archaeocoyote:

Something that gets brought up a lot in aroace discussions is how bothersome it can be for people to assume that (1) a lack of romance leaves a void in your life and (2) we “fill” that void with others things, “substitutions” if you will  - friends, hobbies, etc. This is presumptuous on many, many levels, but especially in assuming that we feel that something is missing in our lives by virtue of our not experiencing certain attractions (though also in how insensitive it can be towards folks still working through the internalized aphobia that can make you feel like this is true, that a part of you is broken or missing). 

That said, something I’ve been tossing around in my mind is a degree of nuance I think is important to add to this discussion, since personally I sometimes feel a bit left out in the cold by the idea that “nothing in my life takes the place of romantic relationships.” The thing is, although I no longer see my lack of attraction as an empty space inside of me, I do feel that I form relationships with the things I do fill my life with in ways that, to me, carry a degree of feeling that in my experience many allo/relationship-forming individuals only reserve for their romantic and sexual lives. So when I try to say, explain how I feel when I’m hiking it ends up feeling almost clinical to express that alongside the idea that nothing in my life is meant to be a substitute for a romantic relationship. My hobby isn’t a substitute for a romantic relationship, but the feelings I have towards the outdoors are of a level of emotional meaning for me that’s on par with the amount of meaning allo folks have expressed that their relationships have to them - it features heavily in my artwork, in my poetry, in my writing, probably would feature in songs if I wrote/sung them.

A semantic feature I often think about when it comes to this is the verb “to romanticize” - to sing the praises of something, to view it in an overly positive light or idealize it beyond the bounds of reality. To be romantic, in the colloquial sense, is associated with flights of fancy, with things too good to be true. In our amatonormative society, to be romantic about anything other than a romantic relationship (and sometimes even that) is generally considered negative, or at least naive. 

And there are aspects of this that are worth remembering, ways in which romanticizing things can lead us astray or even put us in danger. But it also all too often closes off the possibility of adults, a-spec or not, having extremely strong positive attachment to something other than a romantic relationship, behind a veil of “cringe” or infantalization. A little kid waxing poetic about how horses are better than dates is considered cute and pure, but an aroace adult doing the same for, to use a tired example, dragons, is considered childish, naive, cringeworthy. Amatonormativity doesn’t necessarily demand romantic/sexual relationships are our only interest or to have absolute precedence, but it does often expect those relationships to have emotional precedence. After all, what is it that gets songs sung and books written and movies made more than any other plot point.

In living a nonamorous life, we don’t have a void to fill or a substitution to make, but we are still allowed to inject the things we like or love with emotional precedence and reject the idea that these things carry lesser precedence than romance and sex - to write sappy poems about transcendent experiences with nature, sing songs about friendship or being aplatonic, dedicate movies to lost pets, learn everything there is to know about dragon folklore, write books about how a piece of art or a fandom changed our lives, whatever. Just like the millions of songs that write love as curing all ills, changing lives, saving the world, giving you wings, etcetera, our passions and compassions don’t have to always be calm and clinical and factual. They’re allowed to be fanciful and fantastic and filled with an emotional meaning without people seeing that and immediately interpreting it as us trying to fit a square peg in a round hole.