Relationship anarchy and aromanticism

[cute kitty Meow! Mewo!]

my impression is that like. the emotional experience of romantic and sexual attractions are part of being human since forever, but before the modern era where spreading information was more efficiently available, people would have to relly on their immediately surrounding social connections to come up with language and concepts to express their feelings. and I don't know much about the culture before the modern age but, I'm under the impression that before romance shook things up couples were matched due to family status and social polotics - marriages tended to occur as a means to strengthen ties between families, or to strengthen the success or health of progeny. that people married people who were close to the family, rather than close to the individual, and our human experience of romantic attraction is all about the individual's preferences - so people would be lucky if their marriages involved romantic connections - or were the kind of person who develops a romantic connection over time - and even so, I imagine that life would host challenges that make romantic connections hard to develop.

 

like, generally speaking, romance is able to succeed when it does today, because the people involved either have the time to develop them - or more often, know to set time for it, and how to do it. Romance being a modern thing - to me- means that.... our quality of life and our ability to share ideas enables for us to focus on our emotional satisfaction much more so than we used to - and when it comes to romance specifically, means that we have the privilege (as a culture) to be able to enjoy romantic stories and a romantic culture, and the pursuit of romance in our relationships - not that romantic feelings, themselves, are constructed by culture, but rather, embellished because of culture.

 

 

I suppose that in a way that is still "construction" because taking clay and forming it into tools and infrastructure is construction. but the clay always existed before we constructed it into something. 

[Ettina]

On 11/9/2016 at 10:11 AM, Cassiopeia said:

I don't really like the term polyamory either. The 'amor' part feels like a lie, and as far as I know the 'poly' is kind of disrespectful to polynesian people. Just nah.

 

 

No, poly is Greek for many. Polynesian means "many islands" while polyamory means "many love". So there's nothing disrespectful about them having the same prefix.

[Dodecahedron314]

I found some more interesting quotes in the readings for my gender/sexuality studies class that I thought might be relevant to this thread, this time from Lauren Berlant's essay Sex In Public. 

On the establishment of alternative norms that differ from those imposed by heteronormative society:

Quote

Making a queer world has required the development of kinds of intimacy that bear no necessary relation to domestic space, to kinship, to the couple form, to property, or to the nation. These intimacies do bear a necessary relation to a counterpublic--an indefinitely accessible world conscious of its subordinate relation. They are typical both of the inventiveness of queer world making and of the queer world's fragility. Nonstandard intimacies would seem less criminal and less fleeting if, as used to be the case, normal intimacies included everything from consorts to courtiers, friends, amours, associates, and coconspirators. (Berlant, 559)

And on the potentially problematic aspects of emulating the hetero/amatonormative monogamous romantic-sexual couple in inherently non-normative relationships:

Quote

In the absence of marriage and the rituals that organize life around matrimony, improvisation is always necessary for the speech act of pledging, or the narrative practice of dating, or for such apparently noneconomic economies as joint checking. The heteronormativity in such practices may seem weak and indirect. After all, same-sex couples have sometimes been able to invent versions of such practices. But they have done so only by betrothing themselves to the couple form and its language of personal significance, leaving untransformed the material and ideological conditions that divide intimacy from history, politics, and publics. (Berlant, 562)

Obviously, this was originally written in the context of specifically lesbian and gay relationships that probably involved romantic and sexual components, and predates the broader awareness of any arospec identities. However, I still feel like it has a certain resonance with the aros that the amatonormative component of heteronormativity excludes from the societal expectation of the idyllic monogamous romantic-sexual family-creating hetero relationship, and the overall concept of RA. Thoughts?