Aromantic

Positivity

It's pride month! This story is a little late in the month but it's necessary.

It's a month celebrating LGBTQ+ people, meaning that certain discourse seems to get louder. As an aro community, we definitely have allies in terms of inclusion, but it's still difficult to look through the aromantic tag.

So instead of dwelling on the negative, let's look at the positive! 

Aromantic and asexual awareness is growing! Asexuality is no longer classified as a mental illness, it is simply someone's sexuality, just as gay and bi are. There are websites dedicated to aro and ace people, such as arocalypse.com, an aro forums, and asexuality.org, that hosts AVEN. Maybe there are exclusionists, but there are definitely inclusionists working to defend our community. We share solidarity with a lot of other LGBTQ+ people anyways.

There's a couple songs out there that resonate with the aromantic community, such as Never Been in Love by Will Jay, the song at the top of this page. Jay himself even tweeted that he understood that it was an important song for the aromantic community .(https://twitter.com/willjaymusic/status/983493520634736640)

Here's a list of aromantic songs that might be nice to listen to:

-Never Been in Love by Will Jay

-Love Love Love by Of Monsters and Men

-Home by Cavetown (an aroace creator!)

-Oh No! by Marina and the Diamonds

-Crush Culture by Conan Gray

-Disloyal Order of the Water Buffaloes by Fall Out Boy

There's more on arocalypse and on spotify. Not all of them are by aro creators by they contain aromantic feels, y'know? And songs are always open to interpretation. They may mean one thing to one person and something else to another. As an aro, I've interpreted the songs above as aromantic culture.

For videos, there's:

-"Are you aromantic?... My experience as an aro" by Connie Glynn

-"Being Aromantic (while not asexual)" by Nik Hampshire

-"coming out... i'm aromantic" by Eva Abidin

-"Being Aro is fine (advice #5)" by cavetown (this one only briefly touches on it bc it's a q&a)

Obviously there's more videos than that but these are the ones that I've watched so far and that I recommend. They're relatable.

Lastly, a narrative. "How I Learned to Love Being Aromantic" by Kotaline Jones is an amazing short narrative on discovering her aromanticism and then learning to accept it. I read it a short while before publishing this chapter, and I loved it. (https://narratively.com/how-i-learned-to-love-being-aromantic/)

Amatanormativity is rampant throughout media and people, but just know that it doesn't mean that what you feel isn't real. You're not broken. You don't have to love anyone romantically to exist. Romantic love is only one type of love, anyways. The Ancient Greeks themselves had 6 different words for love, and only some were concerned with romantic love.

We just have to exercise a bit of philautia -- self-love.