I'm not sure if I'm greyro or perhaps a more specific term?

[Enzi]

Alright so, I'm just gonna put this as a slight disclaimer: I have a lot of emotional trauma that heavily influences how my romantic attraction works.

 

Alright, so I identify as an asexual lesbian, but I know I'm somewhere on the aro-spectrum as well. I seem to have these "waves" of romantic attraction. It's very inconsistent. I have almost never been interested in someone I've just met. I need to know them to some extent. I need to feel safe around them and have a kind of emotional bond. But there are a few (rare) occurrences where I've liked someone after just a few conversations with them. So it makes it feel weird when I try to use demiromantic. I've thought about using grey-romantic, but the definition seems so ambiguous that it's a little intimidating to use? Then add the trauma and there's a chance that this might be because of it. I'm just very confused. Any help?

[CloudlegtheVolcano]

It sounds like you might be demiromantic, which is developing romantic feelings only after an emotional bond has already been established.

 

I know there’s a thread somewhere with a link to a Tumblr post with lots of helpful definitions for questioning aspecs, but I can’t for the life of me find it.

 

I’m not entirely sure, but I think it was posted by @SoulWolf. I’ll let you know if I find it.

 

Edit: 

Here it is. Guess it wasn’t SoulWolf, sorry ?

[Apathetic Echidna]

On 5/12/2019 at 11:52 AM, Enzi said:

definition seems so ambiguous that it's a little intimidating to use

I feel the greatness of grey-romantic is because it is so vague, it can mean anything you need it to so that you don't have to define all the little quirks of your inner-self and experiences. It also means that other people won't have a specific idea of your circumstances, which is useful if you don't like sharing such personal information. However, on the flip side of that finding  label you think fits your experience really closely possibly means you don't have to share such personal information because most of it is already ties into the known definition of the label. 

 

Basically it is how my geology teacher explained soil maps, some people are splitters and some people are groupers. Groupers are happy with a general idea of what is there, while splitters need to define every single little difference. 

I'm a splitter, and if you are too, then I know your pain at ambiguity. If you feel such changes in your experience maybe you will find the variable labels useful, like aro-flux and aro-spike. 

[Coyote]

On 5/11/2019 at 10:22 PM, Enzi said:

But there are a few (rare) occurrences where I've liked someone after just a few conversations with them. So it makes it feel weird when I try to use demiromantic.

 

20 hours ago, CloudlegtheVolcano said:

It sounds like you might be demiromantic

 

Enzi just said why they feel weird about using the term demiromantic.

 

...I mean, to be clear, I'm all for using whatever labels work for you, whether that means using something in spite of other people using it slightly differently (as will always be the case) or not using something that "should" fit, because it would feel weird. More importantly, I don't think anyone can really tell anybody else what they are. That's something that everyone has to figure out on their own.

 

16 hours ago, Apathetic Echidna said:

I feel the greatness of grey-romantic is because it is so vague, it can mean anything you need it to so that you don't have to define all the little quirks of your inner-self and experiences. It also means that other people won't have a specific idea of your circumstances, which is useful if you don't like sharing such personal information. However, on the flip side of that finding  label you think fits your experience really closely possibly means you don't have to share such personal information because most of it is already ties into the known definition of the label. 

 

I agree, it's both a pro and a con, at the same time. And I can understand that making it a little daunting.

 

To me it's also important to remember that figuring out what particular label to use doesn't even need to be important. The bigger questions are -- What communities do you want to be a part of? To what extent, and what ways? And what is this self-knowledge helping you to do -- or how to conduct your relationships in life?

 

But in any case, personally the best way for me to figure out labels has always been to read a bunch of writing by different people about their experiences and what they use those labels to mean, so here's a blogpost by a greyromantic about greyromanticism, as a starting point.

 

[CloudlegtheVolcano]

On 5/16/2019 at 5:01 PM, Coyote said:

Enzi just said why they feel weird about using the term demiromantic.

 

I’m sorry. I missed that somehow.