roboticanary

25 minutes ago, FaerySilverwings said:

finding out that I'm not alone in the way I am/feel is so validating it kind of hurts.

too right

seeing other people talk about things I relate to has been so affirming

Welcome, the thing about having an online community because the real life one is not there is something I totally relate to. Hope you enjoy being here.

Also good to hear you stayed friends with your ex. my one 'romantic?' relationship ended with quite the kaboom. 

As has already been said, only you can decide if aromantic is the term for you.

what is worth saying is that when you ask:

On 8/9/2020 at 8:29 PM, Guest bruh said:

So can I consider myself one or not?

That is a clear yes, you can. even if you are not sure and even if you decide you are not later on you absolutely can consider yourself aromantic. We aren't going to hunt you down and say 'oy, you said you were one of us'

12 hours ago, Holmbo said:

Wouldn't it be better to just say romancenormativity (romonormativity for short ?)

Much more intuitive IMO.

It would, that sounds like a much better word to me.

Although the cynic in me suspects anyone trying that would have the devil's own job trying to get the term into an academic text like how amatonormativity got coined. 

On 8/8/2020 at 1:52 PM, Rolo said:

Except for my cat of course

why would anyone want romance when they could have a cat, I will never understand

Sometimes I used to, but now no.

I hate the conversations with family asking me when I will get a girlfriend (I can brush them off but I hate the effort). 

I hate the fact that it took a long  while for me to accept that to want sex without the attachment of romance did not make me an automatically terrible person

I hate the amount of people I drifted from at school because I was uncomfortable with them pressuring me to find love or insulting me for not seeming phased by it

but with so many dice to roll I was bound to have a few things about me that were different from the norm. Being aro is not that much of a problem now I am an adult and has started to become a part of me. 

I think the idea of wishing I were allo seems to me to be wishing to replace me with a 'normal person', a more boring, robot like copy of me

wow, those are brilliant

6 hours ago, Haze said:

 I might be happy when they enter a room i'm in but once they're out of my sight, I can forget them easily

OK, first up that does not sound like you just being too shy to go further

are they squishes, well I agree with what was said before, 

6 hours ago, Jot-Aro Kujo said:

What determines whether or not they're squishes is whether or not you choose to call them that.

Also the community, at least on here, is fairly small, and the aro community in general is not that old. I wouldn't be surprised if a bit more time and a bit more looking led you to find quite a few people who describe squishes, or whatever word they end up using, in a way that you do relate to.

I reckon alone

I am open to living with someone so maybe I will be swayed in future.  But I am not going to go out of my way to make that happen myself, which would mean the only way I would end up living together is if someone else put in a lot of work to make it happen while still being chill with me being aro. I'm not going to rule it out but if I was a betting man I wouldn't put anything serious on it.

Alone seems like a good option, I have a good life and can have a house with everything as I want it. Try to keep good friends but still have a place of my own go to if I want.

That sounds very familiar, I have the same worries as well.

Not sure if I have had much success in solving that but one thing I did find is that throwing myself into organiations or societies really helps with the feeling of loneliness. Try something that works for you but in my case I got involved in scouting and joined a local astronomy club (both free in my case which was useful). People seem far more receptive to the idea of spending time with friends when that time is organised for some reason.

Even when I had few close friends around there were always a couple of days a week where I was talking to people I liked which helped keep off the loneliness.

Recenty I told my younger cousin a joke a friend of mine told me, when my cousin retold it at dinner it had apparently became my girlfriend who told that story.

like no, how did that happen? I was genuinely confused how my description had given the impression of romance to him.

Theres some really good ideas on here that I never thought of, just to add some thoughts of my own.

It could be that asexuality turns out to be more common. boring answer I know but if that were true it would in particular mean more people to push for media representation, more people organising events, more people asking artists to include ace rep.

the other idea I was thinking is that romance seems more nebulous to describe than sex. defining sexual attraction is not that easy but I would wager it is less of a confused mess than romantic attraction. Even asking someone who experiences romance to describe what it means is like trying to get blood out of a stone. It could be that less people realise they are aro than ace because of that. hence less people to push for representation.

OK I reckon this is a tough one to give a clear answer to but here is my attempt.

words become used by being used, if you want to go about getting something 'officially named' as you put it then pretty much what you do is put that term out there in the world and try to find people who will use it.  If people start picking the term up and spreading it around the aro world someone who curates a list like that is going to pick it up eventually.

7 hours ago, Planet said:

That loooong list of different orientations on the aromantic spectrum...how did that happen?

Now I don't know for sure how it started, I wasn't there but if you are referring to the AUREA glossary or a list based from that this info might help.

AUREA takes volunteers, see this page for details

https://www.aromanticism.org/en/volunteer

in particular under contributor

'As a contributor, you would be assigned to a certain project, alongside the people already working on it to help out with creating and/or maintaining it'

'Our resources and glossary need to be maintained less often and require thoroughness and attention to detail. '

So that is roughly how that happens, they get volunteers to work on the glossary, those volunteers decide on what words to include and update/work on definitions. Beyond that or how they go about choosing terms, I am not sure.

To get a word on there, I have no idea, however under the glossary is a list of uncommon or emerging words: https://www.aromanticism.org/en/uncommon-and-newly-emerging-terms

Some of these words have links to the people who coined them, might be worth getting in touch with one of them if you are serious. asking if they know anything about how their term got on there might be an idea.

10 hours ago, aro_elise said:

the 'ay' from aro and the rest rhymes with -pocalypse

you put it better than I did, agreed on that.

although I do wonder what an aromantic apocalypse would be and why we would want that

Ay-rock-uh-lips 

maybe for marriage, although this is less about what I want and more about law. There are some differences in terms of law between being married and living with a good friend and I would rather talk it through. The idea of marriage makes me uncomfortable, and feels like a sort of betrayal to who I am, but I can be old and cynical enough to realise that marriage has advantages that are not going to be extended to good friendships any time soon. my discomfort is not of a level that I wouldn't suck it up and deal with it if I thought marriage would be useful.

As for kids, probably not and no desire for it at the moment but it is not an idea I have put enough thought in to rule out.

I am an agnostic and have been for quite a while, however I was raised christian (salvation army by family and a catholic school).

I suppose the big thing for me was that long before I knew the term allo aro I looked at less romantically serious sexual relations in a favourable light. I saw the idea of a friends with benefits style arrangement as something that sounded acceptable, and I began to think of prostitution as something that could be a sensible transaction, rather than seeing it as bad. I also became very aware of the difference between considered, thought out though non romantic relationships and casual sex as thought of by those religious leaders who had the platform to preach to me. This was not a smooth ride.

gallium doorknobs

individually packaged rice grains

As you say at the start, maybe it is up to you. I would say it is, you define what best fits you.

One important thing,

2 hours ago, Planet said:

feel like I can't be on the aromantic spectrum because I've been romantically attracted to people too many times for that

You can be on the aromantic spectrum. It is, after all, a spectrum. your romantic attraction, even if it is sometimes there that does not prevent you from taking your place here. Alloromantic people do not tend to describe their romantic feelings as weak, confusing, muddled, fade very quickly or refer to them as BS pseudo feelings.

Since grey aro is by design an area somewhere between aromantic and romantic it sounds like a good fit. I won't tell you that it is you, that is up to you to figure out, but it seems a reasonable label given what you have described.

As an aside

you say:

2 hours ago, Planet said:

my romantic feelings usually fade very quickly. Even the one time the romantic attraction was clear and strong, the feelings evaporated within a week

What I would suggest is having a look at the idea of frayromantic, that has some connection with romantic relationships that fade after getting to know people so maybe an identity similar to that is something to consider. There is another term which is about feelings that dissapear as the initial joy/excitement goes, I think it was 'post rubor', something like that, probably on a list of romantic types. They might not be an exact fit but maybe one of these terms might help put your relation to romance into words.

Welcome, hope you enjoy being here. from the short time I have been on this place has been nothing but welcoming so I am sure you will be able to make friends here.

5 hours ago, ravensong said:

cause surely i experienced romantic attraction

Oh yes, that sounds familiar. surely, surely... wait, hang on do I?

wonderful, sounds like your questioning has done you well.

Yes, absolutely.

Coming to terms with not caring for romance has massively changed the demographic of my friends. I am one of two men at my workplace who gets along with most of the women who work here, and given the other guy is gay I think that it has to do with me not making unwanted advances. The lack of romantic expectation frees me to be genuine, to talk openly.

I suppose the other difference is that I place a high value on relying on friends, as in if someone was worried about a something, or someone was dealing with a difficult event in their life I have no expectation of having a partner to comfort me, so I see that as something that a friend just does. I would jump up at two in the morning and travel to the other side of the country to be with a friend in need. I would drop my plans and take care of a friend's child if I knew they were stuck for options. Some alloromantic people do have this idea, and two of the people I am good friends with have a miltary background and are very thorough about doing right by their friends, but I don't think that is a common thing because of the expectation that someone should have a partner to help them with those things.

One last thing for me is realising that my  level of comfort around the idea of sex free of romantic expectations, which is an idea I was open with before I came to terms with the words allo aro, made a fair few people see me as a bad influence. Especially people I got  to know from church in my early teens, I was already on shaky terms through leaving the religion but there was definitely the perception that what was really bad was interacting with someone who felt comfortable living what they saw as a life of sin. I drifted away from people I would have been very happy to be friends with due to that. (sidenote, I was quite happy to not talk about it and for most of those people I never told them those views, it was the fact it was generally known what I felt which was enough for them to push away)

I like this, such a wholesome idea.

One thing I like about myself is that I am a keen reader

4 hours ago, nisse said:

this is a very good point! i have some scribbles of conversations between them about aromanticism in general, but i really should have something about aromanticism as related to being allo. thank you!

No worries, It is so great to see someone putting this effort into developing an allo aro character. Thank you for making that effort.

You get killed by an angry saint.

I wish all the code I use at work was well commented