techno

i'm nearing the end of my college career now, and as i'm trying to figure out what comes next, this is the problem i am facing. i have great friends here, but because we'll likely go our separate ways some day, i can't help but dwell on the fact that every phase of life is fleeting. the first step is deciding what you want from the rest of your life. the second step is figuring out how to achieve it. i don't even have the first one figured out yet.

@Coyote I'd never heard of that concept before, but from a cursory glance, it would seem so!

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.

Apologies for the yelling towards the beginning and stuff, there's only live recordings of this right now, but I love this song with all my heart.