schrodingersowen:

i’ve been thinking just cause of some things i’ve seen on my dash in the past couple of days just how difficult the world makes being asexual or (even moreso) aromantic and just living a day to day life without feeling like you’re broken or wrong or don’t belong there. 

like we live in a time where people are reluctant to say ‘i love you’ to their friends for fear of being taken the wrong way, we live in a world where ‘no homo’ is used by boys unironically because loving your closest friends platonically is too weird. 

we also live in a world in which there’s only three types of love, familial, platonic, and romantic. anything that falls in between those cracks or goes off of the game board entirely is so strange that it makes people scared because they aren’t used to the idea of human beings having relationships that don’t fall into these clean, separate categories. 

we encourage our children to put their romantic love before their platonic love, so much that the word ‘platonic’ becomes a word that some asexual and aromantic people hate using because it sounds so unimportant in the way that it’s been used in society as a whole. we turn love and relationships into a hierarchy. stranger, acquaintance, friend, lover, in that order.

so people who are asexual and/or aromantic are confused, they feel as if the rest of the world is climbing a ladder they’re never ever going to reach the top of. but so many of these people don’t know that some of them have already reached the top of the ladder, some of them have already loved someone as much as they possibly can, they just don’t know it because it’s not the sort of breathtaking romantic love that the movies show as being the best love any person can ask for.

but why can’t friendships be breathtaking, too? why do human relationships have to be a mountain you climb up instead of flat land you can walk across? 

it’s just so hard, and i dont think people realize how hard it is, to be on the ace or aro spectrum in the world that we live in, where people are so ignorant they think that what you’re feeling shouldn’t or doesn’t exist, or is purely the result of mental illness or past abuse. frankly, i would rather be seen as a sinner or a pervert than not be seen at all.

i don’t want to turn my asexual campaigning into a ‘my difficulties are worse than yours’ contest because I know that won’t accomplish anything but i wish that sexual and romantic people would stop for a second and imagine what it would be like to have all these feelings that you don’t know what to do with because no one has explained to you what they mean.

no one ever tells you that you can love your friends with the same intensity as you can love a girlfriend or boyfriend, just in a different way, so when you start feeling that way you start feeling like something’s wrong with you, that you’re overstepping your boundaries, that you’re getting creepy.

gay and lesbian relationships are out in the world, people know that they’re there, people know they exist. i know they have a long way to go but let’s get asexual and queerplatonic relationships the same kind of exposure so that we don’t have as many asexual or aromantic kids and teenagers thinking that something’s wrong with them, the way I felt. the way I still sometimes feel, because i’ve been raised to be so emotionally stifled unless my emotions happened to make sense to everyone else.