Aro Pride Month
AUREA would like to welcome Arielle to the news team! Here is the first piece she has written: it is an reflective identity piece and will, happily, be one of many articles she writes for us.
Word count: approx. 700 words
Estimated reading time: approx. 4 mins
With the month of June gone by, I’ve had a couple of weeks to reflect on my first Pride Month as a fully-out aro. This has been a long time coming. I’ll be turning thirty-two this month, and I’m not unaware of the fact that I am one of the older members in the aspec communities I belong to. When I talk to my community members, I can’t help but feel a sense of pride at how brave they are, speaking words to affirm their identities boldly and without reservation. When I was growing up, these words didn’t exist yet. I’ve always known I was aromantic - being in a romantic relationship felt like wearing something that fit too tightly - it was wrong on a level that I couldn’t explain. The earliest occurrences of aspec terminology appeared in the early-to-mid 2000s, and didn’t filter into mainstream culture until I was well into my twenties. By the first time I saw the word “aromantic” in print, I had already spent my life up to that point chasing after something that I now understand doesn’t exist for me.
Before the word “aromantic,” I suffered through a lot of the same conversations with well-intentioned but benignly ignorant friends and family members. The sound of people asking me when I was going to “settle down and find somebody” was a constant refrain. When I tried explaining that I just didn’t feel right being in a relationship, I got the standard “you just need to find the right person” advice. When this failed to happen over the years, the questions became sharper, more pointed.
“Maybe you need to lower your standards.”
“Don’t you want to be with somebody? Aren’t you afraid of being alone?”
“You have a fear of commitment. You just don’t want to let anyone close to you.”
“You don’t want to be in love? Are you some kind of sociopath?”
I can now see how callous these comments were - after all, I wasn’t alone, and I definitely didn’t have a fear of commitment. And I was in love - just not in the way they expected. But as a teenager and young adult, I didn’t have a way of explaining that. More than once, my well-intentioned friends and family suggested that that there was something wrong with me. Lacking any other context, I believed them.
While the early aspec community was beginning to find solidarity in online spaces, I was busy dragging myself through relationships I didn’t really want to be in because I thought that was what I was supposed to do. I figured that eventually, I would find the “right” person and settle down into a permanent, monogamous relationship. I finally discovered the term “aromantic” in my late twenties, after an online acquaintance of mine came out as aromantic and asexual. I literally had to Google the terms. I had never heard anyone use them before. I had never realized that aromantic was a thing that people were allowed to be.
Coming out as aromantic has been freeing in many ways, but it has also been an exercise in patience. Aromanticism, and aspec identities in general, are poorly-understood. While most of the people that I’ve come out to have wanted to be supportive and accepting of me, it’s clear that many of them view my identity as some kind of “phase” that will disappear when I “find the right person.” The magic of romantic love will somehow fix me and my strange aversion to relationships. I find myself repeating the same, constant refrain: two people can love each other in an entirely platonic way, and there is nothing less powerful or important about that love than the love between two partners in a romantic relationship.
These conversations can feel like shouting into the wind sometimes, but I’m grateful that at least I’m able to have them now. I no longer accept dismissal. I no longer accept “you just need to find the right person.” It’s been a long time coming, but this Pride Month, I can finally put into words that there is nothing “wrong” with me. I am proud of my aromantic love.