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Neon

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Posts posted by Neon

  1. You really shouldn't be trying to "blend in". It may be nice in the short term, but in the long term, your mental health and sense of self will suffer.

    Instead, just keep talking about their relationships. Hype them up. Tease them if everyone is comfortable with it. They are your friends - take an interest in their lives. You don't have to relate or talk about yourself to be happy and engaged with a conversation.

    Think about like a friend talking about a movie you didn't watch and have no interest in watching. You aren't interested in the movie, but you are interested in them and their happiness.

    • Like 1
  2. 1 hour ago, ozymandias said:

    even though I can imagine myself with "them" (it literally can be anyone), it is never "me". It is just a story, a work of fiction. I don't know how to explain it in the most tactful way, it just feels wrong.

    This sounds just like me lmao. Before I accepted I was aromantic, whenever I imagined my future, I would picture a faceless woman married to a faceless man. If I tried to put my face onto the woman, I couldn't get it to look like me. If I tried to put someone I knew's face onto the man, it would look like him. I literally cannot conceptualize a future in which I am in a romantic relationship.

    1 hour ago, ozymandias said:

    Maybe I am just shutting down emotions, even though none have been for a real person in a while.

    I thought I was doing that for a really long time. So I started writing down every time I felt what I considered the feeling associated with romantic attraction and how it felt. I felt the same thing singing in the car with my mom, petting my dog, looking at flowers, seeing someone's coloring of a mandala, and more. If I didn't have literal written records, I probably would have gaslit myself into believing it didn't happen, so I highly recommend doing the same if you want to start to parse that out.

    1 hour ago, ozymandias said:

    maybe what I am craving is just a person I can trust with anything.

    This is me again! I had to force myself to share more of myself with the people I wanted to know me. It's a very slow process but my close friends were never surprised and never left me. After I started doing that, the craving for someone I could trust went away - I already have that person now.

    1 hour ago, ozymandias said:

    I feel like a fraud, truly

    When I was first trying to accept myself as aromantic, I felt this all the time. It gets better. What helped me was avoiding all "am I aro" posts, quizzes, etc. like the plague, keeping track of my thoughts and feelings, and just using arospec and acespec instead of aromantic and asexual.

    It also helped me to know that it's okay if you are wrong about this. Use the label now, and for however long it feels right. You aren't hurting anybody by doing so. In fact, there is a net benefit for using a label that you want to use: it hurts no one and HELPS YOU. So use it.

    Also, there is no set way to be aromantic. There is no symptom list, no diagnostic criteria. The only thing you need to do to call yourself aromantic is find the label personally useful to describe your experiences. And based on what you described, the label aromantic seems to describe your experiences.

    1 hour ago, ozymandias said:

    I probably am having trouble differentiating between romantic and platonic attraction. In all honesty, I don't think I could, my idea of romance has been twisted to the point of unrecognition. I don't really know what romantic attraction really feels like anymore.

    I don't have personal experience with this, but it may help to look into the microlabel quoiromantic (aka WTFromantic). The hallmark of it is that you cannot conceptualize romantic attraction/cannot tell the difference between romantic and platonic attraction. That being said, microlabels are not for everyone and I strongly advise against just scrolling through lists of them (I did that and it just made my self-invalidation so much worse).

    1 hour ago, ozymandias said:

    This all probably seems very melodramatic, but I am just trying to be as logical and pragmatic as I can in this situation.

    It doesn't seem melodramatic at all! A lot of what you've said has rung very true to me. Don't feel bad about being upset or confused. It's brave to be so vulnerable with complete strangers, and I commend you.

    Also, attraction isn't logical or easy to nail down. I know it's so much easier said than done, but don't stress this.

    1 hour ago, ozymandias said:

    a lot of what I have seen on this site is the first.

    Trust me, that's probably a solid 95% of us here. It's genuinely one of the best resources I had when I was questioning/struggling to accept myself and I've learned a lot from the community here. I've completely revised my idea of aromanticism, romance, and love in general MANY times over the last few years lmao.

    1 hour ago, ozymandias said:

    I think I am aro, in some way or another, but I don't know how comfortable I would be using that outside of my own head.

    Again, I relate so hard to this. It took a very long time for me to get fully comfortable admitting to anyone outside my head that I was aromantic. Hell, it took an extremely long time to get comfortable admitting I was aromantic INSIDE my head. Like I said before, it take time, but it gets easier, and then it gets effortless.

     

    I really hope this helped, because I've been there myself. It's scary and confusing and overwhelming. I hope I payed forward what the people on this site did for me a little bit. I hope that you can find some solace in the fact that people here relate to your experiences. I also hope I was mostly coherent in this (it's 12:15am and I am tired). Please feel free to ask me any questions about my experiences.

    • Like 2
  3. On 10/4/2023 at 7:35 PM, mordo said:

    no hate to aros who do feel strong forms of attraction

    I feel strong familial/platonic love and the whole "aros can still feel love" thing pisses me off to no end. It feels like I'm being used as a shield against criticism of loveless antagonism (I'm curious if anyone else feels this way and/or aros who feel romantic love sense that with "aro people can still date"? or if it's more a me thing). And it feels like I'm expected to make up for my romantic attraction with it. AND it feels like alloros expect me to express platonic love the way they express romantic love even though it's not anywhere near similar to romantic love.

    • Like 2
  4. I don't know any alloro people who have ever chosen their crushes. Heck, I've even seen my alloro friends desperately want to date people they otherwise hate. If people could just choose to have/not have a crush on someone, there goes most relationship drama, which clearly is not the case. I'm not sure quite what your mom means, but if I had to guess I would say the same as everyone else here.

    • Like 1
  5. 4 hours ago, castletalk said:

    I'm pretty much up for anything sci fi or fantasy, especially if there's well-written/interesting platonic relationships! Bonus points if there's queer people. Or robots. Or monsters.

    Starting with fantasy recs:

    Vespertine by Margaret Rogerson, features an aro main character (confirmed out of canon as the author decided to not write a sequel), and it's really good!

    The Discworld series by Terry Pratchett is excellent. Every book is a stand-alone so you can read whatever you are in the mood for. (Here's the list for reference https://www.discworldemporium.com/reading-order/).

    The Fablehaven series by Brandon Mull remains one of my favorite of all time. The romance is minimal and it focuses heavily on the sibling relationship between the main characters.

    The Market of Monsters series by Rebecca Schaeffer is an urban fantasy with two aroace leads!

    The Girl Who Drank the Moon by Kelly Barnhill is also one of my favorite fantasy books, I don't remember if there's any romance.

    The Red Queen series by Victoria Aveyard is a dystopian fantasy and the main romance is one of the only YA romances I like. It also has multiple queer couples.

    The Inheritance Cycle by Christopher Paolini is also excellent, especially if you are like me and like the concept of Tolkien's worldbuilding but finding Tolkien's writing insufferable.

    For sci-fi:

    Recursion by Blake Crouch is excellent and I read it in one sitting, but it does have a main romance and iirc a sex scene

    Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao is similarly amazing, but also has a lot of romance and I also think there is sex in it. The main trio are polyam and they have robots!

    The Electric State by Simon Stålenhag is a post-apocalyptic story with amazing illustrations to go with it. The main character is gay as well!

    On A Sunbeam by Tillie Walden is a graphic novel and the main character is gay

    The Illuminae Files (series) by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff is a "compiled documents" space opera and is really good. However, there is a lot of romance

    Bonus:

    Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine is realistic fiction but it features one of the best platonic relationships I've read

    • Like 1
  6. Hi! I'm Neon and I use she/they/he pronouns. Welcome! And I love giving book recs so if you have genre (edit: used the wrong word, I meant age range like middle grade, YA, or adult) or any other specifications I can give you some!

    • Like 1
  7. That sounds a lot like my experience at that age! Had I known the word at the time, I'm fairly certain I could have confidently called myself aro when I was 12.

    I encourage you to look further into aro experiences and learn more about the term if you haven't already (I literally cannot recommend Ash Hardell's videos on the a-spectrum enough, they were one of the best things ever when I was questioning) and don't hesitate to ask more questions as they arise.

  8. Ugh. I've been there. It sucks. I did a lot to quell my doubt, but the number one most important thing is TIME. It wasn't until about a year in that I could confidently say I was aromantic. But it got easier the entire time. You've only known you were aro for a month. That's not very long, and I promise it gets better. I feel doubtful very rarely now (it's been just over 3 years, and I can count on one hand how often I've tried to invalidate myself in the last couple years).

    In regards to the other stuff, I took a lot of notes about intense feelings of all kinds, so I could look back and remember that the feeling I thought was romantic attraction I also got singing in the car and looking at a pretty abstract art piece (yes those are both true lmao). That way I had physical proof that I wasn't deceiving myself. I also used "arospec" and "acespec" for a while because they felt more comfortable. Without meaning to, I started using aro, ace, and aroace interchangeably with them, then started using exclusively aro, ace, and aroace. It wasn't conscious, I just eased into myself. That may not work for you, so I guess the nearest thing is just to give yourself space to explore your identity.

    Finally, and this may seem counter-intuitive, but stay away from "am I aromantic" type questions, "you might be aro if" type posts, any kind of "what is your sexuality" quizzes, etc. for a while. They may validate you, but more likely, they will cause you to compare your experiences to other people's and even if you relate to 9/10 things, you will try to convince yourself you aren't aro because you don't relate to 1 of them. And to clarify, you can be aro without relating to anything in those discussions.

    • Like 1
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