hey if you wanna be an ally to aromantic people listen up: you need to start looking for subtle arophobia in posts. Because it feels like aro people are the only ones to notice when a post is targeting aro people without saying it.
Like, a post about how “love is everything and if you read that as "romantic love is everything” you’re stupid and missing the point"? That’s generally targeting the discussion around loveless aros and how many aromantics are uncomfortable with the usage of the word “love”. The post isn’t gonna directly target aros (because aros are chronically invisible and seen as childish and not real), but aros who see that are going to know that the op of that post doesn’t respect aromantics and doesn’t like us discussing our own experiences, and thinks our opinions and terms are stupid and immature.
Like, I’ve seen so. many. posts. clearly referencing aromantic community discussions that get passed around eagerly by people, because nobody fucking talks about aromantics in the queer community. Nobody outside of our community cares about red flags or amatonormativity, or, i don’t know, taking our feelings on the word “love” seriously and not mocking us for our terms.
Like, I am begging you at this point. Please start listening to aromantics. Listen to our conversations and our theories on amatonormativity. Our community is valuable and our experiences matter just as much as every other queer persons.
@dullahandame absolutely amazing tags, and I really like that you brought up how aros are more likely to examine the concept of love than alloros.
I think most people understand how trans people, by virtue of having to question our own genders, generally have a deeper understanding of gender as a social construct than cis people, who (especially before trans people had our current visibility and voice) never thought of gender in that way. And it’s the same thing with aromantics: because we have to question ourselves on our feelings of love, we develop an understanding of love as a construct. But because we have such a nonexistent voice in the wider community & world, people don’t really… take that into account? Amatonormativity isn’t a “real problem”, so our opinions on love are just online discourse nonsense, and not people criticizing a social construct based on the real life harm it’s done them and others.
Just like how many cis people get defensive and feel attacked when trans people question the construct of gender, many alloromantic people get defensive and feel attacked when aromantic people question the construct of love.
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“For real! The fucking ‘love doesn’t have to be romantic, you silly aros, you are included, don’t know know that love is not romantic?’ That shite’s so condescending. Like I won’t say it’s a certainty, but I’d say that if you’re aro, you have reason to examine your relationship to Love, and thus you’re more likely to do so and come to your own conclusions. The aromantic community does a lot of work around the subject of love. To assume we don’t know about platonic love is ignorant at best. It’s a 'gotcha.’ It’s something to say when the big mean aros come and criticise your post, which insists on love as universal. That one 'love is the meaning of everything actually’ post drove me insane, because like, the most popular version going around was one where an aro was mocked and dismissed for expressing concerns about exclusionism. And you wanna know something funny? That post was about Destiel, it fucking was romantic, it was about romance. But you can’t say that when a silly aro takes issue, because then you’d be proving them right. So you pretend that platonic love was the intention all along. Aros are not stupid for expecting 'love = romance’! That is an assumption we have been forced to make because that’s what you cunts always mean by it! God I hate alloros.”
