I think a huge part of the ignorance about aromanticism is that people fundamentally misunderstand aro relationships because they simply do not have any frame of reference for what it would be like to live without romantic feelings. Non-aro people completely miss the point when they imagine their life as exactly the same, but with the romantic feelings and relationships removed, and extrapolate that that’s what aro people’s lives are like, because for a lot of people… it’s not.
It’s the same misunderstanding when cis people try to imagine what it would be like to be trans by thinking “what if I wanted to be a boy?” and straight people imagine their partner and their relationship as exactly the same, just another gender.
That’s why we get all this bullshit where allo people act as though all relationships must fit neatly and obviously into either ‘romantic’ or ‘platonic’ categories, because… their relationships do. That’s why we hear stuff like “lol what you are describing is a friendship!” when aro people talk about QPRs, because for them, any relationship that lacks romantic affection is a friendship. Because they are not imagining their life without a relationship that is committed, incredibly intimate, exclusive, and prioritised above all others.
Aro people can still desire a level of intimacy and commitment with somebody that everybody else gets from romantic relationships, without wanting a romance: sharing everything – space, money, belongings, time – having a level of emotional and even physical intimacy that is not common in friendships, being committed to one another, making that relationship a priority above other things in your life, basing major life decisions around that relationship… these are all things that most people fulfil through romantic relationships, and aro people can desire that kind of intimacy without feeling or wanting romance.
Ultimately, it doesn’t matter if you don’t understand QPRs or the aro experience. You don’t have to understand it to respect it. At some point you have to acknowledge that you don’t understand because you have not experienced it, you have no frame of reference for it, and you will never really know what it’s like because those are not one of those people. The validity of aro people’s experiences does not hinge on whether or not non-aro people understand or accept them.
i have a distinct memory of thinking “wow i sure hope this was worth my Entire physics grade” while drawing this and i’m gonna let god figure that one out
the funniest #otherworldly trait concept i can imagine is
you when like. magical and nonhuman characters are described in a book and the protag like. hears the rustling of grass or smells woodsmoke inexplicably whenever they see them.
i’m just thinking about like. Wrong Versions of that.
every time someone sees me they inexplicably smell a shoe store which is like, not bad, I guess… they hear the distant and quiet but distinct sound of a lawn mower……
When I was in middle school, I found a chocolate-scented aroma oil that I dabbed on my clothing. The one time I went to a ‘Battle of the Bands’ type event, I wore it on a dark brown dress and near the end of the evening, this kid just turned to me and said, in obvious distress, “I don’t know why, but being around you makes me crave chocolate cake?!”
we all have that one book we read as a class in school that we REALLY liked…reblog this and tag what it is for me it’s either the outsiders or romeo and juliet
i don’t see taako and barry’s friendship explored nearly enough in modern AUs. give me these dumb dumb boys being idiot best friends together whenever lup is busy. i want barry being dragged along shopping with taako and suggesting terrible clothes for him to try on only for taako to manage to pull them off. give me barry convincing taako to use an ouija board with him to see what will happen. taako doesn’t believe in that stuff but he ends up getting creeped out anyway and burning it in the backyard afterwards
Lup is out of town, so Barry is staying with Taako for the weekend.
(“Where did she say she was going?”
“She said she had a business trip”
“Don’t you guys have the same job?”)
Taako decides to do the good brother-in-law thing and take Barry fantasy thrifting. They decide that they’re going to pick out outfits for each other to wear for Lup’s homecoming.
BUT THE THING IS they’ve had a prank war going for some time now, and Barry realizes this is how Taako is going to get him, so he picks out the most hideous clothes he can find. Something like this:
Just AWFUL.
Anyway they make their purchases, and leave, and Barry is v smug thinking there’s no way the outfit Taako picked for him is going to be worse than the one he bought for Taako.
A day or two later, Lup rings home on her stone of farspeech to let them know she’ll be be home in an hour or so, so the boys trade shopping bags, and Barry opens his, a little bit terrified of what he’s going to have to wear for the rest of he day, and it’s… good. There’s a nice new denim jacket with some faded patches sewn onto it, and dark jeans that are worn in all the right places.
And Barry has a sudden realization that- Oh Shit! This wasn’t part of the prank war. So he runs out, ready to explain what happened, so he won’t feel like as much of an asshole. He hears Taako’s voice from behind the door,
“You know, Barold, I did have my doubts, but…”
And he walks out and he is pulling it off FLAWLESSLY. Barry is speechless. Taako tells him he has an eye for fashion, and pulls him in into a hug. Barry is so relieved that he doesn’t notice Taako sticking a note that reads ‘hug me’ onto his back. He is hunted ruthlessly by the rest of the IPRE (mostly Magnus and Lup) for the rest of the day.
Okay. There’s a social interaction concept that I’ve tried to convey multiple times in multiple conversations, so I’m going to just go ahead and make a graph.
I’m calling this concept “Affordance Widths”.
Let’s say there’s some behavior {B} that people can do more of, or less of. And everyone agrees that if you don’t do enough of the behavior, bad thing {X} happens; but if you do too much of the behavior, bad thing {Y} happens.
Now, let’s say we have five different people: Adam, Bob, Charles, David, and Edgar. Each of them can do more or less {B}. And once they do too little, {X} happens. But once they do too much, {Y} happens. But where {X} and {Y} starts happening is a little fuzzy, and is different for each of them. Let’s say we can magically graph it, and we get something like this:
Now, let’s look at these five men’s experiences.
Adam doesn’t understand what the big deal about {B} is. He feels like this is a behavior that people can generally choose how much they do, and yeah if they don’t do the *bare minimum* shit goes all dumb, and if they do a *ridiculous* amount then shit goes dumb a different way, but otherwise do what you want, you know?
Bob understands that {B} can be an important behavior, and that there’s a minimum acceptable level of {B} that you need to do to not suffer {X}, and a maximum amount you can get away with before you suffer {Y}. And Bob feels like {X} is probably more important a deal than {Y} is. But generally, he and Adam are going to agree quite a bit about what’s an appropriate amount of {B}ing for people to do. (Bob’s heuristic about how much {B} to do is the thin cyan line.)
Charles isn’t so lucky, by comparison. He’s got a *very* narrow band between {X} and {Y}, and he has to constantly monitor his behavior to not fall into either of them. He probably has to deal with {X} and {Y} happening a lot. If he’s lucky, he does less {B} than average; if he’s not so lucky, then he tries to copy Bob’s strategy and winds up getting smacked with {Y} way more often than Bob does.
Poor David’s in a situation called a “double bind”. There is NO POSSIBLE AMOUNT of {B} he can do to prevent both {X} and {Y} from happening; he simply has to choose his poison. If he tries Bob’s strategy, he’ll get hit hard with {X} *AND* {Y}, simultaneously, and probably be pretty pissed about it. On the other hand, if he runs into Charles, and Charles has his shit figured out, then Charles might tell him to tack into a spot where David only has to deal with {X}. Bob and Adam are going to be utterly useless to David, and are going to give advice that keeps him right in the ugly overlap zone.
Then there’s Edgar. Edgar’s fucked. There is *NO AMOUNT* of behavior that Edgar can dial into, where he isn’t getting hit HARD by {X} *and* {Y}. There’s places way out on the extreme – places where most people are getting slammed hard by {X} or slammed hard by {Y} – where Edgar notices a slight decrease in the contra failure mode. So Edgar probably spends most of his time on the edges, either doing all-B or no-B, and people probably tell him to stop being so black-and-white about B and find a good middle spot like everyone else. Edgar probably wants to punch those people, starting with Adam.
In any real situation, the affordance width is probably determined by things independent of X, Y, and B. Telling Bob to do a little more {B} than Adam, and Charles to do a little less {B} than Adam or Bob, is great advice. But David and Edgar need different advice – they need advice one meta-level up, about how to widen their affordance width between {X} and {Y} so that *some* amount of {B} will be allowed at all.
In most of the situations where this is most salient to me, {B} is a social behavior, and {X} and {Y} are punishments that people mete out to people who do not conform to correct {B}-ness. A lot of the affordance width that Adam and Bob have would probably be identified as ‘halo effects’.
For example, let’s say {B} is assertiveness in a job interview. Let’s say {X} represents coming across as socially weak, while {Y} represents coming across as arrogant. Adam probably has a lot going for him – height, age, socioeconomic background, etc. – that make him just plain *likeable*, so he can be way more assertive than Charles and seem like a go-getter, *or* seem way less assertive than Charles and seem like a good team player. Whereas David was probably born the wrong skin color and god-knows-what-else, and Edgar probably has some kind of Autism-spectrum disorder that makes *any* amount of assertiveness seem dangerous, and *any* amount of non-assertiveness seem pathetic.
There’s plenty of other values for {B}, {X} and {Y} that I could have picked; filling them in is left as an exercise for the reader.
Does this make sense to people?
Everybody want to do me a personal solid? Yeah? Good.
Add on some example behaviors that fit this. They don’t have to be gendered or something like that. They can be very specific, they can be broad. Just things people can do an amount of and that bad things happen if they do too much or too little of them.
I’ll start with eating. You can eat too much food (short term sickness, long term obesity) or too little (starvation).
This applies nicely to gendered vs. cross-gendered behaviours with punishments of negative stereotyping on either end.
Adam, as an attractive heterosexual man can appear as butch or as femme as he wants within pretty large limits and people are just going to compliment him on it.
Bob, a less-than attractive heterosexual man can act more masculine without too much fear of reprisal but can’t generally slip into more effeminate behaviours without negative comments about his presumed sexuality.
Charles, as a gay man, needs to ensure that he confirms to gendered expectations as much as possible to avoid derisive stereotyping for effeminate behaviours.
David, as a trans man, is pretty much screwed if he acts the least bit feminine, but can occasionally avoid accusations of transitioning poorly if he loads up on balls out machismo.
Emily, being a trans woman, gets screwed over in that she can’t act effeminate without being accused of re-enforcing sexism and can’t act masculine without getting accused of not-being-trans-enough and pretty much gets assaulted with both negative outcomes simultaneously anyway.
Emily feels sick when she sees Adam dance around in lingerie she fears even buying, David considers punching Bob in the face for always being on his case about going to the gym too much.
Thanks for the addition! This is a really insightful take on this. I’m glad to see people contributing as I think the original post was missing at least one good example. It’s also enlightening to see just how well this can apply to such a wide array of social behaviors and expectations.
HOT SHIT THIS IS A GREAT MODEL FOR A THING THAT I HADN’T THOUGHT MUCH ABOUT BUT IS REAL AND IMPORTANT.
Also… The OP made a graph. Bless you, OP. 😍
I’ve thought about exercise like this for a long time. X is when you aren’t really doing anything, like, heart rate isn’t up, muscles aren’t trying that hard – it’s not bad, but it’s not actually helpful in any way. Y is when you do too much, end up aching and exhausted in a bad way, maybe feel like barfing or just lying down and not moving for a week. Or worse. The goal zone is where it feels good – the pleasant burn, the breath lost but catchable, the actual building of muscle and slimming of fat and etc. Endorphins.
Most people are in the Adam or Beth group. I, with a muscle tissue disorder and one partially collapsed lung, am a Charlie. I’m a fan of powerwalking and yoga. And I know people who are Denise or Elton, with chronic pain and no or very minimal win conditions.
Exercise was the first thing I thought of when reading this, too. Also, there’s Fritz and Gus.
Fritz’s graph changes from day to day, too fast for them to make plans that will help them stay between X and Y, plus other people are going to keep saying “why can’t you do that today? you managed it fine yesterday.”
And Gus’s measuring, graph-making, and/or graph-reading apparatus is broken, so they can’t monitor what’s happening with their body (or with their social reception, if this is about gender presentation not exercise) and have to rely on other people for input on how much of the thing they should be doing. Which is a problem if the person advising them is Adam, and Gus’s graph (if they had one) is more like Charles’.
also: I realized this causes something like a problem I have, which I thought of as the ally’s problem.
Suppose B is trying to be helpful to a marginalized group of which you’re not a member. Too little, you’re upholding current oppression; too much, you piss off some members of the groups of which you ARE a member AND some members of the group you’re attempting to help since you’re taking up too much space and/or Doing It Wrong because you haven’t lived through things and groups are not monoliths so anything you do relating to a group you don’t belong to is bound to piss off somebody.
I tend to veer a lot between being Bob and Dave, and trying hard to keep to a Charles level, as my energy levels to cautiously navigate social mores not my own and my standing in groups I supposedly belong to wavers.
I mean: if I go out and volunteer at a charity for refugee kids instead of working enough hours a week to support my family, people will be rightously pissed. Same if I get overloaded in a conversation about racism, lash out at someone who said the wrong thing, and end up shouting at the very people I’m trying to help. Or if I try to help a friend with mental issues, get overloaded, and get us both caught in a mutual triggering spiral.
I have a LOT of friends whose mental illnesses put them at firmly Edgar levels when it comes to social justice – either we must be ALWAYS CORRECT ALL THE TIME or SCREW ALL THIS SJW SHIT rather than “This is important and your pain is real but I can’t help without hurting myself.”
This metric also applies to addict vs non-addict behavior patterns, and to chronic pain and mental illness survivors, and to social perceptions of safety for survivors of rape and domestic violence. And if you’re feeling sprightly, it can apply to profanity patterns in atheists vs staunch believers too.
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