Kaz's Scribblings

I am not sure why I suddenly want to write pages and pages of posts on Chistmas Eve like seriously I have TEN THOUSAND THINGS I want to write about. Probably consequence of going on holiday which involved a lot of hiking which involved a lot of me thinking to myself. Sigh.

I've been thinking about my romantic orientation again. Which is, I admit, partly frustrating because I thought I'd FINALLY managed to pin it down and it's been elusive for YEARS and I was sohappy figuring out something I was happy identifying as.

The development of my orientation went a little like this:

I only really started thinking about it when I was in my twenties, then sort of flailed around a bit and settled on "aromantic" because I didn't really think I wanted to have a boyfriend (note the gender). I slowly became comfortable in that identity, then suddenly realised I'd entirely forgot about the possibility of a girlfriend. And that, in fact, the idea of a girlfriend was not nearly as alien or weird as that of a boyfriend. And that, actually, I'd been crushing on women. A lot. Since I was very young. And that my dream plan for my life involved living together with my BFF (whooo is probably reading this, hi!), possibly raising kids with her (probably adopted bar scientific meddling) and possibly marrying her for tax and visa reasons. Which didn't really fit in with most people's perceptions of friendship, and was furthermore pretty damn different from the desires that I'd seen other aromantic people express (which tended to involve a lot of stuff like being independent and living on your own - I think reading glad_to_be_a formed a lot of my ideas of what it meant to be aromantic). And furthermore, my crushes/squishes/whateveryouwanttocallthem had a distinct gender preference as I'd only once crushed on a guy and it felt like a fluke. You couldn't very well be aromantic with a gender preference, now could you? But on the other hand, I wasn't quite happy with calling it romantic. I mean, I was thinking of marrying my BFF because it'd make it easier wrt visa stuff, not because it was something I wanted. I wasn't sure if I wanted to date her (or was dating her, for that matter), or call her my girlfriend (and indeed, I call her my not!GF these days because this whole area is still a giant big SO CONFUSED). I didn't have any desire for the trappings of romance, and some of the things associated with coupledom actually seriously freak me out (there is this tendency for two people who are dating or married to present themselves or see themselves as a unit instead of two individuals in their own right, which I find disturbing, and the thought of it happening to me makes me want to flee to the other side of the earth). And, well, what the hell was romantic attraction anyway?

I'm still looking for an answer to this question, by the way. The only remotely useful one I've found is "it's romance if you think it's romance", which is at least clear in its definition but kind of very very circular. There's components that are often a part of romance (sexual interest, exclusivity, primary relationship, crush, specific types of strong emotional connection, desire for approval, etc.), but I haven't found a single one that's present in all romantic relationships or that's never present in nonromantic relationships. Any people who have romantic desires may weigh in on what they feel is the difference.

This led to - a year? maybe two? of intermittent agonising over whether I was aromantic or homoromantic, and whether the relationship I was in was romantic or friendship. In both cases, neither seemed to fit. I opted for "somewhere in between" as an interim measure while I figured things out, then got sick of the agonising and decided to stick with that for the time being. Then as time went on, I decided that I was actually somewhere in between and so was my relationship, and started to question the friendship/romance/family dichotomy we tend to stuff our relationships into. I started looking for a shorthand for "in between aromantic and homoromantic", went for "demihomoromantic", then discovered that some people were using demiromantic as analogous to demisexual (with romantic feelings and desires developing only after an emotional bond was already present) and ended up with greyhomoromantic instead. Which I have been using for... a few months now, I think? Not all that long.

So what's been making me question that?

First, I'm starting to become uncomfortable with the implicit binary assumptions of homo-, hetero- and bi-. For one, using "homoromantic" identifies me as a woman, which I'm not entirely comfortable with (and I'm also not comfortable that the terms in use are really problematic for nonbinary, agendered and other people who don't id as male or female.) I think I'm attracted, in some way, to women in a way that I'm not to men. But what about people who aren't either? I don't know! :(

Second, recently I've met a lot of ace people iding as aromantic who have expressed desires similar to mine - they want a BFF who's also their life partner, they might want to live together with this person, they might want to raise kids together. I think some of them even mentioned a gender preference. I'm starting to realise I may have let myself be driven away from aromantic based on the fact that the other aromantic people I was seeing seemed very different from me and I assumed that theirs was the "right" way to do aromanticism. But surely aromantic can entail different things. In fact...

For ages, I've sort of quietly thought that asexuality is the most diverse sexual orientation, because it's defined through the lack of something instead of the presence. We sort of have a microcosm of the sexual world - orientations in the form of romantic orientations, kinky folk in all degrees of varieties, pretty much anything that exists as an identity for sexual people seems to have some analogy for ace people - plus various "gradations" of asexuality like repulsed, indifferent, libido questions (although these do happen for sexual folk as well, but differently from what I can tell), the asexual spectrum with all the possible varieties of grey-a... I suspect one of the things that confuses people who first find the asexual community is the huge amount of jargon, but the thing is that we need it to talk about all the different identities and varieties of asexuality in our community. The only thing we have in common is lacking (or, for the spectrum people, nearly lacking) sexual attraction, and that's less of a commonality than the presence of a certain type.

Similarly, aromanticism can be incredibly diverse. Who are the people who don't have romantic attraction (whatever the hell that means)? There are the hermits. There are the people who want friendships but nothing that exceeds the bounds of friendships as socially defined. There are people who want something else. There are people who invest a lot in communities over individuals, who have a network of primary relationships, or just a few, or one - but still one that doesn't manage to fall into the "romance" box. Under this kind of thinking, I am definitely aromantic - I lack romantic attraction. (I sort of deduce this by the fact that it's only really aromantic people who I've seen asking the "but what the hell IS it anyway?!" questions; romantic people seem to know.) I've got something else, but that's not the question.

Thirdly, I have been thinking of hierarchies of relationships. I have railed for a while about how society expects us to fit our relationships into these neat little restricted boxes, and these boxes are ordered. The fabulous Irrationalpoint put it better than I've managed to:

In other words, from a very young age, we are taught The Relationship Hierarchy. Which is something like: blood ties and marriage ties trump other sorts of ties. Sexual relationships trump non sexual relationships. You have only one partner, who shall be your sexual partner and your lawfully-wedded spouse, and no other partners, and they trump all other relationships. Marriages that produce children trump non-procreating relationships, but Thou Shalt Not Be A Single Parent. “Family” and “Friends” are distinctive sets of people, and “Family” trumps “Friends”. “Friends” should mean only people of the same sex, but otherwise, same sex friends trump other-sex friends. You shall be emotionally intimate only with same-sex friends, unless you are a man, and then Thou Shalt Not Have Emotions.

This clearly works for a lot of people, although I imagine that it may not work very well and may cause a lot of pain that's not obvious looking in from the outside. It does not work for me. At all. In fact, sorting my relationships into these categories simply does not work for me. At all. The types of relationships I want? The types I already have? Are too cool for your puny boxes.

As a result, more and more I feel like the whole concept of a romantic orientation is asking me to define myself in terms of boxes that just don't apply - hence my constant back-and-forth not feeling comfortable with any of the options ending with me making my very own - that asking me "so what's your romantic orientation?" is simply the wrong question.

ALSO, I worry that by calling my relationship and desired relationship "in between friendship and romance" (which again feels a bit like I'm boxing it in) I'm trying to get relationship points from the hierarchy - that because I don't want what I have with my not!GF to be dismissed as "just" friendship I'm calling it sort of romantic ish in a way in order to get some of the importance that gets accorded to romantic relationships in our society - when really I should be trying to break down the hierarchy altogether, point out that friendship doesn't have to be "just", and that there are more options than friendship or romance. And sure, I don't think anyone would argue with me that in some situations that's not a good strategy and I can pretend to buy into the hierarchy to some extent for self-protection (and if they do, they're an arse), but surely if I'm in an asexual community I ought to be able to drop that.

CONCLUSION: I am feeling more and more as if I should a) be identifying as aromantic and/or b) just stop asking myself about my romantic orientation entirely because it's the wrong question with a dash of c) be breaking down the friendship/romance/family categorisation and the relationship hierarchy. At the same time, I find myself sad - I don't actually know anyone else who ids as greyhomoromantic and not sure I know anyone else who ids as greyromantic period. This is literally a word I created for myself when nothing else felt like it would fit, and the idea of having to drop it hurts.