roboticanary

Glad I'm not alone in getting that worry. I guess one side affect of having a community with a focus on finding labels is that if you aren't sure which one fits you it can make you feel like you might be cast out.

I am not sure but something isn't normal. Throughout most of primary school and a fair part of secondary school I was told I had 'anger issues' and was sent for some sessions in anger management. What I suspect is that underlying mental issues got turned into a label that I simply had trouble controlling my anger which was something the school could justify putting someone to work to fix. In particular I got violent because something was seriously preventing me from dealing with a confrontation by talking it out. Honestly i am struggling to explain it now so long later. To be fair dealing with it as anger issues was not a bad idea, the primary school in particular was a bit of a scummy place and could not justify detailed mental health for the kids, however they could get in someone to work with kids who were causing the most trouble and stopping us beating the crap out of each other so often. A long time later I was talking to my mum about it, and she told me she had asked two of the people that had spent time with me on that if they though I was autistic. apparently one was not sure and the other said I was very likely to be. But as around the time she asked I was becoming less violent she decided to just not tell me and leave things alone. Sometime I will get around to properly looking myself over and working out what my brain is like, but i guess I take after my mum in a way, until something goes badly wrong I am unlikely to put money or effort into working it out.

Wow. I have no idea what goes on at AVEN but I will say one of the things that really drew me in to this site was how kind the introductions were. Anyone who joins gets a nice little shower of welcomes and hellos, its great.

Nice, I hope I can reach that stage of confidence in the future. at the moment I still get too angry about the arguments to be comfortable with that

Damn, great point there, I totally haden't thought about that but it works.

To be honest any representation would do, just give me something In particular I would like to see an old aro. someone who is not cast as a young adult coming to terms with their identity, but has got themself fairly sorted out over the years. knows what they want in life.

welcome From what I have seen so far this forum is fairly chill. so no worries about not wanting to get involved in politics

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: 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'

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.

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

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, 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. 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.

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.

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