MulticulturalFarmer

Aro and sex spectrum bingo? Sounds fun. I'd love to play this game someday for sure.

Any option to do a reading club? I don't have a ton of close friends and doing that would be nice lol.

Just like the song, I'm curious. What is love?

I am feeling the loneliness for sure, but partly it's because of the culture that I was raised in that doesn't promote small talk, and to make matters worse, we like to discuss taboo topics (at least for North American societies (where I live now) like politics and religion as well as topics that dont go well outside of academic circles like science, mathematics, philosophy, etc. I could care less about football teams and sports teams and gossiping casually. Also my ethnic background is complex and that makes it hard in many cases to get the relationships/friendships/etc that I want cause of prejudice. Also, I'm definitely attracted to (academic and emotional) intelligence, and let's just say that it's hard to find someone who is okay with an LGBTQ person, is okay with a person of a complex ethnic heritage, AND has both academic and emotional intelligence and doesn't have the personality of a tyrant when it comes to negotiating friendships and relationships.

Oh god, where do I start with this? Well I dont think that being aro should automatically be associated with being ace, granted I'm a sexually fluid person, leaning towards allosexual, but also aro. I dont think that being allo means that you are just gonna want one night stands and FWBs, ever, or for the rest of your life. I think that's kinda a misconception that goes around. Or that we are too touchy feely or something and dont care about building the emotional connection first. These are the first that come to mind, I'm not sure what the rest of the stereotypes are but thought I'd share.

Oh haha, I see now. Yeah I was thinking, yeah, the French don't like speaking English much, eh (or English speaking countries like UK and USA.. so yeah)?

I feel like this website is very very mixed. On the one hand, I have had experiences and learned from others in ways that would not have been possible. I have learned so much about what it's like to grow up in an urban ghetto (I instead grew up in a rural town) in different parts of the world as well as what it's like to live with dissociative disorder and how dealing with the stigma of that diagnosis. However, I have also dealt with racist, anti-LGBTQ, and intersexphobic people, which is especially impactful for me as an intersex pansexual person. There are people who use intersex slurs and anti-gay and trans slurs, and say that people just get triggered too much these days. And to add insult to injury, the people who ran the website (7cups) didn't care and only sometimes would clear things up. Not to mention the process for reporting is VERY VERY cumbersome, more so than it is on other websites, such that repeatedly experiencing such things can make it hard to speak up and go through the entire process of filing a report, and even then there's no guarantee anything will happen or change.

Wait France is an anglophone country now? Or I guess you are just making a statement, right?

Funny, I heard about similar anti-Americanisation sentiments in France. They are, to say the least, very proud of the French language, and bring up everything you mentioned, like tipping culture. I'm not French or anything, but I do know tipping was common there at some point, just not any time recent. Things are similar for the holidays you mentioned too.

Just handed out candy, thought about how we didn't celebrate halloween in my town for the past 150 years and started to do it in the past 20 years or so. Also we are still very formal and bow down when giving out candy, especially when people are appreciating us.

Oh yeah i have a friend just like that, however, I think a lot of that is due to the fact that it is verboten to have premarital sex in her religion, so her experience isn't super applicable to your experience. I on the other side am like that because I am sexually fluid in terms of sexual attraction to people, and partly because I need to rehearse how sexual encounters are going to be as an intersex person, because I am scared of things going sideways. However, I tend to trigger my libido but that is more so when writing characters (historical characters too who once lived, I might add) and what an interaction in an aromantic and in a sexual sense would look like.

Well, personally, from my point of view, aro or not, if someone is not meeting your needs/standards, then you don't need to engage with them. I am sure there are aro people who would be willing to do the meeting their parents and all that stuff. I guess my point is that being aro shouldn't have much to do with it.

When you say issues with commitment, do you mean wanting certain rituals to be done or that your partner wasn't spending a lot of time with you?

May I ask if you had donor sperm? If so, how much did it cost?

I am going to use that phrasing from now on. I feel a lot less isolated now seeing that the above is something reserved for romantic encounters and feeling alienated by that.

I think worldwide, we need to admit that romance is a quirky and abnormal feature of being human, despite how "normal" and inherent it seems to be (though perhaps to an extent it is a construct) and try to control this urge (or let it pass) and then try to engage in a relationship with someone, whether friendly, romantic, etc.

I am not sure either. I have heard of psychologists saying that that behavior isn't normal even for alloromantic people, but the romance movies sure have shown a bad example of what a good/healthy relationship looks like.

Yeah LGBTQIA+ acronym is just for sexual and gender identities apparently :( Sigh...

I guess continuing on the topic of this thread, I think that there's good and bad aspects of all relationships, and I think that seeing it in a black and white way isn't healthy at all.

I've never heard the term "romantic coding". What is that?

I'm genderfluid, and I guess you could say that my intersex identity is kind of related to that as well, I use the genderfluid identity to explain my comfort with my body I guess. Before I fully embraced being aro, I did have the whole "no one is going to want to invest in me and treat me well because i'm not cis" and then I was like, well, just because someone doesn't want to date me doesn't mean they can't treat me with respect? What kind of messed up thinking is this? And it's true that many people (in my experience) don't want to, well have a family, whether via biological means or through adoption, with an intersex person, I have found people in kind of non-traditional ways who I could do stuff like that, at least outside of the "I'm romantically attracted to someone, lets have a family" model. I get along well with gay folks and just elderly ladies in the village I grew up in, and I realized that I did have quite a bit of "love" and "affection" in my life, it's just different. I just only have a few people close to me at the moment and it sucks that i'm not amatonormative, sadly. I really despise having to live with the two tiered system of treating people you are romantically into better than those that you aren't, or just treating people you are aesthetically attracted to better as well.

Thanks for clarifying what that means. Oh yeah, I bet there's a sense of like, "being aro isn't a real thing", right? God, if I received money for that every time I heard that dumb saying. Ugh.

What software did you use to make this? I love it. Also, what's the policy for sharing this picture on other websites?

Same for the "happy" to date someone if they asked part for me too, if they truly knew what arospec was. The issue is that if I mention if they just assume "friends", "FWB", "acquaintances" and anything that to them doesn't imply closeness or a "real commitment" or someone who NEVER wants to settle down. There's also the two-tiered system, where friends can't expect a consistent amount of time spent hanging out, hanging out at certain places, and all that but that's reserved for dates and romantic partners. Also, alloromantic people act kinda weird when they get into romantic relationships. Not only do some people become less expressive with their emotions than when they were friends (or just with their friends period), but there's a lot of "playing hard to get", and oh my, don't even get me started on how some people see their partner as a possession or someone to be controlled. Not that friends can't do that but it seemed more intensified in these "romantic relationships." And somehow people are okay with it because of their infatuation (not that anyone deserves toxic or abusive behaviors, I'm just talking about how some people rationalize it away, and yes, one's upbringing also has a huge role in what one considers to be "appropriate behaviors so I don't find it appropriate to blame the victim.) and will say as much if you ask them directly. I wonder what the usefulness of such romantic relationships are if one has to abide by so many "rules"? Could you explain more what you mean by "being judged by allo folks?"

Do you feel safe or comfortable asking directly if it's a date? Would you feel better with having the "third wheel" friend there?