Neir

You seem lovely, Lea! Thank you for the well wishes. Here's an aro ice cream welcome gift in return: 

Welcome Sel! 

I really look forward to seeing your merch ?

Welcome! I'm really happy to hear that you're trying this out in an effort to better understand and accept yourself. Many of us have been where you are. Have some aro ice cream for your troubles -  - and come hang out in this lovely community.

Welcome! 

Hi and welcome. Have some ice cream and join our shenanigans (with your dog too!): 

Welcome. Have some aro ice cream to go with your book: 

An update: We closed the poll and took everyone's suggestions and comments into account.

The winner of the community acronym poll is:

AUREA (Arospec Union for Recognition, Education, and Advocacy)

AUREA has good potential searchability, is explicit in its advocacy aims/goals, and is also the Latin word for "gold," whose imagery is something we can do a lot with.

Thank you everyone for participating and also for suggestions about the site in our other thread. We're excited and working hard.

A fellow writer!

Do you have a place you publish your writing? If you're comfortable, I'd love to see.

Welcome! @The Angel of Eternity already gave you aro ice cream but there's no harm in giving you even more: 

I'll let @aroalien explain what those terms mean to them but if you're looking for a definition, @The Angel of Eternity, nblw is usually short for a nonbinary person who is attracted to women. Sapphic is also used for being generally attracted to women if I remember right.

Anyway, welcome again, and you sound really cool.

As someone who struggles with depression and who is also aro, I get where you're coming from. It's incredibly frustrating seeing friends of mine slowly abandon me for romantic pursuits and constantly have my family hammer my brain with "So when you get married, _____" comments. Sometimes I'm quite happy to be aro because, like Tost said, there are people out there who do stay and who do respect me. It gets to me sometimes that those people are the minority and it for sure doesn't take away from the hurt and loneliness and touch-starved feelings I get. But, I'll be honest, chatting with these folks here and on Tumblr/Discord about their lives and aro issues has been really validating and rewarding for me. Being able to share my struggles is something I love about this community and when my friends are being distant, I at least have the crutch of the online world and my hobbies. It's not a perfect system and it sometimes isn't enough to make me feel better, but I think that with enough communication with friends and society at large about amatonormativity may help us see change.

Thanks for coming by and sharing this. It takes a lot, I know, but you're not alone in this. Being queer (and aro specifically) can be hard right now. That's why we're fighting for change. In the meantime, we're always nearby (sometimes literally) and real allies and friends will step up to close the gap sometimes so it never hurts to be vulnerable and honest with them. I'm sending lots of hugs and support. ?

Oh gotcha! I wasn't sure about whether we were just searching for an umbrella term or both that and a specific vague attraction.

I'm definitely biased, but I like oblique especially as an umbrella term. I would readily use it.

As for the specific vague attraction, I'm not a person in need of this term but if others are in search of such a term and like it, it would make a great sibling term. You do have a point with alterous (and arguably queerplatonic or honestly just queer) being vague enough to potentially include what some folks here are thinking of.

THE FINAL ROUND is here!

Vote here for your favourite community acronym. Huge thank you to everyone who's participated and commented so far.

1 hour ago, Coyote said:

It sounds a bit like you two are talking past each other here.

Thanks for clarifying this, Coyote!  

The team just isn't quite sure how to respond, if we can be honest. We wanted to make clear that those of us on the core team are us because we work well together, are dedicated to inclusivity, and have time right now. What we're asking from everyone else isn't for your personal trust right now, but for your support and feedback. That's why we were confused by Mark's comment at the beginning. We welcome their feedback but know we can't fix them not trusting us with simple words. You will have to see the site to judge and this conversation will be circular until you see what we have created. Please don't assume we will misrepresent you. That's why we're here and listening, you know? What can we do better?

We get the apprehension behind blindly supporting us without seeing our content (especially with money). You don't have to do that and we're not asking for that if you don't know us. The financial support we've garnered is from people who have seen us around and know what our personal goals and stakes in this are. We have also reached our initial goal for finances so if you've been apprehensive about donating, don't feel you need to. It might also be worth mentioning that most of the funds were covered by just our core team.

I don't think @Mark is the only apprehensive one but we appreciate them speaking out. Allow us to work on it first and then we, community-wide, can talk about constructive criticism and feedback. Hope that helps!

Thank you @assignedgothatbirth! This is really useful.

This first time around Paypal did its job, but really good to know about other options.

Good point @Coyote

2 hours ago, assignedgothatbirth said:

On 3/26/2019 at 12:22 AM, running.tally said:

From what I understand, the purpose of this term is to describe a set of attractions that are not the "mainstream" (for lack of better term) romantic or sexual attraction,

maybe we should call it hipster attraction

The 'hipster' thing was totally a joke but it's actually got me thinking. A term that vaguely means 'nonconformist' attractions would be ideal here. It could describe 'non-mainstream' types of attractions and also potentially include 'non-mainstream' romantic- or sexual-adjacent attractions as well.

Some terms:

- oblique attraction(s): still like this one because it covers the below and above

- obverse attraction(s): obverse meaning complementary but not 'opposite,' since many attractions are kind of complementary (like connected along an emotional axis like you described @assignedgothatbirth or perhaps crossing certain axes) or alongside romantic/sexual attraction, or can be understood in ways similar to romantic/sexual attraction in terms of being oriented

- diametric attraction(s): diametric meaning 'opposed,' kind of 'as opposed to 'simple' romantic/sexual attraction'

We have a semi-final round for voting open now, containing all acronyms suggested so far.

We will keep this poll open until April 29th (one week from now).

VOTE HERE:

https://forms.gle/pagzavsu1h3dqe9D7

I'm the person primarily handling the funds at the moment, so if anyone has issues with the fund specifically, I can be contacted.  

We have a thread running about our organization name that explains the purpose and layout of the website as well: 

@Coyote Yes, I want people to really think and choose a favourite, since it's important. If it becomes an issue and many people want multi-select, I can go in and edit it.

I'm also glad we've been approved hahaha! We agree that self-appointing and becoming kind of dictators is beside the point of this whole community. We just happen to be the people who decided to start things up and get the site live.

It looks like we're pretty ambivalent about ANREA and many people don't like the acronym so I think we can open up another poll with all the options now, yes!

I've updated the description of this poll to include a Google Form link for the new poll. We'll keep this one open for much longer, since this initial polling was a first poke.

@Jot-Aro Kujo Definitely! A few of us here were inspired by the recent chats from the Carnival of Aros and formed a group chat in Discord about the need for something to happen. We have peeps from these forums, mods from some blogs on Tumblr (e.g., aromantic-official and other active participants in discussions), for example. We can let y'all know the core roster once we figure that out.

We are only a few days in and are working on the logistics before we make any official announcement (i.e., figuring out what the costs would be and how much manpower is needed to address the concerns we've seen on Tumblr, these forums, and the Discord).

We're going to be reaching out to people who we've seen be active activists (lol alliteration) and who we think have unique skills we would need for a core team! We want to make sure we don't overload anyone with responsibilities (especially those who are already quite busy with blog stuff or IRL stuff) and that we have people who work well together to launch the site.

Once those little things are set up, we're going to make an announcement everywhere we can (here, Discord, Tumblr, prob Dreamwidth and AVEN as well) and ask for more community input before everything goes live. Then once we launch (hopefully smoothly) we can begin the call for more volunteers.

Constant feedback is something we want to have because the core team we're trying to keep small so it's manageable.

@Coyote I've added some elaboration on the site in the description of this post!  

Update:

ARENA and ARNA have also been suggested by some Google Forms folks!

Thank you for your input so far, everyone! Acronyms are hard and we appreciate the honest input and resources.

As for domain name, we may work that out in a separate topic (to keep things focused on the acronym here) once we've discussed our options a bit more.

FINAL ROUND CLOSED AND THE WINNER IS AUREA (Arospec Union for Recognition, Education, and Advocacy)

A few of us have decided to put together a website similar to AVEN for aromantic advocacy and resources.

We wanted to pick an acronym that is different from AVEN but is also short and official-sounding. We looked through a bunch of options but we wanted an option that is also free as a domain name for the website.

If you don't like the acronym (or even if you do like it), let us know if you have any suggestions for a better one.

Website Info:

We haven't announced the website officially yet.  We're still planning what will go on the site and how it will be managed (as well as who our core volunteers/admins will be).

We will likely be including:

- intro to aromanticism

- FAQ

- term glossary

- pamphlets/resources

- news and aro-related events

- media contact (for interviews, guidance, etc.)

- volunteer contact (for those who want to volunteer with us)

Much of what Sennkestra wrote (post linked in this discussion!) is what we're aiming for - an official space with aros who can be contacted by media outlets to talk about everything aro. We've been thinking of adding:

- a tab for ongoing surveys/research information

- tracking aro-related fiction/art/media

I think many people like this equate romantic love with having feelings, and that only this kind of love can inspire your art.

One way to address this (without explaining aromanticism for two hours) is to point out poets who were single all their lives and wrote beautiful poetry. You could also say that many other feelings can inspire poetry: love for others (family or friends or nature or animals or whatever), joy, excitement, sadness, anger (i'm thinking of slam poetry for example).

Also, doing art isn't necessarily romantic. It can be for advocacy, for protest, for expressing your feelings in many other ways.

I think arguments like those could help! It sucks you had this experience but it's definitely amatonormativity (and sexism honestly) at work!