Raphael

Trumpet

I remember mine. It was terrible, because it was both our first times, but also we were very physically into each other so it was extremely fun. She's also the only person I've ever kissed/dated/slept with, though, and our relationship has changed a lot since then (for instance: we're no longer dating because I'm greyro af and she is not).

Hey Hart! Good to meet you and congrats on figuring yourself out! Welcome!

I've never really officially come out as greyro, although I definitely don't hide it most of the time either. Everyone I've told has been cool about it (once I explained what it meant, lol), and some have even been in the same boat. My best friend accepts it but also has a hard time with it since we used to date. My parents don't know and I probably won't tell them anytime soon, but they don't seem too fussed about how single I am for the most part. (I'm also romance-positive and open to being in a relationship; I just don't tend to actively pursue it.)

Terry Pratchett

Isn't it just adorable? It popped up on my Twitter timeline during aro week and I almost died of cute. I love it so much.

I know this is late, but seconding everyone else who said you should just talk to her. It seems like you have a really clear idea of what you want, actually, and the best way to find out if you're on the same page is to ask. But if that seems scary, you could also start with something like this: --Raphael

I haven't read the whole thread yet, so sorry if anyone else mentioned this but The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue has an aroace character who is also the protagonist of the next book, The Lady's Guide to Petticoats and Piracy. I know the author has written other slightly more problematic books (particularly I seem to remember her overstepping a bit with the trans community, for lack of a better way to put it), but those two were pretty good. Also, this doesn't exactly count because it's not in the show (and arguably the show is one of the most romantic things I've ever seen), but Neil Gaiman did tweet this about Good Omens last year, and I was just kind of impressed that he knew the word, tbh:

@VoidArcana (Off-topic, sorry) WE HAVE THE SAME PRONOUNS OMFG HELLO (Back on topic) Same. I'm really grateful that we have this option, but I also hope we don't need it. I've had mostly positive experiences with the ace community, but I'm also hyper-aware that it isn't my community and that people who are in my community have had less positive experiences. I appreciate the gesture and understand it's made in good faith -- I never thought there was any grand conspiracy -- I just want a space that I feel welcome in, and I don't think AVEN is at the top of the list to provide that.

Yeah, for the record, I'm also a bit handwavy on being associated with AVEN. To be honest, I don't know exactly what they've done to the aro community because Arocalypse was my first foray into this community, but I do feel very strongly that my identity is not at all tied to asexuality (because I'm allo). I get that's not for everyone, and that the overlap is a big part of the aro world, but if this site had been in any way affiliated with AVEN when I heard about it and I knew that, I would feel like I didn't have a place here, because I'm not ace. If it were truly a silent investor type deal where they paid the bills and never glanced over here or advertised that they were paying the bills, I'd be fine, but I really wouldn't feel comfortable any other way. Even if AVEN were totally silent, it wouldn't necessarily solve this really good point. I like Arocalypse because it gives me a safe place to explore the community I'm part of and learn about the issues that affect my community without being constantly conflated with or compared to other LGBTQ+ people's struggles. It's a lot less likely to turn into the oppression Olympics or the kinds of really harmful gatekeeping that occur in other queer communities I'm part of if we're all on the same team, so to speak. Again, I don't have any specifics, but for instance, if there were a board for enbies that was owned by exclusively binary trans folks under an organization for exclusively binary trans folks, I'd think twice before joining.

Hey Korbin! I love your name! And yay for bi aro enbies!!! What do you (mainly) like to write?

CW: romantic feelings, romantic and nonromantic uses of the word “love,” sexual relationships, mental illness, suicidal ideation, mentioned suicide attempt, swearing, guilt, anxiety, minor aphobia . . . Okay, I’ll try to simplify a really long story. A girl—we’ll call her A—and I met and became best friends just before we started college together. We started dating that spring semester. I had played with the idea of being aro-spec before, but didn’t really think much of it. I loved her. I have always loved her. I think I always will. But I don’t think that love has ever been romantic. When we’d been dating for almost 4 months, her mental health crashed. I had known she had mental health issues. I thought I knew that her therapist, other closest friend, and probably family knew about her past mental health struggles, including her past suicide attempt. I was wrong. I was the only person who knew. I found that out three days after she tried to break up with me out of the blue, when I asked her wtf happened and she said she was sorry, but she’d tried to kill herself the morning she tried to break up with me, but couldn’t bring herself to go through with it. That is how I found out I was literally the only support system she had. I was 19, and I was scared. I made sure she was safe (maybe not in the most helpful ways, to be fair, but in my defense I had no idea what I was doing and I was terrified). I told her family. Her family told her therapist. She was safe. She had a support network. I broke up with her. I hadn’t been happy in the romantic relationship (probably because I’m aro-spec as hell, go figure). I was too scared to be her everything. I just. I couldn’t feel responsible if she hurt herself. That would have destroyed me. Two weeks later, we decided to be friends. She came out to me as a trans woman. We rebuilt our friendship over makeup and shopping. I loved her. It wasn’t romantic for me. The friendship we rebuilt is very romance-coded, but it isn’t romantic. We negotiated the hell out of that. I’m never sure if she’s my best friend or my QP partner, but it doesn’t matter. We’re still sexually involved. We hold hands and cuddle. We say “I love you.” I figured out that I was never romantically in love with A because I fell romantically in love with someone else. This is the first time I’ve ever been romantically in love. We’ll call her M. My label for myself shifted from quoiromantic to greyromantic. A asked why. I told her about M and my feelings for M. It’s been almost two years since A and broke up. I have never been even slightly alloromantic, but she is, and I didn’t know that it would hurt her so badly. I told her I was sorry for the ways I had hurt her by not knowing myself, but I thought what I’d felt for her had always been platonic love—never romantic. I don’t put types of love in a hierarchy. She does. And she puts romance at the top. But she said it was fine. I thought it was fine. I fucked up. I fucked up so badly. I’m currently in a creative non-fiction class, and I decided to write my first essay in part about M. I asked A today if she’d mind reading my draft, because I was worried M’s identity was too explicit. She agreed. I sent her the wrong file. I sent her the wrong. fucking. file. The file I accidentally sent her was something I wrote as part of a freewriting exercise for the same class. The prompt was 3 things that stopped you in your tracks. I wrote about something really shitty that my father said to me when I broke up with A. I included context about the breakup. Here’s some highlights (by highlights, I mean literally 50% of what I wrote): I. fucked. up. I never wanted her to read that. I never really wanted anyone to read that. That was. Private. That was freewriting. That was not for A’s eyes ever. Because I never ever want to hurt her like that. I never want her to know how badly she hurt me. I never want her to know the way sometimes I still wake up terrified that I’m in a world where she isn’t anymore. She’s not supposed to know that because I don’t want her to get hurt. I didn’t know what she meant when she texted me that she didn’t want to be the one to proofread things about herself anymore. I hadn’t written anything really about her that I’d asked her to read through since…before we dated. I was baffled. I checked the email attachment. I panicked. I apologized way too much. I explained. She said it was fine. But. She thought that that is what I'd wanted her to read. On purpose. I asked if she really thought I was capable of that kind of cruelty intentionally. She avoided the question. I asked if I’d hurt her that badly before and not known. She said, “Hearing that you never loved me like I loved you hurt.” I’m so tired. I’m so tired of hurting people I love because they want something from me that I’m hardly capable at all of feeling. I went on one date with a guy once and the week later he got drunk and said he was in love with me, said he wanted to marry me, and I told him I was aro-spec, I told him what it means, and he begged me not to be aro-spec anymore. And I know that was wrong of him. I don’t know if A is in the wrong here or if I am. I think maybe we both are. She gets to have her emotions. But it sucks so much that I hurt people just by not having those same emotions, because my equally important, loving, fond emotions mean less to everyone than capital-L Love would. It is not fair to be insulted by something I cannot control. It is not fair to blame me for that. And yes, I expressed it badly. And of course she was hurt when I sent her something she should never have seen. But I feel like I hurt her by just being the way I’m wired, and I am so tired of disappointing people. Disappointing her. Disappointing Needy Drunk Guy. Disappointing my mother. I’m so tired of it. I hate it. I fucked up so badly. Tonight she asked me to please stop telling her I love her, and I’ve been crying on and off ever since, because goddamnit I love her, and I’m sorry it’s not enough, I’m sorry I’m not what she needs, but I love her and I know she loves me because she’s never been shy about saying so, and we agreed that it wasn’t romantic. I don’t know how to fix it. I don’t know if anyone does. I don’t even know if I’m asking for advice. I wouldn’t turn it down. Mostly I just need someone to talk to, but I don’t want to hurt her by talking to people I know IRL who might know her too or might eventually meet her, so I’m talking here instead. I’m so tired. And I’m so sorry. And idk if I can fix this one. --Raphael

I bind with a camisole that has a half-shelf bra built in that I convert by wearing it backwards and folding it with some safety pins. It's supposed to be safe (I did a lot of research, lol), but the elastic rubs and it just isn't very fun. I usually end up converting it back into a camisole before the end of the day.

Fair enough!! I call myself genderqueer because it seems like. I don't have to prove anything to myself to claim that label? I don't feel like I could be genderfluid because I'm never a guy, but hey MAYBE I'M WRONG WHO KNOWS. I bind at school sometimes too, but it also really hurts if I do it for more than ~4 hours, so I don't usually. I might tomorrow. IDK.

This is really just a place to vent about my gender angst for a minute; others may join in or respond if desired, but I'm mostly just screaming into the void tbh. (Also warning ahead for fairly negative feelings about men/masc people as a general category of human.) My gender has a lot of fluidity, and it's frustrating as hell, because my desired presentation ALSO is fairly fluid, but the two don't always align, so sometimes I'm like "I'm not a girl and that's why I want to wear a flannel and look GAY," but other times I'm like, "I'm not a girl, and that's why I want to wear a princess dress and look GAY." (But also those about actually being a girl because I am sometimes.) And lately I've been feeling fairly masculine which is new and frankly really uncomfortable for me (I've been afraid of men and masc-presenting people literally since before I could walk), because I'm basically always femme or andro no matter what else is going on, so now I'm wondering if I'm sometimes a guy? Or like guy-adjacent? Demiboy? I don't fucking know. The whole thing sounds kind of repellent to me, but here we are with masculinity and no idea what to do with it. And the social dysphoria is both a lot and... Kind of my own damn fault? Because I'm like "I'm feeling masc-ish today, so that's why I want to wear a skirt and eyeshadow and earrings—but it's *matte* eyeshadow, so that'll make me look masc!!," which uh. Surprisingly doesn't work for someone who is very small, curvy, long-haired, and conventionally pretty. And my best friend is a binary trans woman and she just. She tries but *does not* get it, and all the enbies I know IRL aren't super fluid, are andro-butch presenting, and are just. Not people I feel like would be sympathetic?? And I also can't bind because I live with my parents and I'm not out to them. So. Extra yay. --Raphael