This year, right before before pr*de, I reconnected to an old friend. She's ace. She lives with aces, is engaged to a lesbian ace. She's also demisexual and the way she talks about romantic attraction she's most likely demiromantic, too, because she doesn't fall in love without a strong emotional bond first. Her roommate that's not the fiancée is aroace.
I talked to her about my aromanticism. About how I identify as aroflux or maybe grayromantic. She did not know what grayromantic was, asked me if I meant graysexual or gray asexual. What she said exactly was, "Grayro is on the ace spectrum?" She didn't differentiate "grayro" apart from gray ace or asexuality in general because she didn't know? She and her aro roommate are in the aromantic spectrum, she lives in an aspec household, and she didn't or couldn't differentiate the aro identity out of the ace spectrum. I had even clarified that I was allosexual by using the exact word, allosexual, in my paragraph. And she still asked if I meant ace when I told her I felt I was an aro identity.
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Look. I'm not posting this after avoiding this blog for over six months to come back and even to really say anything to start something. And this is bad time in the world, that's why I *-ed up in my first sentence, I don't want tumblr algorithms to pick up that word and take away timeline space for posts that are more important right now.
But I don't have anywhere else to voice my frustration.
And it has been so good to reconnect to this friend!!! I have missed her so much, we used to talk a lot and she was the first to validate my difficulty with romance and even introduced me to asexuality that lead me to aromanticism. I ordered her and her household june stuff, some of it specifically demi and ace, because they've been out helping those who need it and doing good stuff but were sad that they felt the shouldn't post anything june related because of the sad bad and important stuff. Like I know that she would never try to hurt me because we were just today talking about some acephobic asshole earlier and how frustrating that is. She would never meaningly say something to be arophobic.
I'm not ace. I. Am. Not. Ace. None of my identities are asexual identities. I am arospec. I may be grayro, meaning gray aromantic. I am aroallo. Aromantic allosexual.
I've been sitting on this for a few days to decide if it was actually bothering me and it is.
No where is there a place that understands aro only identities. Not on tumblr, and apparently not irl with irl aspecs lol. Seriously, in a household of all aspecs, it wasn't common knowledge that the not asexual version of gray- is just the aromantic one. Like why did she ask me it like that? "Grayro is on the ace spectrum?" No lol, grayro is an aspec identity, but it is on the aro spectrum.
Why is it like this? Why am I constantly stuffed into the ace spectrum when I am not ace? I can't even be a non-sam aro because I still get stuffed into the ace identity when I do not belong there. And I even clarified that I was allosexual and bi questioning and I still was questioned if I was identifying with an ace identity.
Nothing has changed. It's still this stupid fucking mentality that if you're not ace or not aroace, then what are you???
I'm fucking aroallo. I'm aroallo. Aromantic allosexual. I am just ARO.
Please see us, for fucks sake. I know there's other aroallos out there, there are aroallo voices speaking still. We are aro. We are aspec. We are not ace, but we're still aspec. Please see us.
