Tagor

I personally probably would have thought "Oh, an ace gathering" and stayed away. As a white cis male heterosexual romance neutral aro I haven't experienced much discrimination (yet) and probably "look" completely straight. I would just have gotten looked at and wouldn't have known what to talk about anyway.

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@asexualpanda27 I just wanted to say that I basically feel exactly the same

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Well, mesaging these organisations and asking on how they would like to threat ASAW would be something everybody could do. An organization like AUREA could also offer help and pre-written articles. But I haven't been in the queer community long enough to know if this would be a valid approach.

For further reading, there's also this thread, which asked the same questions some years ago.

I stumbled across the term in a twitter bio and thought it was interesting. I researched (googled) it, and after a detour over AVEN I found this forum and began reading.

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I agree with bydontost and nonmerci. I already know I don't feel extreme romantic attraction, I wouldn't be here thinking about being aro if I would. It's way more interesting to see what the median romantic experience is, as this a more sensible value to compare against. Just looking at the extreme is like trying to to determine how low you are by just looking at mount Everest in comparison. You won't get good results, as most places are just "really far down" from this point of view.

I think it is really hard to tell, but I would tend towards cupioromantic. At least according to my understanding, if you're lithromantic you really do have a crush on somebody which just fades really fast once you're in a relationship. To me, your experience sounds more like liking the idea of having a partner (somebody, not specifically someone you have a crush on). Also, in questions about whether something is roamantic love I personally tend to go with the one without romantic love, reasoning that I would know it if it was love, but that's just a decision I made some time ago. But ultimately, you have to decide if you feel romantic love which fades (and are lithromantic) or you don't (and are cupioromantic).

I think it's just a biology thing. When we feel empathy, part of our brain emulates the experience the person we're talking to feels (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathy#Neuroscientific_basis_of_empathy. The problem is that with aromantics and allos it's like trying to emulate a quantum compute using a regular computer and the other way round (sorry for using a comparison nobody will understand but I couldn't think of a better one). For some tasks it works just fine, but others are impossible. As we have never felt the emotions of being in love or being heartbroken and our brains just aren't wired to feel it, we can't simulate this emotion in our heads and feel empathy. We can come close by comparing it to something we know, but ultimately we have to fail.

I'd probably say something along the lines of "I think I'm aromantic, here's a link for you to learn more if you want to, but I think a relationship might work, so if it's okay with you I'd like to try a relationship" (Though that's easier said than done). If I was the boy I can't imagine that being that much of a deal breaker to not at least try a relationship (as at least in my opinion more information is always better than less, but this might be my aro perspective on this).

I jut wanted to say that I would not call an interest in warfare a masculin trait and especially wouldn't call need for emotional expression a feminine trait. The latter is close to a basic human need, and the former has more to do with upbringing and education (which might be influenced by gender) than with gender. My stance on sex and gender is that i pretty much don't care. When it comes to sex i got kind of lucky with being male, as it aligns with my interests and tends to give you more possibilities in society (and menstrual period sounds really painful). Gender never really was a thing that interested me. Identifying as male is just the easiest choice, but I think if things were different I wouldn't have many problems with adapting. I think that romantic and sexual attraction plays a big part in defining gender. At least I think that for me, gender would be even more irrelevant if I wasn#T sexually attracted towards women. (And why would somebody ever complain about his girlfriend not wearing feminine/"seductive" clothes? First of all, it's her choice what she wants to wear, and on top of that, in my opinion, sexual attraction is just distracting most of the time and I'd be glad if everybody wore androgynous clothes).

I recently realized that I often misinterpret love songs I hear to be aromantic. For example with "You say" from Lauren Daigle I consistntly heard it as "You said I'm in love / while I can#t feel a thing" with the rest of the lyrics being in the past tense, transforming it into a song of an aromantic at the end of an unhealthy romantic relationship. A similar thing happened with "A Moment like this". I never really listened to it closely and always heard the refrain as "some people wait a lifetime/for a moment/like me" (don't ask me how you can mishear me instead of this, I'll just say it wasn't that clear in the recording I heard). I always thought it was about the feelings of a cupioromantic who wants to fall in love and waits for it but is sad that it probably will never happen?. I guess you always hear what you want to hear.?

Regardless of definitions and identities, I don't thing it is strategic to exclude grey-romantic people from the aromantic flag/term. The aromantic community is quite small, and the only semi-recognized flag we we have is the aromantic one. (I personally couldn't have matched the other flags with their labels, and I've been in the aromantic community for well over a year). We may not like it, but to much of the LGBT community , aromanticism is a niche label, so more people using the label is benefiting it as we still need to build awareness even in the queer community. And I'm convinced that once the aro community gets big enough, it will split on its own. Humans tend to be quite good at building groups and differentiating themselves from each other. The second reason why I don't think it is smart to draw a clear line between aromanticism and greyromanticism is that with aromanticism being defined by an absence, a lot of people can't be sure how aromantic they really are. We do not have a clear definition of romantic attraction, and the absence of romantic attraction can't be defined more exactly than romantic attraction itself. This would be like saying "a desert is a place without plants", but never defining what a plant is. As a result, a lot of people which aren't heavily romance repulsed have the stance "I don't know what romantic attraction is, and I guess I would know it if I felt it? So I'm aromantic?". (At least that's my thought process). Using this reasoning, it is impossible to discern little romantic attraction from no romantic attraction and being greyromantic from being aromantic. In conclusion, it neither benefits the aro community to exclude greyromantic people by implementing strict definitions for being aro nor have we the built the foundational definitions needed to create such a definition, rendering this discussion (at least at this time) quite useless.

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From what I read on here, there are a lot of people who are in your situation and have one or two cases where they aren't sure if it is /was a crush or a squish. A distinguishing feature between crushes and squishes seem to be (I my sample size on this is one + a lot of speculation, so take it with a grain of salt) that with crushes people tend to get really jealous when the person they have a crush on chooses somebody else as their partner, even if this somebody else is a close friend. Another distinction can be that with crushes there is no conscious choice involved though that can be true for squishes too.

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I found the term "aromantic" by chance on Twitter and I thought it might fit me and was curious about what it meant I began to research the term. After at first finding AVEN with some discouraging definitions I pushed it aside for some time but eventually found this forum.

short version: In my opinion, it's likely that you are aromantic, but the only person who can determine this are you. long version: in this thread, we tried to define romantic attraction, so if you haven't already read it it should be quite interesting (Caveat: we didn't find a real definition). I personally use two rules to distinguish between squishes and crushes: I think about if I either made a conscious decision to be "in love" with someone and if I don't think I did, if I would've been jealous if the person got together with somebody else. This eliminated basically all of the cases I had on my list of possible crushs. It might help you if you just read through some more posts in this forum. A lot of the points you raised were the topic of a discussion at one point. There will be lots of interesting threads in the this subforum, and if you want to look for people with similar problems the Q&A part is definitely worth a look (for example this post). II hope I could help you. If you have any questions, just ask. (And have some ice cream , we've got plenty of it)