SimonB

One trick is to make your own podcast 😃 Having done that for nearly two years, it felt easier to be a guest on someone else's, though listening back to myself in such a different context I definitely have some verbal mannerisms I want to work on. What kind of podcast would you like to appear on yourself?

Before I knew about asexuality or aromanticism, let alone that I was AroAce myself, I thought a romantic relationship was about being emotionally intimate with someone. I wanted to understand and be understood by someone else, for them to care about me and for me to be allowed to care about them. All the other stuff, such as romantic gestures and possessiveness and having sex, I assumed were things one needed to do as part of being in such a relationship. Now that I know emotional intimacy can be completely separate from a romantic relationship, my understanding is that romantic relationships *include* emotional intimacy but then *also* the romantic and sexual stuff in addition. As for "exchanging spit", the idea never appealed to me before I kissed someone, and doesn't appeal to me in the abstract now either. However, when I was in a relationship and did kiss my partner, it felt completely different from how I had imagined before. I felt very close to that person, and so it somehow felt warm and comforting. But so never with tongue, I didn't like that 😜

I'm 40 and randomly met two other A-spec people over the last year, one Ace and the other AroAce, both in their 30s. Since I didn't even know asexuality or aromanticism were a thing until a year ago, and I wasn't intentionally seeking out AroAce folk and met both of those people by chance, my perspective is probably a little skewed; it seems super easy, barely an inconvenience 😉 But seriously, until last year I'd not properly dealt with my depression for over 20 years, and so stayed inside all the time, barely spoke to anyone other than family. Once I pushed myself to go outside in order to help myself feel better, that led to meeting new people, and then since being ace was new on my mind I spoke about it with some of them and that's how I met the two other A-spec people. We've since become friends but I don't know that they would have brought it up if I hadn't done so first, they weren't wearing badges or the like. And now more recently I've been attending a monthly AroAce meetup here in Frankfurt, went to a CSD demonstration a few weeks ago, and appeared as a guest on an AroAce podcast last week. So I'm greatly increasing my chances of meeting other AroAce folk in real life 🙂

It sounds like how Spaced started, only it's less funny because it's real life 😕