Characteristics of an Aromantic vs My Experience

[Jack Ross]

Here are some personal characteristics I have that I wonder if others have also had:

1) Romance seems to be made out of two things, friendship and sexual attraction.  But when I experience friendship and sexual attraction at the same time, romance fails to appear.

2) Love is a negative word, a synonym for hate, rage, and a thousand other negative emotions.  To me, love is the kind of thing you would do to someone you wanted to destroy.  There are personal reasons for this that I will not go into.  Related words like caring, understanding, friendship, sexuality, communication, and similar words are all positive, which is as it should be.

3) My friends describe marriage as having a stabilizing effect on their lives.  When I think about marital relationships, I feel destabilized, as if I am trying to put the wrong ends of two magnets together.

4) Romantic literature seems silly to me.  Why go to all that trouble and create so much drama?

5) Flirting is silly.  It is indirect.  It is hard to decipher because the rules are unwritten and change from time to time, place to place, and person to person.  Flirting creates dangerous situations because it's often hard for me to work out what a woman is doing when she is flirting, and if I get it wrong, things can go badly.  I never flirt back.  She often thinks I am rejecting her.

6) Having a family is a great thing for others to do.  I have no desire to be a parent.  I don't see parents doing anything that looks fun.

7) I like living independently.  Having someone constantly sharing opinions, telling me what to do, and subjecting me to criticism, would be exhausting, especially if there is no hope of escape.  I need space.

8) I have wanted to find a woman to have sex with.  Probably this would occur over weekend visits, maybe once a month.

9) I am not a closeted homosexual.  One woman I went out with subjected me to an odd, and invasive, test to see if I was.  I wish she had asked me directly, and then I could have told her straightforwardly.

10)  I am not cold, a psychopath, a manipulator, a player, an exploiter, etc., I just am interested in sex and friendship at the same time, and not into romance.

11) The best way to win me over is to discuss scientific data with me.  Data is nice because it is a fact, not an opinion.  Facts can be neutral, and therefore are a safer way to start a conversation.  I met a woman who I am very attracted to over a discussion of carbon-14 mass spectrometry and low temperature oxygen plasma.  She is married and lives 1300 miles away, so of course it went nowhere sexually.  The last woman I met who was like her I met 10 years earlier.  We discussed classical music all afternoon.  Though we're friends, she's not interested in sleeping with me.

12) I am not afraid of commitment, some women I have been friends with for over 20 years.

13) I come from a family that is about 60% high functioning autistic.  Everyone forgets what they're doing, is always 2 minutes late to meetings, forgets important items when traveling, gets worked up about topics of no importance, and has difficulty communicating.

14) I have tried putting a description like the one above into a dating profile on Match.com and similar websites, but I get no meaningful responses.  One response I did get was from a woman who wanted me to join her to "drink beer and talk dirty."  I told her no because that didn't sound like much fun.  I'd rather discuss science, classical music, academics, literature, and similar things.

Does any of this sound familiar?

[HelloThere]

So I can mostly agree on the friendship part of number 1, generally romance just seems like friendship but with kissing, like that and an apparent obsession with the other person is really the only difference I can notice.

I can agree on sorta how to “win you over” I’m not very interested in romance or sex at all but I can easily get through conversations on movies or video games and stuff like that.

I agree with 6 on not having kids, it just doesn’t look incredibly fun and what it does to parents just seems awful.

Living independently is definitely nicer than living with someone, generally I’d just prefer close friends that I can just play video games with, talk to, and confide in. That just sounds better than marrying one person and within a few years running out of things to talk about.

On 5 I couldn’t agree more, flirting is just so stupid I mean why can’t they just say it to people or try to be friends first? It’s just so dumb! It’s indirect, I’m practically blind to that kind of crap, and when I’m not it just gives me a signal to shut that down as fast as possible.