The kink community has changed my perspective on sex and sexuality, and it's made me reeveluate what it means to be asexual
For me, one of the hardest parts about being aromantic is managing the expectations of alloromantic people in relationships
I've been thinking a lot lately about what "family" means as an aromantic person, especially when family is so fundamentally tied to the concept of romantic relationships.
I talk about the "in-between spaces" between my neurodiversity and my romantic orientation and just how interconnected those aspects of my identity are
I use Coyote's concept of a convergent-divergent spectrum to describe some feelings about my identity I've been trying to piece together for a while.
Where I talk about QPRs, relationship anarchy, how I personally find QPRs less useful of a concept than I used to.
I used to use the split-attraction model to conceptualize my romantic and orientation. Here's why I don't anymore, why the SAM never really made sense for me in the first place, and where I think the SAM fails a lot of aro folks.
Sometimes explaining my identity to non-queer folks means giving definitions that aren't entirely accurate—little white lies that make coming out easier. And I sometimes wonder if these half-truths amount to a betrayal of the community.
I find I tend to use different language to describe my identity depending on who I'm talking to. There are "layers" of specificity and detail I will use depending on whether I'm talking to another aspec person, another queer person, or a non-queer person.
It's hard to understate how pivotal the Asexual Visibility and Education Network was in shaping the modern asexual community, including much of the language aces use to describe their identity. But what about before AVEN? What did it mean to be asexual? This essay is my attempt at tracing the history of the usage of the term "asexual."