Imagine you’ve grown up excited to find a lover, marry, start a family, grow old together, and die happy. You go through life waiting until you finally meet the one. Through high school you never find them; you keep telling yourself “I’m still young, I’ve got heaps of time, I’ll find them some day.”
Finally, you reach the end of your high school days, only to be cursed with the inability to fall in love.
This is basically what happened when I realised I was aromantic.
Many aro people I know love being aro, it can be amazing to have the freedom of never finding yourself head over heels for someone. And although I take pride in my aromantic identity, so often I find myself wishing I could identify as anything but.
It’s not even that I wish I could fall in love, it’s that I wish I wanted to.
Being in a romantic relationship sounds amazing; the big gestures that make one another cry, the little intimate moments, coming home after a terrible day and wrapping yourself in their arms, the feeling of finally being okay again after a bumpy argument that you stuck through.
The idea of it sounds amazing. I’ll watch a romance blossom in a movie and I’ll want the happiness that they’ve found, but then I imagine myself in a relationship like that and I just don’t like it. I don’t like the idea of sharing my home with a partner, or co-parenting, or being tied to one person for my whole life. I don’t want that.
But I wish I did.
I wish so badly that I wanted to fall in love.
And I grieve the moments I’ve always dreamed of, those I’ll never have.
I may never have the first kiss that makes me feel giddy every time I think about it for the next few weeks or even months following. I’ll never have a partner that proposes to me, catching me off guard even though we’ve been talking about the moment for years. I’ll never have my mummy help me put on my wedding dress, my tatay walk me down the aisle, nor will I ever recite my vows and declare my love in front of all the people I hold dearest to me. If I end up choosing to have a biological kid, I won’t have that one person to share the excitement of discovering I’m pregnant with. Them supporting me as I give birth. No one to share the joys and struggles with as our kids grow up.
None of it. All of these things I’ve been dreaming of since I was a kid, I may just never have them.
And this world just has to be centered around falling in love. Every single damn love song is a further slap in the face, reminding me of that specific kind of happiness I’ll never have. It's the same with all the cute little relationships in my favourite movies, my favourite books. I can't escape it.
I begin to resent my friends and their partners. I’m so happy for them of course, but I can’t stand being around them. I want what they have so badly and it hurts, but then at the same time I don’t.
My family and closest friends? They’re the most important people in the world to me. Hell, even if I were to have a romantic partner, they wouldn’t be any more important than who I currently have. But my parents have each other, my brother and my cousins have or will have their partners, and same with my closest friends. As an aromantic, I feel so alone. Everyone falls in love.
It’s that I’ll never be somebody’s one person, I’ll never be that “special one” to anyone. Everyone who I have will have someone else. And even if I did want that type of relationship, I can’t make myself feel that way for anyone.
But don’t get me wrong, I am proud to be aromantic. I’ll wave that green to black gradient pride flag left and right, so high in the sky. And I am grateful that I was made this way. The appreciation that I have for my non-romantic relationships is something I cherish, and probably wouldn’t have had, had I experienced romantic attraction throughout my life.
Though I can’t help but wonder... if I were given the choice to fall in love, would I have taken it?
Description: Drawn image of a hand choking a person. The flag is coloured with the aromantic flag colours.
