Being Aro

Over the past few years, I’ve been doing some self-exploration when it comes to the ways in which I identify. I’ve been sorting out how I’ve been raised within a social system rife with injustices based on race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religion, education, and class/economic status and how that intersects with the various ways in which I have large amounts of privilege. Frankly, as an old white cis-het woman, I can get away with a ton of shit! I’m trying to use that power for good not evil, and to be a supportive ally more often than a bossy fixer of other people’s problems. … but I still revert to bossy fixer more often than I’d like.

Part of my self-exploration has involved recognizing that the kinds of emotions I feel in relationships aren’t all that normative. For quite a few years, I’ve been asking friends to tell me what they feel when they love someone, because I don’t feel the things society expects me to feel, and I wasn’t sure if all people assumed or pretended they felt what they were supposed to without examining that, or if people really did feel what is culturally defined as love. I’ve come to the conclusion that most people really do love someone—their parents and/or their children and/or their life partners—and that I don’t, at least not in their way. My friends describe feeling that they’d be willing to do anything for the other person, that being with them has a powerful effect on their emotional state, how devastated they’d feel if that person died. And I can’t say I’ve experienced that. I feel friendship, I feel affection, I want to help others, but I don’t think I can say I’ve ever loved a person or a pet in the ways people describe. I was sadder hearing that Jim Henson had died than I was at my father’s death. I’m sorry my father died age fifty-two, but I didn’t feel all the anger and sadness that people describe as grief.

For a while, I self-diagnosed dismissive-avoidant attachment behaviour, and thought that it was probably my being raised in a family in which nobody hugged or kissed or said “I love you” that had led to an inability to attach to others. But now I’m not so happy with that identification. For one thing, attachment theory implies that the essential state of human emotionality is attachment, and that those of us who don’t attach in the ways the society validates are repressing our “real” feelings or redirecting them. But what if my emotional states and functions are in part inherited, and my parents, who had a strong sex life but didn’t display much if any romantic affection, didn’t “naturally” attach to people, either? Why should I blame myself for failing at romantic and familial love, or blame my parents for not nurturing that in me? What if this is a kind of neurodiversity? I wouldn’t say I’m on the autistic spectrum, though probably someone in Psychology has explored this kind of emotionality.

It’s not that I don’t feel emotions: for sure, I do! I feel joy and sadness and fear and anxiety and anger. Books or performances often make me laugh or cry, can frustrate or bore me. People can make me laugh or cry, can frustrate or bore me. I find pleasure and fulfillment in friendship, fellowship, collegiality. I love most of my friends in the same way I love most of Tanya Huff’s novels—I think they’re great and enjoy spending time with them. I love the Creator God and believe that God loves me. I love lakeshores and mosses. I just don’t love people in the ways that most people mean when they say they love their parents or their children or their life partners. I probably come closest with the brother who is nearest to me in age.

I’ve never wanted children of my own, though I respect children and teach children's lit. As a child in the 1960s, I assumed that I would marry a man, quit my job, have children, and be a stay-at-home mom, because that’s what society and adults around me told me would happen because I was a girl. As an adult, I said the only situation in which I’d consider being a mother was if I married someone who desperately wanted a child and was willing to do most of the child-rearing. Glad that didn’t happen, frankly. As a single childless woman (like Hannah McGregor, proud to be a spinster), I’ve had a good career in academia, not affected by the systemic challenges that mothers face. In that way it’s another privilege to acknowledge, one that to some extent balances all the micro aggressions against single women, even from well-meaning coupled friends.

More recently, I’ve been exploring what it would mean to identify as aromantic. This has some advantages, for example allowing me to say that there’s nothing inherently wrong or broken or inadequate about me because I’ve never been in love and currently have no interest in being in love (when I was younger, I hoped I’d fall in love, but I never did much of anything to make that happen and rarely dated). Using the categories outlined in the LGBTQIA+ wiki, I would call myself “desinoromantic”: “an aro-spec attraction where one does not experience full-on romantic attraction. They may experience alterous attraction or other forms of attraction, but they do not experience complete romantic attraction. They may describe their attraction as ‘liking someone, but not loving someone,’ which is the end of their attraction.” And I like the way that aro as a category, like ace and bi and other ways to be under the queer umbrella, isn’t an automatic or essentialist binary. But I’m feeling a disadvantage as well, or perhaps I could say an inadequacy, with aro as an identification. Because there’s an implication that the label only holds for the ways in which I do not attach to others who are potential life partners, but doesn’t cover the way I don’t feel love for my mother.

I’m currently reading and appreciating Refusing Compulsory Sexuality: A Black Asexual Lens on our Sex-Obsessed Culture by Sherronda J. Brown. I value her insights into what it means (and doesn’t mean) to be asexual, which is the A in GLBTIA2S+. Still looking for the equivalent book about refusing compulsory romanticism and familial love. I don’t think I’m able to write it, but I hope someone currently is. The culture I live in seems to me not only to be sex-obsessed, but also obsessed with the idea of (romantic) love. So, for now I’m saying I’m aromantic, part of a diverse group of people who are non-normative when it comes to emotional attachments, under an umbrella in some ways similar to the queer sexuality umbrella.