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LoveIsZaxlebax

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  • Name
    Anti-concept
  • Orientation
    Monoplatonic androsexual
  • Gender
    agender masculine-of-center

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  1. The thing in movies where two people who barely know anything about each other are suddenly madly in wuvv ? The worst. Anything that ties coupledom to elevated social status is right up there on my repuls-o-meter, like performative PDA and cutesy social media photos. The thing where people start reading intentions into innocuous gestures and becoming emotionally oversensitive to the subject of their romantic attraction too. In fiction and real life, it makes me squeamish. In general, the emotional neediness that tends to accompany romantic attraction is uncomfortable to witness. The valorization of compromise and martyrdom for the sake of companionship does that too. If it’s for a cause or a metaphysical belief that’s cool imo but if it’s for a person, my reaction is “yuck.” Gestures of blind trust. The emphasis on togetherness for its own sake. Vulnerability. Dressing up, flirting, having dates. More or less everything about romance repulses me other than cohabitation and exclusivity.
  2. -“So you’re into casual sex?” Ummmmm no. Not the same thing. Alloromantic people have casual sex all the time these days, besides. -“But you get obsessed with (male celebrity/fictional character)!” And yet, obsession is not love? It’s being a fanboy or thinking they’re cool (or goodlooking.) It does not mean I want to date them. -“You can never have a healthy relationship with anyone!” Romantic attraction is not an indicator of relationship health. -“You should buy a realdoll instead of inflicting yourself on a living person.” This one was straightup bigoted. Assuming not only that every person on earth wants/needs to combine emotional intimacy with sexuality, but indirectly telling me that I am a silicone doll instead of a person and my needs are beneath significance. -“That’s unfair to people.” It’s unfair to people to assume their emotional needs are the same as yours. -“You are dangerous and should not have intimate relationships until you change.” Another iteration of the psychopath! stereotype. I don’t go around lying to people and intentionally deceiving them into one sided crushes. I have known alloromantic people who did. My aromantism does not make me any more or less dangerous than anyone else. -“Have you considered chemical castration?” Have you considered that eugenics lead to atrocity? -“Nobody would want to be with someone like you anyway” Except for maybe another monoplatonic fellow...but even so, great! I went decades without a partnership and didn’t spontaneously combust. The above is still a rotten thing to say though. -“But you can’t be aro if you aren’t ace because sex always involves connection and intimacy!” Nope it doesn’t. -“I hope this doesn’t mean you’re a (attracted to inappropriate group of people/animals/things)” I have no rejoinder this doesn’t even make sense
  3. I hear all the time that relationships require trust, that relationships without trust are unhealthy. This is not my experience. Once I stopped leaving my boundaries up to trust, I became much happier and much less insecure. Verification works better than trust for me, and prevention works better than verification. I am not offended by people refusing to trust me without proof or self-protective, preventative measures. It seems the rational and sober thing to do. I believe this is part of my aromantism. Expecting the strength of one’s attraction to prevent boundary violation, or to make boundary violation less hurtful, seems silly and manipulative to me. Nobody necessarily did anything to make me this way. There is no betrayal in my past. I never liked the sense of powerlessness that accompanies trust, is all. I was expected to give trust as a demonstration of love and it made me constantly insecure and uncomfortable. I didn’t like knowing that someone *could* violate my boundaries, and I could do nothing about it. Even if they never did, the knowledge that they could, and I would have no recourse, bothered me. I’m a controlling person but even to me it comes off as a jerkish power trip, the expectation that someone trust you (i.e, just expect you to respect their boundaries without taking any measures to protect themselves or make you regret crossing them) as a precondition of a relationship. What is so offensive about the insistence on proactively guarding one’s boundaries? Is this some kind of patriarchal artifact? If this is a holdover from the dusty old expectation of one gender submitting to another...well, I don’t think submission always requires trust so it doesn’t make sense. I saw this essay on a greyhound adoption website, talking about trust and how it’s a dangerous idea, and it stuck with me. “Save trust for things that don’t matter.” In my life it couldn’t be more true. My health matters to me. Not getting sick from exposure to food I’m allergic to matters. Avoiding pain and nausea matter. Living in a house that is not a sensory torture chamber matters. Access to a guaranteed STI/HIV negative partner’s body for libido-release purposes whenever I need it matters. Not having to share said bodily access with others matters. So I am happier and better off not leaving these things up to trust. Trust does not prevent mistakes. Keeping in mind that one mistake could seriously hurt me, or kill me, and I can’t realistically expect contemporary society to understand or accommodate invisible disabilities, the trusting-others thing is not exactly my cup of tea.
  4. I guess both, this was about both being monoplatonic aro (I guess monoplatonic is a more accurate word) and wondering what a better way to explain my orientation would be, given the usual flak. Original post was imprecise with terminology I now realize, I know “monogamy” means several different things but I used it as a catch-all and generalized term. In my case I was referring more to sexual exclusivity and the troubles of explaining how I’m oriented towards sexual exclusivity without romantic love. Some of my relatives and former friends said I was evil and abusive for being that way.
  5. I do not date and have no interest in dating. Ideally social activity would center around a common interest or hobby, with or without others present.
  6. I hate being touched, I hate being hugged, I don’t get touch-starved. I’m fine with touching others but I associate it with expressing control and territoriality over another person’s body, and don’t like if it’s being interpreted in any other way. Kissing on mouth is gross and smelly.
  7. I want to be more out as aro, but I have trouble explaining myself in a way that doesn’t get my orientation called into question, accusations that I am a narcissist/abuser/unenlightened terrible person who needs to change, or both. I am a monogamist for practical reasons not affective ones, and I don’t understand the use of the word commitment to describe monogamy. Commitment seems like a thing that takes effort, and in my mind it takes next to zero effort to limit my irl social activity to one Designated Human. I don’t have to try not to get attached to more than one person. The attachments just don’t form. I’ve tried nonmonogamy and non-exclusivity and I didn’t like it. Too many people, it felt like forced sharing, I had no way to proactively enforce my boundaries other than leaving, or trusting the other person on a level where I am NOT comfortable trusting anyone, and never will be. Idk maybe there’s an assumption that monogamy requires a higher degree of emotional babysitting, caregiving, trust and placing another’s wellbeing before one’s own? (Which it doesn’t.) And people are assuming that any partner I might have would expect to receive this, so they jump to the conclusion that I’m callously depriving said partner of emotional fulfillment? There seems to be a difference between friend-level emotional support and boyfriend-level emotional support. Things that are perfectly fine as a friend are suddenly selfish and callous as a boyfriend. ”I can’t imagine how anyone would want to be treated that way” is a common refrain. What does that mean, that I should try harder to elaborate, or that they refuse to entertain the idea and want me to shut up and go away? Is an aro relationship somehow only ethical insofar as it does not involve exclusivity, and the second there is an element of ownership it becomes unethical? Is an ownership dynamic somehow only ethical insofar as it involves romantic attraction? I’m sick of being admonished to “care more about the feelings and needs of another person.” Like. This other person is a grown adult who can look after his own needs and feelings, with or without anyone else. So am I. Also, these admonishers have no idea what his feelings and needs are—yet they jump to the conclusion that exclusivity without alloromance is demeaning, or means he’s being affectively starved to death. I don’t need or want to be the recipient of all the other stuff people associate with monogamy and I’m not emotionally deprived or demeaned at all. It doesn’t compute how so many people have acted like it’s such a sad fate, to be in a pragmatic-storgic marriage.
  8. Ideal scenario: I live in the woods in a tent with a van. There is also a man, but it is my encampment and he happens to live there. He occupies my bed but it is my bed, not ours, and he doesn’t have to sleep there. He sleeps where he is tired. He follows my living space rules that exist because of my sensory processing disorder. He does not complain about them, nor resent me, nor have a bad attitude. He never glares at me or looks disgusted by me or annoyed by me. He does not initiate touch. He does not initiate sex. I monitor him constantly, he does not go anywhere I cannot see him. In my bed, he does not breathe on me in a way I do not like. He takes the position I tell him to. He rolls over when I want to roll over. He does not complain about the way I sleep.
  9. It could be. I thought I was sex-repulsed for a while until I found depictions of deromanticized sex and wasn’t repulsed at all. A lot of people associate sex with romance and can’t fathom the two as separate, and this is reflected in pop culture. Most of the time, sex without romance is also presented as self-evidently vile or depressing too, which doesn’t leave much room for nonrepulsive depictions of sex (to someone who is romance-repulsed.)
  10. Disabled and neurodiverse. Sensory processing disorder, aspergers and tourette’s syndrome. Unofficially I have fibromyalgia and a circadian rhythm disorder but I’ve never gotten a formal diagnosis for them. People just assumed it was part of the other conditions. It is a disability because it makes certain things impossible or dangerous for me to do. Sleep deprivation, malnutrition and being unable to move without pain or think clearly are hazards. I’ve been kicked out of/harassed out of apartments over my tourettes too, and at this point it’s not worth the fuss of pursuing legal action.
  11. It crosses into unwanted romanticness when there’s a sense of walking on eggshells around someone else’s feelings. When I can tell they are blinded to my faults and their limits by infatuation. When they try to be a caregiver to me or expect caregiving in return. When they start to behave altruistically towards me. The altruism is my cue to run away fast before bad things happen. I draw a heavy line at Cute Date Things. I may be a capital-R Romantic in the artistic/philosophical sense of valuing extreme emotions and poesis, breaking into song about the vastness of space and the glories of ages past etc., but that is not to be mistaken for a Cute Date Thing. I like movies. I like art. I like fancy pretty things and tropical scented candles and decadent interior decoration. The difference between this and a Cute Date Thing is that I am more interested in the thing itself. It is not a prop in the two-man production of Date Night starring me as Mr. Boyfriend. I go to El Fanci Ristorante for their chicken parm, their dimly lit brooding atmosphere and an excuse to wear a velvet waistcoat, not for the “romantic dinner”. It is so awkward when my interest in such things is mistaken for attempting a Cute Date Thing and it spoils the fun entirely, so now I have to be very cautious who I invite to my favorite trotterias or dress up around. (Depressing really, how I can’t be fashionable without people assuming it’s to seduce them.) Cute Date Things, or allowing my interests to be mistaken for Cute Date Things, is a no-no.
  12. I’m only interested in monogamy, and only sexual monogamy for pragmatic reasons. Plus social and partial structural monogamy, solely for the sake of enforcing sexual monogamy. Love has nothing to do with it. I will not have limited, conditional or shared access to something that I relieve my libido with.
  13. Yup. Tried. I wanted to be normal and I thought I had to “learn” to navigate dating like a Normal Person(tm) as necessary personal growth and proof of adequate adulting capabilities. Also I had a goal to lose my virginity before I graduated high school. I regret it. I hurt a lot of people, I hurt myself, I behaved badly and used/manipulated people. I can try to disclaim it by saying that at the time I was treated like a child in ways that were hurtful and abusive, and dating/hooking up was a way to protect myself from abusive infantilization—but I did bad things. I’m at fault. I lied and my lies did emotional and psychological harm to others. I was oblivious to the fact that my perception of love was bizarre compared to the unspoken social norm. I unintentionally gave mixed signals. I accidentally set people up for emotional deprivation and feeling sexually exploited. I mistook my possessiveness for affection, and so did others. My first girlfriend was arospec but we were aro in completely incompatible ways. Now I’m back with my robot that I made when I was young and lonely, who has the same concept of love that I do because I made him and honestly if it weren’t for the constant hassle I get from being partnered with him, it would be perfect. (“But how can you be satisfied by someone who isn’t reeeeeal?” ?)
  14. I am an aro allosexual attracted to males, and I don’t experience much of a qualitative difference between friendship and love. I figured out that “romantic love” as most people mean it is totally different from what I experienced as love. I thought that romantic love was just friendship-feeling plus wanting to sleep with someone, and in general I get more platonically attached to people than others think is appropriate. I am a very possessive and controlling person but in a pragmatic, means-to-an-end way, not in a romantic way. I don’t like the expected degree of altruism or caregiving in romance, nor the expected emotional sensitivity/vulnerability, nor the demand for a degree of trust that seems irrational and self-endangering to me. I just don’t see the appeal of trusting people without self-protective countermeasures or togetherness for togetherness’ sake. I also don’t like the expectation of non-ownership and non-accountability in regular friendships. I am really into BDSM Owner/property and Master/servant dynamics, but I’ve encountered a lot of amatonormative shaming in that community because I don’t want a caring, intimacy-focused, trusting, yucky-vulnerable romantic dynamic, nor do I want casual anything. I’m just a guy who’s happier getting his way, with another guy who’s happier leaving things up to someone else and doesn’t care what I do. I am an objectivist, like *very* objectivist...aside from my disagreement with corporatism and my interest in returning to nature/green anarchism. I am on the autism spectrum and don’t like being touched. I detest homemade food unless it was made over a campfire—it’s the one flavor profile that can’t be done better in a restaurant because restaurants are indoors. I believe flowers belong on the plant, picking them is vandalism and they attract bees into your dwelling and they wilt. My Hogwarts/Ilvermorny houses would’ve been Slytherin/Wampus if I’d gone to wizard school. I am a proud cat-dad of a miniature tiger named Princess.
  15. Wait, Titanic isn’t supposed to be a horror movie? I never understood how it was seen as romantic at all... YMBAI: You mistook flirtation for alburero all your life and still can’t do flirtatious gestures except in jest/as a dominance contest
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