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Yep. Quick recap, I use platonic attraction/squish to refer to when, for no discernible reason, someone I’ve never met seems super cool and I want to be friends with them. I also use platonic attraction/squish to refer to when I want to spend more time with a close friend (and sometimes go from being comfortable with platonic and physical affection to sometimes wanting to initiate it). I use alterous attraction to refer to when I have a specific feeling of attraction that’s neither platonic or romantic. It’s involved some of the stereotypical infatuation associated with romantic crushes, but had a friendship/nonromantic component. And in all of those cases, I haven’t wanted A Relationship (TM) (although I used to think I maybe sort of did want A Relationship (TM)). And also what friends means, I think. I can see the two examples you give as resulting from a miscommunication/discrepancy on what friendship/platonicism is.

Alright so, I’m joining this topic because I’m not sure I wrap my head around all of it either. This all seems to be dealing with differing ideas about what “platonic” actually means, right? I’m trying to suss this out: —people who describe something as alterous tend to see platonic as being to do with friendship only —people who disagree with the above usage see platonic as its own separate thing, on a different level to either friends or romantic partners, and therefore to them alterous is redundant? I agree that there seems to be a linguistic inconsistency with romantic ->> romance and platonic ->> friendship. Another wrinkle in all of this is that the term queerplatonic also linguistically implies that it is something different from platonic. So what makes it “queer?” When dictionaries say platonic defines something non-physical or non-sexual, we should maybe consider the societal context, where people usually don’t separate romantic and sexual attraction, or for that matter any other attractions. My understanding of queerplatonic relationships is that they lack to some extent romantic attraction but contain one or more other types (emotional, aesthetic, sensual, sexual, etc.). Unless I’ve misunderstood and there are some people in QPRs who are not attracted to their partners in any way? So here’s a shot in the dark, could platonic then refer simply to any relationship that does not contain attraction? In this case, alterous and platonic could coexist, where both describe something “else” but only alterous can go along with queerplatonic. Although don’t some people use the term platonic attraction? That really throws a wrench in my idea...

That's fair. I only half noticed the sleepovers the first time, and probably rationalized it as "having an excuse to do a thing that friends like to do some times" to make it fit with how read the rest of the original post. I get why you want to do that, but I also think it kind of...doesn't matter? In the sense, I guess, that I've had an inherently subjective experience reading through the posts, and I don't think the OP's intentions have much bearing on it either way. Whether or not the additions are in the spirit of the OP won't really change how I read through it. (Which is not to say that the OPs thoughts don't matter at all, just that they don't affect how I read the post. But I am curious to see what the OP meant.)

I get what you're saying, but I think we might be describing different things. I've definitely had at least one (small) squish where me and this other person were on opposite sides of a large room with a bunch of other people and for whatever reason they caught my eye and I felt like they were a cool person? I didn't interact with them in any way, and considering that I ended up leaving the room after about half an hour and never saw them again, it's entirely possible that they didn't ever know I existed because there was literally no interaction, and yet, small squish. There are definitely squishes that develop once I know someone to some degree, but they feel basically the same in character to squishes predicated on literally zero interaction, so I think they're the same experience. The other reason that I call these feelings squishes and not just "wanting to be friends with them" is that I used to think they were crushes. When I figured out I was ace, I mistook my squishes as crushes and thought I was demiromantic for about a year. When I realized I was aro, one big shift in my thinking was realizing that my "crushes" were actually squishes, which also made a lot of things make a lot more sense. To me at least, a squish is different from "this person is really nice" or "this person is interested in the same things as me", which is why I use a specific word for it. Sort of, but not exactly. My squishes on close friends might involve a minute amount of platonic, nonromantic infatuation, in the sense that I want to spend lots of time with them and have philosophical conversations and stuff, but my alterous attraction definitely has a distinctive element of infatuation. The first time I felt alterous attraction (which was after I knew I was aroace), I panicked for a second because the infatuation was definitely closer to the stereotypical romantic infatuation you see in media than anything I'd ever experienced. However, it was decidedly nonromantic in nature, and my feelings for the person I was alterously attracted to were definitely nonromantic. The infatuation was...adjacent to stereotypical infatuation, I suppose. Some element of "their sense of humor is superb, and they can't quite finish their jokes without cracking up, and their smile is just so endearing, and their hair is just incredible" (to badly channel some infatuation-driven comments), but without any connotations of romance. Something similar to, but distinct from, my squishes.

We are putting together a collection of aro thoughts and experiences. As you may or may not know, the 'R' in AUREA stands for recognition, and we want to recognize just what it means to be aromantic. Being aromantic is such a personal thing, and there’s so much more to it then can be summed up by a simple definition like “experiences little to no romantic attraction". We want to showcase that. Write about your identity, a dream, a reality, or simply what it’s like to you to be aromantic. This piece will be titled 'My Aromanticism', and you can click the link for more detail and/or to submit an entry: https://forms.gle/c9z5YBPL4ZTupKoU9

@DogObsessedLianne One good title I know of is The Black Veins by Ashia Monet. Aromanticism isn't explicitly mentioned in this book, but Ashia says it will be later in the series and the book focuses mostly on friendship.

That's how I read it too. Probably because I don't want to get married. If aros want to get married they can, and if they don't they don't have to be pressure to do it; that's how I see it. Otherwise it is normative.

my friend came out as asexual (i knew she was questioning) and our friend grilled her about it and i tried to have her back without speaking for her. i just know it's not as easy to explain and stuff in the beginning.

Wait, hold on. Didn't @raavenb2619 use "alterous" for a feeling they've had that didn't involve wanting to form a particular relationship? What are you using "platonic" to mean here? Generally. But people also do both. "I kind of like queerplatonic as a definer for the attraction I feel to my zucchini" was the very first known online use. I've also seen it used more recently in other places, even on Arocalypse. I mean, I don't really get that either, but it does get used. There's a problem with relying on those dictionaries or other conventional approaches though because a lot of English-speakers typically don't recognize adult nonsexual romantic relationships as a concept. Yeah... "a little bit romantic, but not completely" is worlds different from "completely off the scale." The way people fail to make any distinction between the two on this topic is like people failing to make any distinction between nonbinary people with totally-off-the-binary gender identities and nonbinary people who are half-man half-woman.

Yeah sure! It's about separating love from humanity, or love from goodness or kindness. We're all likely familiar with the prevalent idea that love is what makes us human, but what I see talked about less is the idea that being capable of love is the same as being a good person. You can love someone and still hurt them; you can treat someone with kindness even if you don't like them at all. We can't choose whether we feel love or not, no matter whether that love is romantic or platonic or something else or what-have-you. But we can choose to be kind and to do what's right. Moses Sumney talks about this as well. The kinds of love you feel or do not feel and in what quantities don't determine your value as a human being. Love, to me, is an arbitrary concept. And we don't solve amatonormativity by shifting the focus merely onto a different type of love; we don't do right by each other by simply repackaging the same rhetoric used to alienate us ("Love is what makes us human!") in a different wrapping. A narrative in which any form of love is pure or universal or a sign of being a good person will always be one in which one of us is left behind.

Returning to the initial question of what we can do besides wordsmith, I think the push to constantly create new terminology is both a result of a rapidly expanding community and a desire to somehow wordsmith our way through intracommunity differences. I guess you could call it growing pains? What happens, at least in community spaces that I've been involved in, seems to be that people begin to take notice of some sort of difference or disparity in aro experiences and narratives, and try to create the language to concisely name and talk about that disparity (for example, as others have mentioned in this thread, aromantics who don't want a qpr or similar relationship feeling alienated by those who do). I don't see the problem with this, on a surface level; if people want specific terminology to talk about their experiences, then more power to them. I personally do consider myself nonamorous, in the "not wanting a qpr or similar relationship" sense. The issue comes when we try to make the terminology we have exhaustive, intensely specific, applicable to all and not up for interpretation. And that's never going to be possible. For me, the seemingly never-ending onslaught of new terminology, while it can often be used to point out the diversity of aro experiences or to shed light on unequal representation within the community, does very little to actually solve whatever problem it's meant to address. People can use whatever labels for themselves that they feel comfortable with, and I'm never going to take that away from them; however, we need to address the root causes of problems rather than simply create terminology to attempt to patch them up. The focus should be on creating spaces where all arospecs feel welcome to talk about our experiences without having to box ourselves into a corner--that's what we can do besides wordsmith. As for how we do that? I don't know, and I don't think anyone does, or else we would have done it already. But for starters, casting all other terminology aside, what are the main goals of aro activism? When you strip back all of the word salad, what's left? Heteronormative/amatonormative society largely doesn't understand or accept us, regardless of any distinctions we choose to make between one another. In my opinion, a core tenet of aro activism should be dismantling the idea that love, in any form, is normative or necessary in order to be a valid human being capable of good and worthy of respect.

Thread title: What can we do besides wordsmith? Thread content: intense wordsmithing "Queerplatonicnormativity" is exactly what the Tumblr posts you linked to at the start of this thread were complaining about, and fighting that norm within our communities is exactly what they were suggesting. When arotaro says, "That 'default' is so overpowering that those of us who do not fit into this description often feel excluded from the aro community," they're talking about the 'default' assumption that all aros want a QPR, or some kind of committed partnership. An example: an old friend of mine was in a really, really bad mental space and I told him "I love you" because I knew he needed to hear it. I then hopped onto Discord to vent about how saying "I love you" had made me really uncomfortable, and got a response along the lines of, "Baby steps are fine! You do you, as long as he's fine with taking it slow too." And I had to explain that we weren't "taking it" anywhere, that I was not remotely interested in a relationship with this guy (or anyone else). In my experience the extent to which this "default" exists varies among community spaces, but in every aro and aspec space I've been in, at least once people have assumed I want or would be interested in a QPR. I tend to spend less time in the spaces where that assumption is more prevalent, largely because I find discussion of QPRs and seeking and maintaining them equally as off-putting as discussion of romantic relationships. So I guess that's a manifestation of what arotaro was complaining about: I feel somewhat excluded by those community spaces. I don't think that having an agreed-upon label for those of us who really aren't interested in any kind of partnership or committed relationship, seriously is the best way to solve that problem. Not least because of the issues the links in the OP describe about coming up with such a term. An example of something that has been helpful is the Arocalypse Discord explicitly segregating off channels for "Romo-talk" (discussions of romance-coded things) and "Nonromo-love" (discussions of queerplatonic and other non-romantic relationships), to minimise the prevalence of those topics in general channels. Other things that would help of course include more visibility and discussion of the experiences of those of us who are very, very happy to be single and stay that way forever.