them resonate with me, and I love seeing things that make absolutely no sense to me and accepting it and moving on.

To go back to myself, I generally prefer to keep myself unlabelled. Just a personal thing. There’s probably a microlabel that would describe how I feel better than the broadly swept ‘aroace,’ but I don’t particularly care to look for it. If I end up deciding that loosely calling myself aroace when prompted isn’t for me, I’ll pick another label. I mean, seriously, it doesn’t matter that much.

…I feel like everyone who could possibly find this page already knows what asexuality and aromanticism are. This page is redundant.

Happy pride month!