ramblingaro:

genderkoolaid:

genderkoolaid:

*alloro person who has never had to personally grapple with arophobia in their life voice* what do you mean posts about love exclude aros???? OBVIOUSLY i meant all kinds of love, maybe its you that thinks love always equals romance 🙄. stop making up things to get mad about lol. for no other reason i view aros as being bitter haters who resent me for feeling love

this is very much abt loveless people & the hostility towards them, but its also about like. how alloro people don’t seem to understand the level of hostility towards aro people in our culture that might make us dislike these sorts of “love is the most important thing ever!” type posts.

like i’m sure most people would agree with the statement that you shouldn’t rely on a romantic relationship to be happy & other things can be fulfilling and make your life worth living, and support the idea of someone taking a break from romance. but when i say “yeah i dont feel romantic attraction and i never want to get married or have a romantic relationship” to people irl, i get seen as a freak and/or in need of therapy. even when people talk about love between friends, its often still within an amatonormative context, where you can love your friends but your romantic partner comes first and all of your friends either have or intend to eventually find a romantic partner. being aro (at least for me) is not just “alloromantic experience but without romance” it changes like. so much about how i relate to other people, and i feel like a lot of alloro people don’t understand! that saying “all love matters” is not enough to make me feel seen or safe! because a lot of times the underlying message i’ve received is “all love matters… assuming you are Normal want Normal Relationships which are valued in the Normal Way!”

& if you are supposedly supporting other kinds of love as important, but you get super defensive when aro people critique your emphasis on love as a necessary feeling & talk about disliking those kinds of posts. then it seems like you do not support aromantics as much as you might claim to. it gives off big “i was an ace exclusionist until it became uncool to be openly aphobic but i never actually did anything to really change how i view aspec people” energy

Thinking about how when I was in undergrad studying a lot of queer & feminist theory, people would go on and on talking abt love as if it was the pinnacle of everything and THE solution to all. And sometimes I’d voice my frustration with their singular focus on love, and point out that love doesn’t have to do everything and not everyone values love the same way. And I would bring up me being aro, as a way to talk abt what really got me thinking abt what love actually meant to me (nothing).

And 11 times out of 10, the first response I’d receive would b something along the lines of “well love doesn’t have to b romantic!!!” And while that was irritating, it was also ungodly funny to me bc like….not a single soul had mentioned romance at that point. The closest thing to that was me bringing up being aro bc I was bringing up why I had critiques of love. But these people immediately went to “nO THERE IS LOVE THAT ISNT ROMANTIC” because a) they were already thinking and focusing on romantic love already and b) it was easier for them to believe that I, at 22 years old, had NEVER once encountered the concept of nonromantic love than it was for them to believe that I simply don’t really experience love and have had love directed violently at me and I therefore really don’t care for it at all.

(via jay-aro)