Even when aromanticism is acknowledged in the A-spec community, it is often framed through the amatonormative belief that everyone falls in love Unfortunately, a majority of these ideas use restrictive lines like, “everyone loves, just not always romantically”, or “everyone loves, just not always conventionally”, referencing the importance of loving friends, queer-platonic relationships, family members and pets. Sometimes it moves away from people to encompass love for hobbies, experiences, occupations and ourselves. The what and how tends to vary from person to person, but the idea that we do and must love someone or something, and this love redeems us as human and renders us undeserving of hatred, gets pushed to the point where I don’t feel safe or welcome in my own aromantic community. Even in the online posts meant to be challenging the more obvious amatonormativity, it is presumed that aromantic people must, in some way, love.
A scene in Heartstopper where Nick asserts Isaac’s humanity by saying that the fish who doesn’t fall in love must have lots of friends was well-meaning, but left my throat dry as a person with autism, social anxiety disorder, and borderline personality disorder, who has difficulty not only making friends but maintaining those friendships. Neurodivergent aromantics are often thrown under the bus in order to do what the aromantic community often accuses alloromantic asexual people of doing: using their ability to love as a defence of their humanity. Because I love, they say, I also don’t deserve to be a target of hatred, aggression and abuse.
But what if I don’t love? What if love itself has been the mechanism of the hatred and violence I have endured? Why am I, an aro-ace, neurodivergent survivor of emotional abuse and bullying, still acceptable collateral damage?
I’ve been told all my life that I’m unloving because I can’t perform love the way non-autistics expect and demand. I don’t have the same gestures, the same words, the same verbal and non-verbal languages that convey affection, compassion and interest. I tell people how I value their words, actions and behaviours, but that’s rarely considered a sufficient expression of affection among neurotypical people. Right from the day I drew my first breath, a baby the world didn’t yet recognise as autistic, my ability to love was always going to be questioned in a society unaccommodating autism.
Also read: On Neurodivergent Attachment Styles
When I look at my hobbies and experiences, I’m not sure that love is the correct word to describe how I feel about them. People with autism and BPD may argue that love as neurotypicals understand it is a pale, ineffective word to describe a special interest or a favourite person. I feel enjoyment and connection to things that aren’t special interests like drawing. I also feel connected with friends who are not my favourite person. Should I have to use a word with a difficult history to describe that connection?
I’ve been forced into harmful situations by parents who hurt me because they love me. It doesn’t matter that I’ve been grabbed, held, screamed at, called names. Should I mention how their actions hurt and damaged me, I am now expected to master forgiveness and compassion. It was, after all, a mistake they wrought through love.
I’ve been manipulated and pressured by an ex-friend who thought ignoring my boundaries was the best way for her to confess her love for me. Even if she loved me, her way of showing it had no interest in my own feelings or autonomy. Her language of love rang loud and clear to the world, and it had no need or interest in me, save as its target. I have been bullied and tormented by people who hate me, but none cut as deep as the wounds left by the girl who loved me and taught me to fear judgement, scrutinity and even religion.
Love is meant to make us human and also love is the mechanism by which my humanity has been denied. If we acknowledge that sex can be a mechanism of violence, oppression and abuse, we must afford love the same recognition. None of this “but it isn’t really love if they hurt you” nonsense. Love intersects with and justifies many shapes of denigration, denial and hatred targeted at marginalised people. Until we acknowledge that there is no falsehood in a love that abuses, we create sheltering shadows where people who love have free rein to harm and dehumanise.
It’s comforting to think that a love that wounds isn’t real love, but it denies the complexity of experience and feelings shared by survivors. It makes it harder for us to identify abuse and escape its claws. It denies the validity of survivors who look at love and feel an honest doubt about its worth, as a word or a concept, in our own interactions and experiences.
I don’t know if “love” will ever apply to me. I write about it, yes! I crave it! Most of my poems are about affection and loss of connection, and many of those narratives name this, purposefully and specifically, as love. I think it’s part of my healing to long for relationships where love supports and nurtures. Maybe, if I write enough, I’ll come to trust love, to feel some connection to it that doesn’t remind me of all the ways it has scarred me. Or maybe I won’t! It’s safe to express and explore love in a story where those characters aren’t me. Where the affection and connection that I sometimes name “love” is free of pain, manipulation and domination. Where it’s free of other people’s assumptions and misunderstandings. In my passion for reading and writing, love can be what I need it to be.
Also read: Are We Unlovable or Is It Just Capitalism?
In real life, a world that isn’t a fairy tale, a psychologist directed me to say “love you” in return to the parent who denies my sexual orientation. In real life, I am not permitted honesty about my history and the way it influences my relationship to love. Instead, I am told that there’s nothing more hateful than being a child who can’t love her own mother, even when my mother’s love can’t encompass my personhood, education, and identity.
Why do I have to agree that there’s legitimacy in how other people define human worth when that definition has done nothing but harm for me? Why can’t I choose love in the safety of fiction and poetry and have a more complicated distance from it in my real life without being branded a monster? I can only shift from victim to survivor when I interrogate the relationship I am expected to have with love.
When love has enabled violence and dehumanisation, it is offensive in the extreme for my aromantic community to tell me that this is what makes me human. You are denying my scars, my history, my reason. Worst of all, you are telling me that my abusers who so easily profess love are unquestionably human, but I am monstrous because I question the applicability to me of something associated with the abuse they carry out.
Love makes us human? No, it doesn’t. It makes my abusers human and strips me of the last remaining shreds of a disputed humanity. I can’t clear the love bar if I wish to be true to my own history and neurodiversity. Yet my own fellow aromantics, people who should know what it is to be denied acceptance on the basis of our inability to love, continue to reinforce their quest for humanity at the expense of my own. At best they’ll permit me to not love people if I display love for pets, hobbies or experiences.
The world thinks that the opposite of love is hatred. That if love doesn’t exist, hatred must occupy its place. We might as well say, with an equal absence of logic, that if a piece of paper isn’t black, it’s white. Nevermind the dyes and inks that can give the paper an infinite possibility of shades! The same goes for emotions: an endless possibility of feelings and combinations of feelings can exist where love doesn’t.
Also read: Starstruck! A Synastry Cheatsheet
If love can wreak so much harm, why do we continue with the lie that its presence is by definition redemptive? No lack of love alone exists that by definition makes us undeserving of respect, acknowledgement, safety, protection and value. The very idea that we should have to love in some way to be respected as human is an abominable, hypocritical one—one that ties into a long history of finding excuses to deny the humanity of other humans. I no longer want to be collateral damange at the intersection of aromantic and autistic as well as BPD identities.
Some aromantic people love non-romantically. Some even love romantically. Some aromantic people love their pets and hobbies. Some aromantic people don’t love at all. Some may value, seek or desire love; others won’t. Just like romantic attraction shouldn’t make us less or more deserving of safety in our broader societies, neither should our diverse relationships to love.
There is no substantial difference between saying “I’m human because I fall in love” or that “I’m human because I love my friends” and “I’m human because I love calligraphy”. All three statements make human worth contingent on certain behaviours, feelings and experiences. Expanding the definition of what kinds of love make us human does nothing but save some aromantic individuals from abuse and antagonism while telling neurodivergent aromantics, who are more likely to have complex relationships to love as a concept or are unable to perform it in ways recognised by others, that we’re still not worthy.
Also read: A Non-Binary Journey: Experiences of Visibility, Violence, and Silence
If the original concept is an act of hatred, expanding it to include a few more people by redefining what kinds of love determines our humanity is still an act of hatred. Why are we letting alloromantics set the standard for what determines aromantic worth and value? When love, presumed romantic, as a metric of worth harms aromantics, why have we not discarded this system?
The aromantic community must fight for the acceptance and safety of all aromantics, including the ones less palatable to alloromantic audiences. The ones who can’t or won’t swap love of romantic partners for love of friends, family, pets or hobbies. The ones who can’t or won’t say, I love something. The ones who shouldn’t have to adopt a word that may be false or uncomfortable to be judged worthy of community, connection and protection.
I am human. I am on the aromantic, asexual, and autistic spectrum. I am worthy of full inclusion and recognition in the aromantic community, as someone with a complex relationship to love. I will not sit by while you throw some aromantics under the bus in your race to make yourself more appealing to alloromantic folks—which is, not at all coincidentally, the same crime the aromantic community levels in anger and frustration against alloromantic asexuals.
Why is one questioned by aromantics and not the other?
