Personal essay: My own type of love: dating while aromantic and asexual

YVES ALLEN III
Staff Writer

From birth, society indoctrinates us to think of one another as romantic partners. From as early as childhood, it seems as though I was doomed to a fate of my sexuality being something that others must understand and compute. Since I mostly hung out with girls as a child, everyone felt justified in prodding me for answers to questions I had not yet asked myself. 

“How’s your girlfriend?” 

“Are you gay?” 

No matter what answer I gave to these questions asked by parents, family and friends alike, I always thought of one question in return – though I was never brave enough to say it aloud: “Why does it matter to you?”

For many, romantic relationships are a key component of life that they actively seek out and cherish. Our relationship statuses are like badges of honor that we flaunt proudly on our chests, even when having a badge that you don’t like very much is more honorable than not having a badge at all.

But what becomes of those for whom the societal convention of romantic relationships simply does not work? What becomes of those who see beyond the plane of romantic love and physical attraction, preferring to instead wield these constructs on terms that work for them?

What, in a society that heralds romantic love and relationships over all else, becomes of people who don’t or can’t fit themselves into that mold?

I began to grapple with these questions upon realizing that I identify on both the asexual and aromantic spectrums. I could feel the future that everyone else had imposed on me my entire life slipping away as I battled with myself in a feud of bitter denial.

“I’m not asexual, I just prefer to wait and get to know people first,” I thought to myself. “I’m not aromantic, I just don’t like dating around or using dating apps and instead need to let things progress naturally.” I found myself hopelessly flailing in a pool of fear, hoping to find anything to hold on to so as to not drown and be taken beneath the surface of society’s suffocating standards that dictate how we are supposed to live.

The mire began to claim me as I sunk further and further away from the life I once believed was mine. A life where I would meet someone special, marry them, have a family, die old and be taken care of: A life of scripted, hegemonic comfort. 

Anxiety and shame filled my lungs as I realized that, in a sense, I’d always been like this. Through 21 years of socialization, my unique understanding of love was taken from me, beaten to a pulp and spat out back to me – a warning symbol of how society would treat me if I ever dared to defy its paradigms.

I remember explaining to my mother during a trip to the zoo in elementary school that I didn’t understand the point of boys my age having crushes on our classmates because of the way they looked, only to be met with “One day, you’ll understand.  You’ll be just like them.” I recall wanting to protest and feeling silenced, though I didn’t yet possess the language to understand why. The idea that one day I’d lose the part of myself that sees beauty as an almost exclusively intrinsic value terrified me, so much so that I didn’t respond to her remark and went about my day.

The silencing that forever stained that conversation in my mind – the falling between the cracks of compulsive dating – would take hold of me well throughout my teenage years, as questions of my sexuality began to reach a fever pitch. 

With normative participation in dating seemingly being my only option, I quietly came out as a gay man. This, I thought, would bring the incessant questioning that had plagued me since childhood to an end. I could finally, I thought, slip back into the world as a somewhat normal being who, despite an attraction to men, was ready to exist in a heteronormative society that was willing to accept me only on the grounds that I conform to its strict, ill-fitting boundaries.

That was until I started actually dating men, when I quickly realized that I wasn’t like others within my dating pool.

Strangers flirting with me on dating apps, even in well-intentioned and appropriate ways, filled me with a deep discomfort. As such, I managed to avoid planning a single date despite using three dating apps simultaneously. The idea of a dating partner wanting to escalate things physically left me paralyzed with fear, though I couldn’t possibly fathom why. Wasn’t that, after all, the point of having a boyfriend? The relationships that I did eventually enter required a deep-seated level of emotional intimacy prior to their initiation, which ended up in me dating those who were already my best friends rather than those I found directly attractive.

I believed that this was all normal, and it is, to an extent. We as people are too complicated and diverse to possibly fit in a singular definition of dating that works for all of us, a terrifying reality for a 21-year-old queer person desperate to find love. As such, I scurried frantically to find a definition that worked for me, trying everything from flirting with strangers to rekindling relationships with partnerships gone awry, hoping to find something – someone – that worked. 

Then, with a deep breath, I decided to let go. I deleted my dating apps. I stopped reaching out to exes. I stopped flirting with strangers. Instead, I channeled that little boy at the zoo who I remembered from all those years ago. I held tightly to his ability to see and be attracted to people’s spirits rather than the bodies in which they are housed. I cherished his wisdom in understanding that, though he could not communicate why, his perspective was valid and sacred, even if no one else around him could possibly comprehend it at the time. 

I wish I were armed with those words at the time: aromantic and asexual. To many, they connote a life of lovelessness and loneliness, a stark unwillingness and inability to participate in romantic and physical relationships. 

To me, though, they are tools that liberate me from the shackles of normativity that prove to be too cramped to fully enshrine the depths of how I view life and those that I love within it – an immateriality that is for no one to define but myself.