On Valentine\u2019s Day, I was browsing Twitter, as one does, when someone reached out to ask what it was like being aromantic, and how I had figured out I was. Because it was Valentine\u2019s Day and I like a good dose of irony, and also because Aromantic Awareness Week was the 21-26th of this month, that seemed like the perfect topic for this month\u2019s blog post :). So, without further ado, I present to you the story of how I tried and mostly failed to have a romantic relationship.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
(Standard disclaimer that there\u2019s a huge variety in people\u2019s experiences, and this is only mine.) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I rarely had a crush growing up, and even that\u2019s dependent on how one defines a crush. Although quite a few guys seemed to be interested in me, ranging from most of my online friends to a guy from my dorm floor freshman year. (Most of them I didn\u2019t even catch on to until way later.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The one person I mostly-think I had a (mutual) crush on was a person who was my best friend. Around the same time we were hanging out, a friend introduced me to the term \u201cdemisexual\u201d (only experiencing sexual attraction once an emotional bond is formed), and I figured I was both demisexual and<\/em> demiromantic, since I was never interested in random people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The day after my 18th birthday, said person asked me to be his girlfriend. We lived in different states, so our friendship and pending relationship were long-distance. Although I liked the idea of us being together, I was hesitant to say yes because when it actually came down to it, I didn\u2019t feel like I experienced very strong affection myself. After talking to a mutual friend though, I decided to at least give it a try and see what happened.<\/p>\n\n\n\n (Like most people, I didn\u2019t actually know about aromanticism for a long time. I probably picked up the terms \u201caromantic\u201d and \u201casexual\u201d around the time I went to university and had to google a bunch of stuff on the demographics section of forms.\u00a0 Even then, it didn\u2019t really occur to me that the orientations could apply to me<\/em> personally.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n We dated for a little over a year, which included my flying up to visit him for a couple weeks and deciding we were still good to go after the visit. My feelings did deepen along the way like I had hoped, although looking back, I feel like I had to \u201ctrain\u201d them to some degree, as opposed to alloromantics just falling in love naturally as seems to happen. (Since I\u2019ve never experienced that, I can\u2019t clarify very well how it compares.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Last year (2021), I lived with him for the summer, and we realized there were some problems. I really wasn\u2019t into the whole sex thing, while he was hypersexual. As I had originally wondered about, there was a difference in affection levels; I saw the relationship as a \u201cbest friend roommates\u201d situation, and seemed to be missing an emotional element that he had.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Then around the end of the summer I realized I was definitely full-on, sex-repulsed asexual. He also felt that there was too great an emotional disparity between us – I liked having a person around for the most part, but the romantic feelings just weren\u2019t there for me, and I really didn\u2019t enjoy the typical couple things like sharing a bed. (Apparently my sleeping self violently elbows people who invade my personal space bubble?) We decided that we couldn\u2019t continue the relationship, and that it would be better if we just went back to being friends instead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I started to think I might be aromantic at the time, but that idea took longer to warm up to than being ace. Since I\u2019d only been in one relationship, I didn\u2019t really have a good, scientific sample size to show that I was aromantic and that it wasn\u2019t just that particular person\/relationship. <\/p>\n\n\n\n