NullVector

@Coyote thanks. It's not explicitly stated, but I guess that to work as an explanation, that hypothesis would be assuming that (per heteronormative social conventions/codes) : 1. female-to-female touching = ok 2. male-to-female touching = prohibited outside the context of (heterosexual) romantic relationships 3. male-to-male touching = prohibited outside the context of (homosexual) romantic relationships i.e women can get their tactile needs (at least partially) met outside of the context of romantic relationships (via friendships) but most men can't. Either that, or men just tend to have disproportionately more male friends and women more female friends? (in which case, perhaps 2. is not 'prohibited' per se, but most men just lack the social networks to access it?)

@Coyote apparently it's not possible to read most of the articles you posted (paywalls ) but I was intrigued where it mentions in one of the abstracts that Affection deprivation shows no correlation with age and no relationship with ethnicity, but men report significantly higher average affection deprivation than women. Do they go into more detail as to why that is?

Welcome @Koraka I think we're similar ages and, in case it helps, what you wrote seems very relatable to me. Particularly this: Really, I just imagined a friend to discuss philosophical ideas and have sex with . From time to time. Without the other anxiety-inducing commitments that would typically be expected.

Not such a fan of that, as 'amorous' can refer to sexual as well as romantic. If we're looking for a more general purpose term then 'amatodivergent' is one suggestion (I just made it up). To contrast with amatonormative (similar in usage to how neurodivergent contrasts with neurotypical).

@Coyote when I wote that I saw elderley care as "less of an issue", the context I meant it in was as "not something I would expect to disproportionately imact aros and/or the childless/childfree, given how our society works in practice". I agree that how our society works in practice is not great in a lot of ways. The question here is whether those ways disproportionately impact aros in a way that makes aromanticism itself a political issue. For me, they don't. For others, they might. I think I'd prefer the political discussions to happen at a lower level of resolution e.g. focusing on social issues that impact all single or all childless people, rather than just aromantic ones. Or, going even lower level, social issues that impact all people lacking in informal support networks, for example. Okay, I am new here. Which phrases I should have avoided not to come off as impolite? Oh, I wasn't implying reference to anything you wrote. Just that elswhere on the interent, what I wrote might have been phrased in terms like 'snowflakes' getting 'triggered' by 'facts' they encounter outside their 'safe spaces'. I don't find that type of phrasing to be helpful! So I did not write my post that way.

That's interesting... I'm vaguely reminded of the Jungian concept of 'integrating the shadow'. But when I tried reading Jung, I found it somewhat impenetrable. Whereabouts does Stapledon expand upon this concept? (source of quote?)

Yeah, I think that is a very valid point. I wasn't ever saying that aromanticism wasn't or shouldn't be a political issue, by the way. Just that I don't personally experience it that way (hence that prefacing of my comment with "Speaking for myself only"). That slogan of "the personal is political": my understanding was it emerged out of the experience of 60s social activism (e.g. 2nd wave feminism) in contexts where people would share personal experiences and came to recognise that those experiences were widely shared. Therefore their personal difficulties were attributable to systemic factors (political) and not merely personal 'quirks' or idiosyncracies. But my experience of aromanticism is kind of the opposite! My inner experience of relationships doesn't seem to be shared by others (at least, others not on this forum!) and does therefore seem attributable to personal 'quirks' and idiosyncracies! So my aromanticism is not a 'personal' that I experience as 'political' (emphasis on 'my' and 'I' here, as I am some of the things you mentioned: able-bodied, young(ish), financially independent(ish)) . Perhaps this perception would change though if I met and interacted with an IRL aro community? I can see that romantic relationships could plug gaps in support systems that are difficult to plug in other ways, given how those systems are set up and legally framed (to not legitimise other relationship archetypes). Which might not be felt as a political issue for someone that can largely ignore state institutional structures, but I can see might become highly 'political' for someone that has to interact with those structures day-to-day. Having kids for elderly care strikes me as less of an issue to be honest. I think in practice (at least in 'the West') it's often somewhat of a romantic fantasy parents have. In practice, the children are often so busy with their own families and financial troubles that the duty of care is passed on to institutions (e.g. nursing homes). Using the (probably significant) extra money you save from not having kids to afford a better standard of elderly care would strike me as, 9 times out of 10, the more reliable plan for old age. I could be wrong here though... Tumblr is, well, not something I have anything to do with. Probably just showing my age there though

All I was implying here is that, on a spectrum between "we are being terribly oppressed by this system and must burn it to the ground and begin anew!" and "things are, fundamentally, reasonable enough, but there is room for improvements in some areas" my sense was that Brake's legal critique was leaning more to the latter end. That qualification was there because my overall point was that I don't personally feel like a victim of oppression necessitating big changes in the political arena. Rather minor tweaks would seem sufficient. So aromanticism is not in the main a 'political' issue, at least not for me. I encounter it more as an unfortunate personal coincidence that I happen to oftentimes feel lonely and isolated from others as a result of being 'a collection of rare oddities' as @SoulWolf puts it. Sure, I'm interested in learning more if you have some links to stuff, book suggestions, etc.

I think I know what you mean and for me personally this is probably my biggest hang-up. Like, I know intellectually that as long as I communicate intentions clearly to another consenting adult there really aren't any issues to my seeking mid-to-long-term sexual but non-romantic relationships. But I still get this sense from somewhere (probably cultural 'programming') that this is somehow not okay. Like, one-night-stand would be acceptable but beyond that would be an emotionally exploitative 'stringing-along' of the other person. Again, intellectually, this does not seem defensible (an adult human choosing to remain in a relationship with me should be responsible for regulating their own emotional state and respecting the truth of what I have explicitly communicated to them going into the relationship vis-a-vis expectations). But I still can't shake this gut sense that I would be being exploitative somehow! If anyone has any psycho-therapeutic suggestions here, I'm all ears

Speaking for myself only: I don't really find I am denied any important political rights as a result of my romantic orientation (or lack thereof). By historical standards, I seem to have an enormous amount of freedom to live my life in the way I choose to. The issue for me is not so much feeling actively persecuted by social/legal structures*, but more just struggling to find IRL people on the same wavelength as me (in interpersonal relationsips, yes, but also in other aspects). But I wouldn't seek to frame that as a political issue. I just find it a bit personally disappointing I think part of what @Spacenik86 is getting at is a tendency for the internet to fragment peòple into quite niche online 'communities' which can then, by design, become largely insulated from outside criticism (constructive or otherwise). This can, perhaps, tend to make people overly defensive and somewhat unprepared for when they venture outside that community and encounter actual contrary views? (I've tried to phrase that last paragraph as politely as possible; I'm sure you're aware of less polite phrasings of it!) What @Holmbo mentioned does strike me as a big cultural blind-spot though. As in, it would be nice if conceps like "romantic harrasment" and "romantic consent" were anywhere near as universally acknowledged as the analagous concepts of "sexual harrasment" and "sexual consent". *You can make the case that existing legal frameworks privilege marriage and aren't good at legitimising other relationship archetypes, sure. Like Elizabeth Brake did in Minimizing Marriage. But she wasn't exactly calling for revolution on all fronts in that book! More like liberal reforms/tweaks to an existing contract law framework that already grants people the core political freedoms, but is currenly a bit inflexible in the inter-personal space.

@nonmerci might know some?

Me too. I was surprised I didn't score higher on 'liberty' actually. But, as others have pointed out, questions lacked enough context. So, does people's 'morality' match their political leanings? I found it interesting that, according to the explanation after the test, 'left liberals' are lowest in liberty! Maybe an american test can't handle the concept of left libertarian

Simple looking equations can concisely encode a complex structure of relationships between things. The complexity is there, it just needs unpacking. For instance, can you derive e=mc^2 from first principles? (first principles here means assuming that observers in different inertial frames all see the same speed of light, c, and then making that requirement consistent with known kinematics) And what about the 'm' in that equation? Is it a rest mass, or is it hiding a dependance on velocity?

Your scores: Care 94% Loyalty 33% Fairness 86% Authority 44% Purity 33% Liberty 69% Your strongest moral foundation is Care. Your morality is closest to that of a Left-Liberal.

I feel similarly. I think that's a nice and positive way to relate to the orientation Without meaning to sound too grandiose here (hah) I've personally always been rather preoccupied with thoughts on the direction society as a whole is heading in, the incalculable debt we owe to our ancestors in bringing us this far (to our present understanding of the universe) and what sort of positive (albeit slight) role I can play in shaping our collective future as a species. I generally find others less preoccupied by this stuff than I am (I struggle to have IRL conversations about it; sometimes when I've tried in the past it has been shied away from and characterised as 'too intense'). I wonder if this is something aros tend to dwell on more than most people? Do we anchor our happiness and self-identity more in positive contributions towards the wholesome evolution of our societies and less in our inter-personal relationships? I don't know if there are any pschometric ways to asses it? Any tests people here could take? I'd be intetested in the results.

Seems like there are two options here: 1. When using the word 'Platonic' in aro spaces it's given a specific technical meaning (a bit like how the word 'theory' in academic scientific contexts doesn't have the meaning it has outside those contexts - which can result in some "just a theory" type of confusions) 2. throw the word 'Platonic' in the bin on the grounds that it has too wide a range of possible interpretations to be useful for denoting a specific interpretation. Pick another word instead. I lean more towards 2. On some older threads, people here have suggested companionate relationship as an alternative label to QPR. I found that more intuitively viable as a term. Also more neutral, in the sense of not precluding a sexual component.

Cool. The way I framed what I wrote was heavily influenced by stoicism, by the way. If you liked it and want a bit more you could watch this and/or read this.

Haha, hetero-normies very much use it in this sense already (e.g. check 'smash' in Urban Dictionary of you care/dare to!). I'd assumed that was the joke here.

I liked what @nonmerci said. My take on it is: Things you can't control: People making assumptions about you based on incomplete information. People believing the information you tell them. Things you can control: What you choose to tell people How you dress, etc. Some ideas: To me it makes sense to concentrate on what you can control and not stress overly about what you can't. If you feel okay talking directly about your (a)sexuality, you can do that. Another idea is that there might be visual markers you could use/wear that would signal it, if you wanted to communicate it in that way instead? I don't know much about the ace community, but I hear people wear custom t-shirts, rings, etc. Also, I'd assume most people your age will probably have heard about asexuality already and it has gained more visibility recently (e.g. the TV show Bojack Horseman has an ace character). So, it may not be as big an issue for other people to 'get it' as you might expect?

I was only trying to point out there that, if we do the equivalent of calling circles as squares and squares as circles in aro spaces, then it's reasonable to expect our talking this way to (unnecessarily IMO) confuse people. I mean, I'm here in this space and I find it confusing . So, are we doing this? The question for me is whether 'platonic' and 'sexual' are mutually exclusive by definition. If most people would agree "yes" then is setting up our terminology to say "no" really a good idea? Can we use better words here? That's the question I was implicitly asking by "pointing at a dictionary".

That's something I find difficult to comprehend. Since I understand "platonic" to mean "non physical", "non sexual", "non sensual". Thus "platonic" and "sexual" are very much mutually exclusive adjectives to me. Yep, that's how I understand it as well. In fact, isn't this just the standard usage of 'Platonic' in the context of inter-personal relationships? I just googled it and this is the top hit I got: adjective (of love or friendship) intimate and affectionate but not sexual. "their relationship is purely platonic" synonyms: non-sexual, non-physical, chaste; spiritual, intellectual, friendly "our relationship is purely platonic" So it seems very confusing to me to coin 'QPR' as a term to inculde sexual relationships. When that usage flatly contradicts the common usage of 'Platonic'...

Yeah, same. Up to now, I didn't personally see why this needs its own word. Or how it's at all specific to aros. ?‍♂️ But maybe it's what @nonmerci said: which would be more aro-specific, I guess...(although I'm personally not sure about the term 'QPR' - do these imply an aro-ace only dynamic, or can they be sexual? (the 'P' might suggest not))

Total Recall? (the Arnie original of course! I haven't seen the remake)

I put 'something else' because I don't really understand the concept of 'squish' from what I've read in other threads (I don't get how it's different from the standard wanting to be friends with someone or wanting to get to know them better / spend more time with them) Also this:

Welcome @Madame Giraffe I found the relevant emojis to welcome you here, lol: ?????? Ice cream is also the traditional welcome here: