Another Aro in the Quiver: An Intro to Aromanticism

Image caption: The aromantic pride flag

When I was a freshman in high school, a good friend of mine introduced me to the music of British singer Mika through the 2009 album, The Boy Who Knew Too Much. As it turned out, this music came to me exactly when I needed it. As Mika reflected on his own teenage years in the music, I found myself relating strongly to the feelings of discontentment, skepticism, and desperate confusion the singer was able to portray. Like a lot of people (particularly people who aren’t “normal”), I found high school hellish, and so The Boy Who Knew Too Much quickly became my rock of sanity, especially when it came to the songs that questioned societal norms like relationships.

The continual chaos of high school and being in your early to mid-teens naturally presents certain universal challenges as you explore your true self. But for me, the adrift feeling that plagued me during those years was all the more pronounced as I realized my true self did not line up with the truth other people were discovering. For me, high school felt like a petri dish, crammed full of societal pressures to conform. Listening to Mika’s music, therefore, and chanting along with lines such as “I’m happy on my own” from the track “One Foot Boy” and “Like a magpie, I live for glitter, not you” from “We Are Golden,” just to name a few, were godsends.

But, because the omnipresent notion of dating and other such relationships drove me particularly crazy, I was especially drawn to a song called “Lover Boy,” which became my favorite song for many years. The song is upbeat and incredibly catchy, but through its lyrics it deftly unpacks the types of toxic relationships people can get themselves into simply because they think they need to or should. Lines such as “Aren’t you tired of hooking up, sick of breaking up?/Oh, you fool, you did it for fun” and “You think you’re in love/But you don’t really know what love is,” would have made it a standout song for me no matter what, but the real cincher was the final line of the refrain: “Love is just a cautionary, momentary, reactionary lie.”

Hearing that line was a surprise and a thrill and, although it felt a bit harsh, I felt myself inexplicably clinging to it. I didn’t think love was a lie, exactly, but I enjoyed the idea of someone poking a hole in this narrative that romance was compulsory (more on that in a later trope essay, believe me). I consider myself very lucky to have a good support system that encourages me to be myself and always has, but even so, high school was still a time when I felt more pressure and confusion than ever when it came to relationships. In the midst of that, here was someone offering me not just an excuse or an escape, but a new way of thinking about myself.

Video description: Audio of Mika's song "Lover Boy" from The Boy Who Knew Too Much; Please note this is not my video, nor official audio from Mika's channel, but uploaded by a fan.

Eventually I came to realize what that line really meant to me: the truth that love wasn’t a lie for everyone, nor was it a lie as an overall concept; but, when it came to the love everyone was pushing on me, it was definitely a lie for me. In a culture that saturates you in romance and sex as the pinnacle of human development, I can’t adequately describe how much I needed to have that redefinition presented to me. In a way, the song – and the whole album – became like a tool, helping me in the first steps of my journey to where I am now, the first whispers of my AroAce identity.

As you’ve probably noticed, “AroAce” is a term I have mentioned many times before on this blog. I have brought it up when analyzing characters, describing how a certain situation or moment in a piece of media feels, and of course, most notably, when referring to myself. While I have defined it in the glossary and talked a bit about it in my intro post, I have not really gone in depth into the first part of that term – “Aro,” which is short for “Aromantic,” a person who does not experience romantic attraction.  

Like asexuality, aromanticism is a sliding spectrum. For instance, people can be grey-romantic or demiromantic, meaning they experience romantic attraction infrequently or only after forming a deep emotional bond. Additionally, while some aro people such as myself may enjoy or be comfortable with romance in other forms like in media, there are those who don’t; in fact, some aromantic people may even be romance-repulsed. It is also important to note that not all asexual people are aromantic and not all aromantic people are asexual. While many aromantic people are asexual, there are those aromantic people who do experience sexual attraction, since aromanticism refers only to a person’s romantic orientation, not their sexual one.

My personal journey with aromanticism has been a bit of a winding path. If you’ve read my introduction post, you know that path first started when I hit my pre-teens and early teen years, and that I began identifying as asexual at around sixteen. What you may not know is that I did not identify as aromantic for another two years or so while I continued to parse out what the “love is a lie” notion that Mika first game me in freshman year might look like in my own life. It was a process that was separate from discovering my asexuality, but just as valuable – and, in some ways, almost more difficult.

As I’ve said before, discovering aspec identities is often a complex process that involves stripping away all the artificial standards that have been imposed on you – whether that is by yourself, people you know, the society you live in, or some combination of all of these. I think it’s fair to say that most people grow up with a standard of normalcy in their head, either a normalcy they see on a daily basis or else one to which they’re always aspiring, consciously or subconsciously. And while sometimes that sense of normalcy lines up with a person’s true self or dreams, there are plenty of other instances in which it doesn’t.

For me, growing up in modern Western society with its very clear definitions of what happiness and success looks like, I spent a large portion of my adolescence imagining that my life would follow the typical path: do well in school, find success, meet a nice boy, settle down, start a family. Nowadays, even just typing that list out makes me cringe, but for a long time, it’s what I imagined I wanted. Why? Because it’s what I saw everywhere. When I look back on my teen years and recall facts like an embarrassing one-sided crush I nursed for over four years on one of my male friends, I realize just how long I spent putting myself into that mould without even realizing it.

Even after I gave up that embarrassing crush and realized the idea of dating made me nauseous, it was still difficult for me to truly accept that romance wasn’t for me. After all, even if I was no longer bound up in those feelings for a real, every day person, I still found myself falling for male actors and fictional characters, leading me to believe I was “heteroromantic in theory” and “aromantic in practice.” In some ways, I think I was hoping that was true; that I could still hold onto all those notions rather than giving them up and starting from scratch. In some ways, I think a part of me really did expect that someone might come along and make me feel the way one of my fictional crushes did. However, over the past ten years, it’s yet to happen.

Now, I’m not saying it’s impossible; because romantic and sexual identities are a sliding spectrum, it is possible that perhaps one day I could discover someone who makes me “romantic in practice.” If, for instance, someone waved a magic wand and brought to life one of my video game crushes, or one of my favorite handsome celebrities showed up at my door with flowers and a box of chocolates, I might reconsider my opinions on romance. But, since neither of those things are likely to happen anytime soon, I think I can rest comfortably in my aro identity.

Even so, although that identity is one that gives me comfort and feels more genuinely like me than anything else ever has, it has presented its own set of unique challenges and difficulties, especially when combined with my asexuality. Our society teaches us that not having romance in your life is sad, that it creates a void of intimacy that leaves you empty and alone. While this may be true for some people, it is definitely not true for most aros and it has definitely never been true for me. As such, being met with other people’s interpretations of how sad and incomplete an individual I must be was often a very jarring experience, especially because identifying as AroAce helped make me feel whole during otherwise confusing points in my life. For a while, this led to a severe fatigue for romance, building off of the initial fatigue I felt in high school that led me to discovering my aro identity in the first place.

It took a while, but eventually I came to realize that romance itself wasn’t the problem; the problem was this notion that romance is a requirement for life and that without romance, your life is incomplete, sad, and therefore worthy of pity or ridicule. Something I tend to zero in on when I analyze media is the harmful notion that sex and/or romance are the highest level a person can reach in their emotional development, as if romance is the final level of a particularly challenging video game. Therefore, our culture and societal attitudes tend to entrench the idea that those people who have not achieved romance are missing out, a notion which is often entirely false.

This false notion actually has a name, “Amatonormativity,” which is simply a long word that means the societal pressure to make romance a priority in your life. Elizabeth Brake, the Arizona State University professor of philosophy who created this term, also nicely summarizes why this phenomenon is so damaging – primarily because it devalues other relationships. By making romance, marriage, or other such relationships the ultimate societal goal for everyone, it makes it seem like friendship, platonic love, familiar love, and others are not valuable, or that they are mere stand-ins for the emotional intimacy found in a romantic relationship.

Just to be clear, I have no problem with marriage, dating, or romance. In fact, I’ve seen many healthy romantic relationships and/or marriages in my real life, and my fandom life is full of writing romantic fanfiction. But in my estimation, romance is like going to a museum and seeing a really beautiful sculpture – I can appreciate the beauty of it without wanting to own it and put it in my home, and that beautiful sculpture certainly doesn’t make me want to rearrange my life so that sculpting is now my highest goal. In a similar way, I can appreciate romance and even enjoy watching it, reading it, or writing it without wanting it for myself.

It took a long time to reconcile the me that enjoys writing romance with the me that is super aromantic; but, to keep the museum analogy going, I’m now fully able to appreciate the sculptures (the romance I write and enjoy) and go home with confidence to my house full of landscape paintings (the AroAce life that means so much to me). But my aromantic experience is just one of hundreds and my aromantic lens might not necessarily line up with someone else’s. Even so, I hope that my experiences and my insights provide at least a small window into aromanticism, an identity that is full of tremendous diversity and depth.

Since I began this essay with a song that helped me grasp my aromantic identity, I would like to close with a song as well – Will Jay’s 2018 song “Never Been In Love.” Just like Mika’s “Lover Boy” is a surprisingly poppy critique of empty love, Will Jay’s song is an exuberantly bright celebration of living a romance-free life, set to the world’s cutest music video.

Video description: The music video for Will Jay's "Never Been In Love," from the singer's official YouTube channel

The song’s lyrics call out people whose meddling, although well-intentioned, is incredibly irksome, and confidently asserts: “I’m not missing out, so don’t ask me again/Thanks for your concern, but here’s the thing/Never been in love, and it’s all good/I’m not the only one feeling like they should.” Unlike “Lover Boy,” this song did not come to me at a time when I was still finding my identity, but in many ways, it’s just as important to me. Because even though I have arrived at a place where I am comfortable with my identity, there are still some very tough days – days when I feel the world doesn’t want or understand me, days when I feel bombarded by people who think I need fixing. But as Will Jay’s song proudly declares, “I say whatever, don’t care that I’ve never/No, never been in love.”