Love Stories for Aromantics
Written by guest contributor Leon L. Friedman
Word count: 1719 words
Estimated reading time: approx. 8 minutes
Am I in love? Absolutely. I’m in love with ancient philosophers, foreign painters, classic authors, and musicians who have died long ago. I’m a passionate lover. I fawn over these people. I have given them my heart and my soul. The trouble is, I’m unable to love anyone tangible. I have sacrificed a physical bond for a metaphysical relationship. I am the ultimate idealistic lover.
– James Dean
Romantic obsession is my first language. I live in a world of fantasies, infatuations and love poems. Sometimes I wonder if the yearning I’ve felt for others was more of a yearning for yearning itself. I’ve pined insatiably and repeatedly: for strangers, new lovers, unrequited flames. While the subjects changed, that feeling always remained. Perhaps, then, I have not been so infatuated with the people themselves, but with the act of longing.
– Melissa Broder
Everything I know about romance – with its unspoken rules that govern flirting, dating, sex, jealousy, infidelity, breakups – sounds like a dispatch from an alien planet. I’ve never been romantically interested in anyone I know; I’d be at a complete loss for how to react if someone admitted to having feelings for me. And yet I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a hopeless romantic in my own strange way, that I don’t indulge in escapist fantasies, that I don’t daydream about relationships (both healthy and unhealthy) that ended centuries ago or never happened at all.
I have long been obsessed with romance. At the same time, I’ve never had much desire to participate in it in reality, preferring instead to live vicariously through famous love stories from history and literature. This contradiction is something I’ve struggled with over the years. While I’ve embraced other aspects of my queerness, I feel less confident about identifying as aromantic, despite relating to many aspects of the aro experience.
I was a preteen when I first encountered the word “aromantic” on Tumblr. It was the early 2010s; concepts from the aro and ace communities hadn’t yet broken into mainstream Internet culture. When I turned to Google for more information, it insisted on autocorrecting my search to aromatic, bringing up pictures of flowers and diagrams of chemical compounds. How ironic that while neither flowers nor chemicals are capable of romantic attraction, both are common symbols in the language of love. People give bouquets of red roses on Valentine’s Day, play loves me, loves me not with daisy petals, talk about having chemistry with someone.
Despite the lack of resources about aromanticism, I found something irresistible about it. For a while I secretly identified as aromantic and bisexual. To preteen me, sex was an abstract concept, vaguely distasteful but too far removed from my reality to be truly unappealing. It was easier for me to believe that, when I grew up, I might want to have sex – possibly, maybe, someday, who knows, everyone else wants it – than it was to imagine myself in a romantic relationship, gushing over a faceless figurehead who called me pet names, who might be jealous or needy, whom I was supposed to kiss and go to restaurants with.
But I soon dropped the aro label, thinking it too specific, too unrealistic, too embarrassing. Everybody fell in love, didn’t they? Wasn’t it futile – pretentious, even – to reject something so integral to the human experience just because I rolled my eyes at romcoms? I was probably just too young to understand. Influenced by aphobic and exclusionist rhetoric, I spent my teenage years trying to convince myself that I was a normal bisexual with normal desires. Never mind the fact that I still didn’t understand the appeal of sex, still hadn’t had a crush on anyone I knew in real life.
Real life. There’s the rub. Prone to daydreaming and overthinking, I’ve always had an overactive imagination. Sometimes this manifests as pathology – a tangle of phobias, neuroses, magical thinking, and obsessive-compulsive rituals lending my everyday existence a droning, monotone rhythm occasionally punctuated by the discordant notes of anxiety. But it’s also the reason I love to read and write, to immerse myself in other worlds simultaneously like and unlike my own. This desire for something beyond the immediate realities of life in the twenty-first century has shaped my young adulthood: it’s why I’ve taken up writing as a serious pursuit, and majored in history with the goal of studying it professionally someday. But aside from its various effects on my external life, my imagination has complicated all my attempts to define my romantic orientation.
The truth is that for the past decade or so, I’ve hardly gone a day in my life without entertaining a romantic fantasy of some sort. Original or derivative, inspired by fiction or history, lighthearted or tragic, rarely modern, always unrealistic in the way fairy tales and Elizabethan plays are unrealistic, my fantasies flood my head like incense fills a church. If they only involved people or characters who weren’t me, this might not have been cause for confusion. After all, if one can read books in translation and watch foreign films with the subtitles on, finding ways to relate to lives unlike one’s own, surely an aromantic can enjoy a good love story without experiencing such feelings themself.
But that’s never been the case for me. In my fantasies, I’m often both director and co-star. I fall in love with heroes and villains, monarchs and poets, vampires and wizards. Most of my love interests are men, though some are women and others are beyond the binary. Although in real life I’m against the institution of marriage, in my fantasies I’ve been both the bride and the groom many times. Despite my actual discomfort with displays of emotion, I’ve imagined countless impassioned confessions of love and loyalty, sudden betrayals and falls from grace, tearful reunions, dramatic death scenes that wouldn’t be out of place in a nineteenth-century opera. (All set to thematically appropriate, though not always historically accurate, music.)
Sometimes my fantasies are just that – elaborate, unattainable chimeras that don’t need to be translated into reality. Even if I do fantasize about sex on occasion, in real life I’m usually indifferent to or repulsed by it. But at other times my daydreams have helped me understand my real self. When I still identified as a woman, I was oddly uncomfortable casting myself as a fantasy girlfriend or wife. No matter how unconventional and boyish I made her, no matter what gender the love interest was, it felt awkward and unbelievable, like a bad drag performance. Eventually she began disguising herself as a boy more and more often, even if the plot didn’t justify it. The disguises grew less artificial, the androgyny more earnest. I started to imagine myself not as a masculine woman but as a feminine man. And it felt right. Having finally allowed myself to express my true gender in my imagination, I could more easily accept and embody it in reality.
But what about the romantic elements in my daydreams? Which category do they belong to? Are they separate from my actual desires, meant to remain forever unrealized – or do they say something about what I truly want deep down? Unlike my aversion to sex, which I’m fairly confident about despite never having had it, my feelings about romance are harder to analyze under the laboratory conditions of my imagination. I’ve never dated, never been kissed, never fallen in love with anyone who wasn’t a ghost.
The questions pile up; the contradictions multiply. If I’m into men as a man, what does that mean in practical terms? Am I attracted to men romantically, queerplatonically, aesthetically, alterously, or in some undefinable way? When I say I’m bi, do I mean that I’m biromantic? Can I be biromantic if I don’t understand real-life romance? On the other hand, am I allowed to be aromantic if I sometimes wish that my fantasies were real, that I could be someone’s boyfriend, that I had someone to hold in a warm embrace? What if, outside of my fantasies, I’m uncomfortable even with something as innocent as kissing? Can I even say I’m attracted to anyone at all, if the yearning I feel – intense and all-consuming though it may be – has always been for the unattainable? What makes a relationship romantic, anyway? Is it all just amatonormative nonsense?
I still haven’t found any satisfying answers. As a teenager, I didn’t know what to do with my paradoxical feelings. Though the terminology of asexuality and aromanticism was available to me, I refused to identify with it, so afraid was I of being unnatural, deluded, silly. So I tried my best to ignore it all. I both hoped and feared that someday I’d develop normal sexual and romantic desires – real ones that weren’t restricted to the imaginary worlds I’d created in my head.
Luckily, it didn’t last. As I grew older, I made aro and ace friends online, participated in queer spaces in college, read about queer history. It transformed me. I’m not in denial any more; I no longer feel guilty or resentful about who I am, no longer subscribe to exclusionist ideas in an attempt to shame myself into a narrow idea of normality. Though my romantic orientation is still a source of doubt and confusion, I think I’m better equipped to deal with it now, at least. At this point in my life, the most definitive statement I can make about my orientation is that I’m asexual and on the aromantic spectrum; terms like “angled” and “oriented” aroace ring true for me in some ways, but I tend to be reluctant to commit to specific labels. I don’t know if I’ll choose to remain single, find a romantic partner, or perhaps try out a queerplatonic relationship.
As for my inner world, I tend to keep it a secret. Few people know just how elaborate my daydreams are, how many wildly different lives I’ve lived in my head, how many love stories I’ve crafted in my imagination. I’m protective of my little universes. Most of the time I cloak their existence in even more layers of fiction and artifice. They inspire my writing, motivate me to learn about history and literature, provide me with comfort and solace. Whatever this says about my identity, my fantasies will always be part of me.