23m Am I Aromantic or Heteroromantic? (or maybe something else?)

[Psychonaut]

This is something that's confusing me. I consider myself to be either a gray asexual or a straight guy with a pretty low libido. I felt strong sexual attraction and had crushes when I was younger, but I don't really feel that anymore. I can force myself to feel arousal if I want but it's not exactly automatic like it used to be. I feel arousal if I'm flirting with a girl or if she touches me, but not if I see a girl. I've never dated, been in a relationship, or done anything romantic other than flirting. I would've had a strong drive to do those things when I was a teen but nowadays I have little to no drive for that.

 

If I could press a button and out popped a relationship, I might push that button. I wouldn't want to text everyday though, and I also would hate having my free time and hobbies interrupted by the relationship. The texting being a nuisance would really be a problem for me. I love talking in person, but texting is just a painful chore. Also, I'd be concerned about catching STDs too, although it'd be much less risky than hookups which if STDs didn't exist I'd probably love trying.

 

Life goal wise, having a relationship, having kids, and eventually becoming a grandparent sounds pretty cool. However, it'd get in the way of my other life goals so tbh it's not a priority for me. Also, like I said before, I don't have a drive to get into a relationship. I'd rather smoke some good weed, have a good drink, or eat some delicious food than get into a relationship. The fact that I can't just push a button and out pops a relationship also puts me off. If I can't easily get into a relationship, why bother? There's fun stuff you can do by yourself so why worry about a relationship if it only brings you down when you fail time after time?

 

On that last part, it's like this. I'm not gonna change myself into someone who I'm not just so I can get dates easily. Maybe it's easy to get dates and I just don't try. I don't know. But what I do know is that I don't have some magical energy driving me to go out of my way to get into a relationship/ask girls out for dates so I just don't care.

 

What am I? Am I just someone who doesn't care about this stuff or am I aromantic? I'm definitely not repulsed because I'm sure if I found a cool girl who shared hobbies with me we could have a really cool time playing music together and just chilling all the time. I'm just not up for going out of my way to hunt her down lol

[Tagor]

As always, the only one who can truly decide if you're aromantic or not is you.

Here are some thoughts on your text: Actively flirting has always been alien to me, but this might just be due to not being able to keep a conversation going even if I have something to talk about. Flirting, where I have to try to decipher additional meaning at the same time as talking just sounds really stressful and just awful to me.

However, I do relate to the part of in theory being open to a relationship if somebody with similar interests asked me. (That's why I identify as cupioromantic ).

Ultimately, to try to determine if one is aromantic, one has to try to examine the events one thinks are closest to a crush/falling in love. A "test" I like to use is to think about if it was my active choice or if it was above my control (I used to do pick somebody whose interests roughly aligned with mine and then decide I had a crush on them, for example)

But in the end, it is futile to search definitive answer to the question "Am I aromantic?", as "romantic attraction" (and thus is aromanticism) is an incredibly weakly defined phrase. Additionally, it's like trying to prove law of conservation of energy: We haven't observed an instance where it was violated, but we can't be sure there won't be such events in the future. However,  like the law of conservation of energy, this doesn't mean it is useless. One can simply adopt the label "aromantic" until proven otherwise.

(Sorry for my rambling, it's way to late where I live)