[Note: the author is claiming that the ‘aro label’ feels like a death sentence or lack or incapacity for themself, and not that aromantic people are lacking or in any way deficient!]
It’s been a week of difficult emotions. So difficult, in fact, that I haven’t even been able to write.
Last Sunday was a day full of joy (despite some anxiety, too). This week has felt the opposite: joyless. And it’s not just the “natural ebb and flow of things”. The joylessness feels deeper, somehow more fundamental or pervasive to my existence than the joy. I latch onto the joy, I celebrate it when I feel it, because it’s in my nature to do so, or maybe because it’s survival instinct. But the joylessness feels horribly pervasive.
These past three days have been filled with feelings of sadness, loneliness, frustration, and fiery anger. The never-ending car issues along with the constant health insurance frustrations and the several shitty behaviors of my employer’s HR department have been exhausting and infuriating. A phone call with my mother, who keeps accusing me of the worst things, was painful and also infuriating. And the loneliness I feel is profound and sad.
I think I’m struggling more with my aromantic nature than with my asexual orientation. There have always been specific situations that trigger or upset my “ace sensitivity” but I have learned to avoid them as much as I can — e.g. by avoiding bars and dating apps. And using the ace label to define my sexual orientation has helped for many situations, e.g. with many friendships and how I feel when I go to the climbing gym. Maybe the ace label feels more like a liberation than a burden or lack or loss to me because I’m a sex-favorable ace…? When it comes to the aromanticity spectrum, instead, I think I’m on the other end of it: i.e. “romance-averse”. At the moment, I am experiencing my aromantic nature as a death sentence. Nothing has changed for me, in the sense that I’ve always felt “aromantic”, I just never had the words for it. And not having the words for it, to a certain extent, still gave me the possibility to hope: to hope that “one day I would be fixed, one day I would change, one day I would find the ‘right person(s)’ and also be able to feel like everyone else does”. But no, that day will never come. And while it’s good, healthy, a liberation, that I stop applying this “conversion therapy mentality” to my own self, it still feels like a death sentence to me, like a huge lack or incapacity I have: I cannot feel in a certain way that almost everyone else does and so I’m doomed to never have the closeness in relationships that I would like/want/need. Maybe this is one of the phases of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance… Is this the depression phase? And the past couple weeks had been the bargaining phase, as I obsessed over a guy at the gym? For the second time ever in my entire life, in the quarter-century that I’ve been having sexual experiences, I felt real sexual attraction for someone (the only other time had been a guy who was my “fuck buddy” for a while in grad school). While being mind-boggling and confusing for me, because so unexpected, it was also very clear to me now that I have a very clear understanding of the types of attraction I feel, and it was also fun: a little pearl of joy (or, at least, excitement) in what has been overall a difficult, joyless summer. But after making up my mind that I would find the courage to talk to this guy the next time I saw him at the gym, I haven’t seen him anymore. It’s a tiny incident and could be almost considered meaningless. But the disappointment I’ve felt at not running into him anymore has been out of proportion: I know this is pointing to something deeper, some deeper unhappiness, some deeper lack in me. And I think this deeper unhappiness or lack in me has to do with the grief cycle that owning the “aro label” has spurred for me…
Will I ever get to the acceptance phase?
The Little Prince and the Fox 