wary but listening

[sciatrix]

so I'm commenting on the aromantic community again.

It's not...

I have such complicated feelings about it! It feels like the people who are continuing the conversations I had ten years ago are also erasing me and the context of those conversations, and I admit I get so bitter at the way that I only ever seem to hear from aromantic community and spaces when they're expressing derision at people who associate them with asexual communities, like there was some kind of cadre of aromantic allosexuals who came up with the whole thing.

And then the older I get and the less I'm convinced romantic orientation is a useful metric for talking about the way that people navigate the world of attachment, because I think the thing people are often talking about is more about limerence and less about the way you find people to grow together with and make families, but limerence is only really relevant when you're starting something new and not so much when you're moving together along a path.

And I worry about the endless hyperfocus on beginnings and not on journeys. Because I think that's what connection with people is, and at the end of the day, I think that the best things that aromantic community discussion has to bring to the table is to really emphasize the concept of chosen journeys that we take with other people.

Comments

[sciatrix]

Yeah, those were the other two I was remembering! I didn't come up with either--meloukhia named both things in a conversation on kaz' blog--but I think I popularized both of them over on Writing From Factor X, because I think I had a lot more readership at the time.

I'm still laughing about wtfromantic, especially because several people from the Aces in Austin meetup have since heard my irritated spiel about define romance anyway and all of it is confusing and gleefully started identifying that way. (Offline, I pronounce it "what-the-fuck-romantic," which I believe also alienated some of the folks who picked up quoiromantic, because there was cussin' in it. My good dudes, I love me some swears; I'm not mincing that oath for a word I never intended for anything but expressing my own ornery dissatisfaction with paradigms in the first place!)

Oh, also, while I'm being nostalgic: next year will be the ten-year anniversary of the If You Can See the Invisible Elephant, Please Describe It post, which a) was a self-indulgent piece largely meant to tweak the nose of my good buddy Sam, b) was (although metaphorically) largely written with romantic rather than sexual orientation in mind, and c) still attracts a helpful allosexual writing me thousand-word comments about what sexual attraction feels like for them every six months or so.

I'm vaguely tempted to go back and revise it or something.

[sylvaine]

Oh riiiight, meloukhia! I got so used to seeing their blog linked in other context that I had forgotten the ace connection.

!!!!, Dude, I distinctly/em> remember that post! That was one of the posts that I read while trying to figure out what the fuck "romantic" even meant, and one of the ones that led me to the conclusion "oh good, nobody else knows and my alloromantic friends aren't helping either so I'm going to proceed like it's not relevant to me". Shit, of course it still gets Halpful comments. *slightly pained laughter*

(I may no longer identify as aromantic, but I do still firmly believe that, at least for me, the act of defining something as a romance is the most important factor in something being a romance. Lol.)

[wellthisisnice]

hey! hey! did you know? that wtfromantic was translated as QuéCarajoRomanticx in spanish?

and it has its own page in the Asexualpedia! which i've had to share at least once, when there was a conversation about it --the experience, not the term-- in my local whatsapp ace group. (i think the page its a mix of the wtfromantic AVENwiki page and the quoiromantic one at the aromantics wiki.)

[sciatrix]

I did not know that! My goodness, that's awesome!