On Being Aromantic

For some time now, I’ve been reading up on aromantics, and what it means to be one. And the more I read, the more I know that I am one too. It’s really the only fit explanation for the struggles with relationships that I’ve always had.

But let me emphasise here what some of the websites I’ve read also stress – that each person’s experience of being aromantic is going to be different. The common core of experience seems to be the feeling of one’s inner nature being somehow incompatible with romantic relationships.

So what does being aromantic mean for me? Firstly, let me tell what it doesn’t mean.

It doesn’t mean that I’ve never had relationships. When I was growing up, ‘everybody’ dated, got married, had kids and ‘settled down’. It was just what you did, unless you were maybe a nun or priest. Popular culture dosed me up with the romantic ideal of The Right One who would sweep off my feet, fulfil me, transform me. As a young undiagnosed autistic with a yearning to be ‘normal’, I swallowed this pretty uncritically, though I do remember saying once that I was never going to get married – because I didn’t fancy becoming a housewife – but I was laughed at by the adults. ‘You’ll change your mind when you get older!’

And in a way, I did. Or rather, I succumbed to societal expectations, and started dating. I also knew that I wanted to explore sex and have children, and a relationship seemed like the price you had to pay for that. (I’m also demi-sexual, so one-night stands don’t really do anything for me. Just to make things complicated.) And if I found my dating experiences awkward, I told myself that I just hadn’t met The Right One yet. I married and had a child, and yes, became for at least a short while a housewife. I loathed it. I finally admitted to myself that I didn’t like sex with men either. I left the marriage and came out, but all I did was switch my search from Mr Right to Ms Right.

The sex was better, but my relationships continued to be awkward failures. And after each one ended, I felt a lot of emotions, but most especially relief. The kind of relief you get when you stop doing something that’s not just inherently wrong for you, but way beyond your capabilities. I spent long periods celibate, trying to ‘sort myself out’, eventually coming to the conclusion that I just couldn’t ‘do’ relationships, and choosing to become permanently single. When I realised that I’m autistic, I thought at first that this was why I struggled with relationships, but then I realised that other autistics were able to do them way better than me. There was Something More.

It also doesn’t mean I’ve never had a ‘crush’/fallen in love. Although looking back, there was a kind of desperation in this. I was always falling for those way out of reach and/or totally unsuitable. (Maybe because they were ‘safe’?) Nor did these feelings - a heady mix of lust and turbulent emotions fueled by my yearning for the promised fulfilment/transformation - ever bring me an ounce of joy. Each time, I was convinced that this time would be ‘The One’, the one who would Change My Life, change me, make me like everyone else. It never happened. In most cases, the feelings didn’t even lead to a relationship. (The ones I did have, tended to happen without that.)

After a while, the crush would die a natural death, leaving me feeling flat and empty, but also relieved. I had myself back. Often, I would realise that the person I’d fallen so hard for was not what I’d thought they were, and become distinctly unenchanted. But I’d still do it again, and again… Eventually however it became so painful that I made a promise to myself to stop. Despite my experiences, letting go of that fantasy of transformation was difficult. I really yearned for ‘normal’. But I did succeed in letting it go, and I’m much happier now. I like my emotional balance intact.

Once I did stop falling for people and idealising them, I realised that there isn’t any magical The One anyway, especially for me, that everyone is simply human, and hence imperfect. Realising that meant that I couldn’t see any point in choosing just one person to put above all others. If they weren’t Perfect and Magical, why bother with the struggle? Ever since, I’ve invested my energies in creating significant non-romantic connections instead. It’s enriched my life whereas attempts at romantic relationships always worsened it.

So - if it’s not the above, what does being aromantic mean for me?

It means that I really don’t ‘get’ romance. I’ve always been bored by the romantic scenes in books and movies, and, in the rare instances they don’t happen, relieved. The whole hearts, flowers, moonlight thing - I mean, they’re pretty and all, but the idea that something special is supposed to happen because of them? …Um, what, exactly? Partners would scold me for being ‘unromantic’, and I tried, I really did, but I invariably just ended up feeling awkward and stupid, a failure on yet another count. I didn’t even like holding hands much. It just meant sweaty palms and being thrown off balance as I walked. Kissing, too, tended to trigger sensory overloads I didn’t understand, and which no-one else seemed to either.

I also couldn’t understand why so many, especially women, seemed prepared to sacrifice everything for a partner, even moving hundreds of miles and abandoning their former lives. I couldn’t imagine giving up my whole life for just one person. When an abusive partner did manipulate me into a degree of distancing from friends and family, I was miserable, and ended up loathing her for it.

Moreover, the older I got, the more I felt that relationships, of all kinds, are formed in the day-to-day caring things, not giving someone a bunch of flowers. It’s always mystified me that others feel this ‘Romance’ thing is so important, that their lives and relationships are lacking something vital without what feels to me like a bunch of nothing. If a romantic type can tell me what the point is, I’d be interested to know. But I still feel that it’s not something that works for me. My problems with relationships, however, go deeper still than this lack of romantic leanings.

I don’t get what others get from relationships. I used to hear people say, “oh, relationships are such hard work”, and I’d wonder, well, why do you do them then? Until the day I finally realised, they do it because they get a reward for all their hard work. They might put in, say, one part hard work, and get back maybe ten or twenty parts reward. And that’s where I differ. For me, relationships are more like ten or twenty parts hard work and one or no parts reward. In fact, I don’t even really know what the rewards are supposed to be.

I don’t need or want someone always at my side. The idea of ‘growing old’ with the same person always around makes me feel faintly nauseous or trapped. Nor do I want anyone in my face 24/7, or even just at night. I don’t like sharing a bed with anyone, let alone a house or a life. I can’t ‘meld’ my living spaces with others, rooms are either mine or someone else’s. I don’t even want a ‘listening ear’ - if I have a problem, that’s what my friends or family are for. I’m perfectly happy with living alone, being my own independent person, going my own way, not beholden to another. It’s simply how I’m built.

And being aromantic means, most of all, that I’m uncomfortable in relationships. This is something I find really hard to put into words. If I say that I was always unhappy, people tend to say ‘you just haven’t found the right person yet’, or ‘just because your past relationships were toxic, doesn’t mean you can’t have a good one’. And there’s no doubt I’ve had some bad ones. But I realised long ago that the problem isn’t bad relationships, but that relationships aren’t right FOR ME. I feel ill at ease, emotionally out of kilter, thrown off my centre, oppressed, even trapped, by them.

Trapped by the ideal of ‘partnership’, of expectations from society or partners as to how I’m supposed to be or behave, by the whole concept of going through my life in lockstep with another person. I would always feel wretchedly miserable, crowded, and suffocated. Inevitably, at some point, I would turn around and look at them and think “…who are you? What are you doing in my face, in my bed, in my house, in my life?” I’d then feel guilty, and suppress those feelings, but they would come back even stronger, and the relationship would sooner or later die.

Now, in no way am I saying that everyone should follow my path. If someone needs a partner to be happy, and they find the right person, I’m happy for them. Why would I want them to take a path that’s going to make them miserable? What good would that do? All I ask is that they accord me, and my fellow aromantics, the same freedom to choose what’s best for us as individuals. Nor am I denying the strength of the bonds they feel with their partners. I only want that non-romantic bonds be recognised as just as important.

Romantic types need to realise that the whole romantic thing just isn’t everyone’s bag. So much of our culture revolves around the unspoken assumption that everyone is either paired or seeking to be, that this is the only ‘healthy’ way to live, an assumption particularly visible right now with Valentine’s Day looming. But not everyone wants or needs a romantic partner, and it’s definitely possible to be happy without one. Some of us are simply made different. And to deny that, to not listen when we try and tell you how it is for us, feels like somewhere between gaslighting and just not getting the message. If you tell us that we ‘just need to find the right partner’, you’re projecting your own need for a romantic relationship onto us, in a manner akin to the heterosexuals who tell gays ‘you just haven’t met the right person of the opposite sex yet’.

You don’t need to understand us, just accept that we’re different. That we’re not heartless or cold, but that we get our needs for closeness and connection met in different ways. Is that really so hard to do?

A final word here for those who think I’m ‘just being trendy’, or who wonder ‘why the need for a label’. I’ve spent most of my life struggling with these feelings, and with relationships. Even when I recognised that romantic relationships were Not My Thing, I still thought I was flawed or wrong in some way for feeling this way. I kept it all to myself out of shame or fear of others not understanding. Finding that there’s a name for what I feel, for what I am, that there are others like me, has been a liberation. It’s also worth noting that I’m in my sixties – this is not just a young people’s thing. We’ve been around forever, but without any way to describe or label it, there wasn’t any way to form a positive identity around it and forge a path to self-acceptance, let alone get others to accept us. The ‘label’ is a path to freedom, not a fashion we’re following. Get used to us, because we’re not going away or changing any time soon.

MY AUTISTIC REACTION TO THE PANDEMIC

You’d have to be living in a cave in some remote spot not to know that we’re in the midst of a worldwide pandemic. There’s really no other news on TV, or my Facebook newsfeed for that matter – except the deliberate light relief kind, like cat videos or music from European balconies.

I’ve felt a wide range of emotions in response to this. A ton of sad ones - compassion for those who are or have been sick, grief for those who have died, and empathy for those who have lost loved ones. Empathy also for those who know that they or their loved ones are at risk, those who are struggling to cope, those whose anxiety is going through the roof, those who find the whole thing just too overwhelming. I’ve sometimes found myself sitting on the couch crying, for instance when my country experienced its first Covid#19 death. I didn’t know the person, or anyone who’s died anywhere, but I cried anyway.

And anger. I’m furious at the hoarders and panic buyers who’ve emptied the supermarket shelves, depriving those of us who can’t afford to do this of things we need. Seriously? Who needs three hundred toilet rolls anyway? I’m especially angry though at the profiteers. How dare you. How dare you make money on the backs of people’s pain, misery and deaths. What kind of amoral pipsqueak are you? And then there are the callous and the don’t-care-I’m-all-right-Jack crowd, who put everyone else at risk. This is not a time for partying, people!

I’m also angry at those so-called leaders who haven’t acted fast enough, and have put more people’s lives at risk as a result. My (admittedly rough) impression is that ‘left-wing’ governments, at least in Western countries, seem to be acting faster and doing more to help ordinary people, whereas right-wing leaders have tried to delay acting, or even reverse some actions too soon, in order to minimise damage to the Holy Grail of ‘The Economy’. The inadequate measures of some governments sometimes seem akin to telling the Titanic’s orchestra to play on as the boat is sinking. I’ve wanted to grab them all by their collars and shake some sense into them.

But my strongest feeling is simply fear. It’s not myself I fear for, but relatives and friends, especially those who are in the ‘high risk’ category. Will they get sick? Will anyone I know die? I fear for my loved ones, especially a close relative who is pregnant with a much-wanted and longed-for baby, as well as my more elderly relatives. Plus no-one knows how long this pandemic will last, will it be over in a few months, or by Christmas? Will we acquire herd immunity, or will the virus mutate again? Will there be further pandemics? When will there be a vaccine? How much should I be scared?

Because nobody knows what the future will hold, even if we beat this thing. Maybe the world will only change in small ways – elbow bumping replacing high-fives, or a shift to more people working at home. Everyone becoming more scrupulous about washing hands. (I can’t help wondering what you were all doing before?!?) Or maybe we’ll become a more scared world, like we did after 9/11, with ‘viral’ becoming a personal insult and cause for social rejection. One big possibility is that we’ll become more callous about allowing the vulnerable – the elderly, disabled, chronically ill and homeless – to be sacrificed in order to ‘manage’ future crises. And many of us autistic and disabled know that we will be among the culled. These are just some of the possibilities.

Alternatively, we could have some kind of social revolution, a shaking up of the world’s complacency. This crisis has made the defects of neo-liberalist capitalism patently obvious. The modern practise of ‘just-in-time’ supply-chains, for instance, with few or no reserves, doesn’t work in a crisis. The profit-at-all-costs mentality and ‘lean, mean’ health services have left many at risk. The crisis has also shown that the real ‘essential people’ of any society aren’t billionaires or politicians, but people like supermarket workers, truck drivers, and medical personnel. Perhaps people will look at our socio-economic system differently after this.

Now, I get that lots of people are having similar reactions and thoughts right now. We’re watching a horror unfolding before our very eyes. ‘Unprecedented’ is a media pop word right now – we’re all in uncharted territory. Feeling sad, angry, frightened and/or overwhelmed is an entirely appropriate set of responses to a pandemic. ‘Quiet terror’, as one commentator called it. There are so many unknowns it’s frightening. Even the scientists and doctors still don’t seem to know that much about how this virus works, and they and governments all around the world are playing catch-up, with fatal consequences. It’s already being said that mental health is going to take a big hit from this.

But I do wonder if it’s going to be even harder for us autistics, not so much because of social isolation (this will vary from one autistic to another), but because of all the uncertainty. My own feeling is that we’re less resilient emotionally, and may take it harder, and come back slower, if at all. I know that a large chunk of my own sense of security has been removed, and I don’t think it will ever return. I already have a very low level of trust in the world, due to my experiences, now I have a new mistrust of Mother Nature as well.

A big part of our trauma is surely going to be how so many of the ‘normal’ things in our lives are either gone or in abeyance. I didn’t realise till now how many of the world’s activities I simply took for granted, even if I didn’t like them much. Something as ordinary as going to the supermarket has become like taking a ticket in a lottery – I never know if what I need will be there or not. What will I go without this week? How will I cope? And of course as for many autistics, fear can lead to catastrophising, where I imagine the worst, and then double and triple it.

My own country moved pretty quickly, more than a week ago, into a complete lockdown, and while I was processing it all, I pretty much fell apart. I’ve done a lot of compulsive watching of TV news, eating junk food, irregular sleep, and much more stimming, while my dreams have been full of earthquakes, violent car accidents and wandering lost in strange places in the dark. It’s been an effort to get myself even a little bit together, to make healthy meals, get to bed earlier - and to do some of my much-neglected housework! I’ve had to cut down my hours of watching TV news, and stayed off Facebook until I felt able to cope with the onslaught.

Because I have a deeper level of fear, which I find hard to describe, but which seems to be a sense of the world fracturing right in front of my eyes. I’ve been floundering, grappling with this sensation of everything falling apart. I guess that’s what an international emergency does to you. An old W B Yeats poem keeps coming to mind, about how ‘the centre cannot hold’, and ‘anarchy is loosed upon the world’. (Yes, I know I’ve probably been reading too much dystopian sci-fi!) As a new order/reality takes shape, and I work out the new rules for it, I hope this fear might ease.

And for all we know, it won’t be like any of this. Maybe there’ll eventually be a vaccine, or life-saving treatments, and life will just go back to what it was. Or something like it. Maybe. Right now, I’m just trying to ride the wave, and take one day at a time. Nobody knows what’s going to happen next. And that’s the hardest thing for any autistic.

On Being Comfortable In My Own Skin

Not many people know this, but I’ve kept journals on and off since my teen years. However I’ve recently realised that in all of them, I’ve been simply repeating the same thing in different ways – “I am what I am, this is me, I’m different, I’m different, and I cannot change.” And of course spilling out all the pain and trauma of trying to live in a world that just isn’t meant for people like me, not to mention the self-hatred, depression, shame, imposter syndrome, and sense of being ‘out of place’ that arose in turn out of that.

I tried tackling these issues through various routes over many years. I tried self-esteem and assertiveness training classes, peer support groups, various counsellors and psychologists, communication skills classes, meditation, self-help programs, and of course lots and LOTS of reading, but all to no avail. I still felt like the lowest of the low. My journal was often the only place I felt no-one would judge or condemn me for being ‘different’, the only place I felt I could be my true self.

But I’ve now reached a stage in my life where I have found that privately repeating the same old same old isn’t actually helping anymore, and instead my urge is to take what I know and feel out to the world at large. Journaling has transmuted into sharing with trusted friends in small groups or private chat, comments on various posts, or, most especially, the rough scrawling notes which I later compile into blog posts like this. It’s taken me a long time to get to this point, and there have been several pivotal steps along the way. The main ones have been -

1) Finding the autistic community. If I hadn’t found the autistic community (as opposed to the ‘autism community’), I would have gone on feeling like an error on the human production line, and that what I believed were my defects were something I had to hide for fear of rejection. I would probably have refused to even identify as autistic, because the official criteria for them just wouldn’t have seemed to fit. What, me, that terrible, almost sub-human creature they describe? No way.

But I did find it. And though I’m no longer rosy-spectacled about it, and will readily acknowledge that it’s far from perfect, nonetheless, it’s a damn sight better than nothing at all. Without it, I was lost in a social wilderness, stumbling and crashing my way through the world, feeling like a fool. But in our community I found for the first time people who thought, felt and acted like me, people who didn’t think I was weird or stupid or laughable. In fact some of them seemed to actually like me! Want to know me! This still sparks amazement, but also the warmth that only comes from having true friends for the first time in my life.

Even so, it’s taken over a decade of support and acceptance from my fellow autistics for this to truly sink in. For the damage of earlier years to be undone, and the messages of autistic pride and neurodiversity to seep down into the deepest layers of my subconscious. I think that even after I found the community, on some level I was still ashamed of being autistic, of being ‘different’. But over time, my attitude has been steadily transformed into “this is me, this is who I am, and if you don’t like it, feel free to go find someone whose company you like better!”

I do appreciate that not all of us have the freedom yet to do this, be like this. I hope that someday we all can. And nor am I going to claim that any of this is easy, or that I’ve magically learnt the secret of ‘loving myself’ that so many people have tried to tell me was so important. Rather, I’ve realised that you don’t need to ‘love yourself’ in order to reach a point where you stop and look at all the negativity that comes your way simply for being yourself, and think “you know what? This is rubbish.” I am what I am. We are what we are. We cannot be anything other. So what’s the use of flagellating ourselves for simply being ourselves? Self-loving isn’t necessary. Self-respect is.

And let’s note here that this also extends to all our co-occurring conditions, such as Executive Dysfunction, Sensory Processing Difficulty, sleep irregularities, alexithymia, etc. I used to feel a lot of shame around these, but after years of struggle, I’ve simply accepted that I have problems with things like organising myself and my time/belongings, sleeping regular hours, coping with various sensory inputs, and recognising what I’m feeling. I’ve learnt that it’s okay to be different, to have different needs, and to do whatever’s necessary to accommodate them. And to stand up for myself when people try to tell me otherwise.

2) Exploring new identities around gender and sexual expression. In the last couple of years, I’ve discovered there are actually new ways to describe how I connect to others, how I am in relationships, and how I define my inner self. Realising that I’m non-binary and almost certainly aromantic and demi-sexual has helped me clarify that my feelings around connection are not flaws I should overcome, but simply part of who I am.

And once again, the understanding that I’m not alone, that there are actually labels for all the feelings I had no words for, has helped relieve a lot of stress. I’m finding another community, one that often overlaps with the autistic one, and no, it’s not all about younger generations or being ‘trendy’, as if identities were like fashions. It’s about deep ways of being, and some of us older ones are finding a new peace and self-confidence in realising that we’re just not into romance, or that we need to get to know someone before becoming intimate, and that this intimacy may not include sex, that friendships can be just as powerful and important as sexual/romantic relationships. Being single is not an inferior state, and Romance is not necessarily the pinnacle of human connection.

3) Taking back my personal power. This has been perhaps the biggest step of all, and I couldn’t have done it without the previous ones. My whole life, it seems, I’ve been pushed around, dominated, bullied, manipulated, dumped on, scorned or belittled or outright abused. Over and over again, people have told me what to do, what to say, what not to say or do, how I should live my life, what opinions I should express and how, what I should or shouldn’t eat, what labels I should or shouldn’t put on myself, what I should write about, even how I should dress or walk or stand. And sad to say, I mostly put up with it, either because I was scared, or didn’t know how to stop it, or thought it was normal, or even that I deserved it.

But I’m tired of being pushed around, and I refuse to let anyone do it anymore. I refuse to put up with anyone telling me what to do, whether it’s a bully on a Facebook post trying to excuse other bullies’ behaviour, a martyr mommy telling me that I should shut up because I don’t understand what a ‘burden’ autistic kids are, someone sending me messages simultaneously putting me down and telling me what to do, a health professional telling me to eat foods I loathe or that I ‘don’t need’ vitamin supplements, or an obnoxious person in a public carpark trying to boss me around.

That’s not to say that all my old habits and reactions have completely disappeared. A lifetime of patterns of please-and-placate, submission-and-appeasement, aren’t easy to get rid of. There are frequent ‘knee-jerk’ reactions, but they’re getting weaker, and after a moment my new patterns of thought kick in and cancel the old ones out. I’m getting better and better at this business of standing up for myself, even if this simply means walking away from confrontation, or blocking toxic people. These can be acts of self-respect too. And this change is, I hope, the final shift, the final throwing off of the traces that once kept me bound, the last foundation stone of a life where I don’t have to hate myself, feel ashamed of myself, feel weak and powerless and stupid, and so on.

Anyway, this is where I’m at, right now. So much more comfortable in my own skin, and with the public expressions I have, that I don’t need a private outlet for negative feelings anymore. I can simply be, be myself, with all my faults and idiosyncrasies, but still a person worthy of life, worthy of expressing myself, worthy of a space in the world.

And so are all of you.