luvtheheaven is moving to VioletEmeraldx!

Hey everybody! I have more blogging to do, but I’m starting fresh with a new username. Everywhere that you once saw me pop up online as “luvtheheaven” I’m trying to now be Violet Emerald or violetemerald or where the username was taken, violetemeraldx.

I wrote up an explanation at the end of my new blog’s “About the Blogger” page: https://violetemeraldx.wordpress.com/about/

I had been known around the internet for over 16 years under the username “luvtheheaven”, occasionally with a number after it. I came up with the name when I was 14-years-old, which was a time when I was questioning my religious beliefs and simultaneously getting deeply into the TV series “7th Heaven”. The name had been a reference to “loving” the TV series. In the years since then, there are many reasons I am not super happy to be associated with my former username, although I believe I will never be entirely free of people who knew me by that name. I’m an atheist though who doesn’t believe in any form of an afterlife, and has been identifying as an atheist for over a decade now. I would like to distance myself from a name that has “heaven” in it for that reason, if nothing else. I plan to try to make the transition as smooth as possible for people who knew me before in whatever ways I can. I’m trying to keep the continuity of who I am, despite my name change.

I chose Violet Emerald as a name for a couple reasons. One main reason is because ace and aro colors are purple and green, and being aro & ace is such a huge part of my identity and life. I also chose the name because I’ve loved the name Violet as a potential psueodonym for myself for a very long time, probably since I fell in love with the A Series of Unfortunate Events books as a child, and the character of Violet resonated with me in many ways.

I didn’t want my old blog posts under my luvtheheaven blog name to break. So I decided to start a new blog with my new name, and leave all my old blog posts where they were associated with luvtheheaven. https://luvtheheaven.wordpress.com/
I have years of blogging over there.

“violetemerald” was taken, as a URL, so this with the x at the end is the next best thing.

This blog will remain open for comments and will sit here mostly as it is, while I put my attention on my new blog and try to also get back into the swing of blogging. Please let me know if you have any questions or concerns!

Many thanks to my consistent blog readers and followers for sticking with me over the years, and thank you to the friends I’ve made in the ace blogging community (blogosphere!). I really hope you follow me over there to violetemeraldx.wordpress.com and indeed follow that blog.

Carnival of Aros – November 2020 Round Up of Submissions: “Commitment”

Hi everyone. I am so sorry for my extreme delay in posting this round up post! It’s December 10th/December 11th already (depending on your time zone) but at least it’s finally here. The Call for Submissions for December 2020 has been up for a bit now, and the theme is “Happily Ever After” and is being hosted by Aspec of Stardust. The deadline is the end of December, goal to post the round up of submissions on January 1st. (At least one of the participants below has already written a December submission as well!)

Thank you so much to everyone who participated in the November 2020 Carnival of Aros. The call for submissions was here. I’m fairly sure it was only six of us total who participated. (Edited to add: a 7th submission was found late, and added to this post early on January 5, 2021.) This is quite out of order of when they were submitted but bear with me, and please make sure to read the full posts if you can! 🙂

1. I myself submitted a very late post on Being Commitment Driven. In it, I discussed a variety of types of commitments in my life including within interpersonal relationships, and my desire to become a parent and find a committed co-parenting partner.

2. Cinnamon (cinnamon_possum) wrote Commitment to Self. Here are a couple quotes to capture a lot of what the post was about:

It took even longer for me to understand that I could engage in relationships on my own terms, and that I’m more than capable of preventing marriage from happening to me.

and

My mind and heart do best when alone, and living in a society that often pathologizes and vilifies this way of being takes its toll.

3. arias_hollow also participated, with an untitled post, and here are a couple quotes:

I would say I do look for some level of commitment in my friendships, even if that’s only ‘commitment to behaving in a friendly manner around each other and offering assistance when necessary’.

and

When it comes to the idea of ‘partnerships’, that level of commitment has always seemed like A Bit Much to me. Romantic relationships seem rather unappealing and stifling, and I can’t relate at all to how people talk about queerplatonic relationships now a days either. That said, the way the concept of a qpr was originally introduced to me – an entirely malleable platonic partnership – did sound quite appealing at the time.

4. CharCharChar wrote Defining a Relationship for Fun, and explained the experience of “the DTR” (a slang term used to mean the Defining The Relationship conversation) within one relationship in their life.

I read a few articles on defining relationships in preparation and made a list of topics to consider:

-how we contact each other
-boundaries, anything that makes us uncomfortable to avoid
-what types of interactions we want to have and how frequently
-what we hope to get out of the relationship / where we see the relationship going

And be sure to check out the post for what happened!

5. graces-of-luck wrote a post on tumblr! Here’s a section from it:

So what truly distinguishes a close friend from a casual friend is the degree of commitment, in which a close friendship is characterized by being deeply committed to the ongoing continuation of the relationship and to each other. Commitment to a person certainly evokes a sense of security and comfort for me. The way I do commitment, though, does require that I maintain some freedom and lets the other person also maintain some freedom. The quote by Thich Nhat Hanh embodies this: “You must love in such a way that the person you love feels free.”

6. aro-and-ace-memes-thoughts wrote Committed relationships don’t work for everyone. Here’s a section from this one:

So, seeing the person I liked the most calling another one their “best friend” was crushing to me, despite my friends liking me and me liking them. I had, and still have, a friendship version of amatonormative goals. Like best friends are a platonic version of soulmates, which isn’t always true.

It took me a lot to realize it’s quite unrealistic for me to have that kind of relationship with someone.

7. aro-neir-o wrote a post on tumblr that I’m adding to the round-up very late. It starts off with these sentiments:

I’m not in relationships for the convenient companionship. I’m in there for depth of connection. Everyone I meet I consider to be an integral part of my life, whether they make the decision to stay or are simply fleeting passersby. 

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All of these posts were great submissions and I really appreciate everyone participating! If I missed a post that should have been included in this roundup please let me know.

Being Commitment Driven

I started the draft of this blog post in June 2018, continued to work on it a bit in August 2018 after the month happened where the topic for the Carnival of Aces was “Nuance & Complexity”, and then… well… I just never finished it.

When the Carnival of Aros was launched in February 2019, I told myself I would host a Carnival of Aros one day on the topic of “commitment” and motivate myself to finish writing about this stuff when that time came.

In November 2020, I hosted the Carnival of Aros on the theme of “Commitment” and the call for submissions was here. I am also quite late into December finishing my own post, and posting the round up of all submissions. I sincerely apologize for the delay. Enjoy my finally finished post below. I tried to edit the draft from years ago to better reflect my views today, without scrapping all of it. I had to delete a lot of it though. I hope I didn’t miss anything I should have updated.

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I have really jumbled thoughts and feelings when it comes to commitment, such as what commitment in the context of interpersonal relationships even is, or why I desire it, but I do think that deep down I am very “commitment driven”. Both inside and outside of interpersonal relationships.

My original draft mentioned how for many years now separated the concepts of sexual attraction and sexual desire in the asexual community. Sometimes we all struggle to agree on what it is we’re really separating, like in this post and its comments.

Now that this a Carnival of Aros post, I’m cognizant that in both ace and aro communities, “behavior” is often importantly differentiated from “attraction”, and people can have a “drive” or “desire” to pursue a certain behavior all while lacking a common type of “attraction” that goes with it. Some may not find people hot/sexy but still want sex, others don’t really get crushes but still could happily receive/give a bouquet of flowers or box of chocolates on Valentine’s Day, some people have friends without feeling “platonic attraction”, etc. Hopefully you get the gist of what I mean. We sometimes call aro people “romance-favorable” and less often talk about romantic “drive” or “desire”, but I think the concepts of drive and desire both can apply.

One Ace Activist’s Journey

This blog post was originally written with the intent of being posted to the official Ace Week website as a guest post: https://www.aceweek.org/stories but due to some complicated circumstances, never was. I was asked to write a post, did my best to cover personal history and stuff, and wrote a very long blog post (over 7,000 words in length), which you can now read below. The post was written end of October 2020, with slight edits I made on December 5, 2020 to the “2019”, “2020”, and “Looking To The Future” sections. I’m finally sharing it below.

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I baked and decorated a cake for Ace Week 2020 using all 3 of my pride flags (all 9 total colors for the 12 stripes on the ace, aro, and pan flags). Purple is the dominant color because it’s Ace Week!

Ace Week (or as it used to be called, Asexual Awareness Week) is a special anniversary time for me because it was during Asexual Awareness Week near the end of October 2013 that I first embraced the truth that I am asexual. I had been questioning my sexual orientation for years in a passive way, and much more actively for a few months. At that pivotal moment seven years ago, after feeling consumed with confusion for a long stretch of time, I finally felt certainty around my newfound identity, and felt like I finally understood such a key part of myself. I was 23 years old. (My birthday is in January, so my age typically lines up quite well to the year—I was 23 years old for the vast majority of 2013.)

In the seven years since then, I’ve been on a much richer journey than I ever would have imagined. One piece of that is a continued exploration of the nuances of what identity labels work for me in what seems to be a potentially always evolving process. Often, as I experience new situations within my interpersonal relationships, I learn more about myself. I currently identify as a pan-alterous, demi-sensual, gray-aromantic, sex-averse asexual. I think some other terms describe me well too, but I don’t claim them as orientations or as important things to label.

The history of Asexual Awareness Week is described here. I didn’t even know until this year (2020) that the celebratory week was launched in 2010.

2010 and earlier:

Reflecting on it now, I realize I was 20 years old when the initiative was beginning. That was a time in my life when I was still assuming I was straight-by-default, all while never having dated, kissed anyone, or had any romantic or sexual experience whatsoever.

For the decade prior, age 10-or-so till age 20, there were little signs of my orientation, had I known what to look for. There were many moments along my journey where I felt a disconnection from my peers and from the cultural narrative of what feelings “everyone” supposedly starts to feel during puberty. But I didn’t know what to look for. And even if asexual online communities were all starting to exist during those years, it was a small corner of the internet and that information certainly did not reach me.

As a cis person who mistook herself for straight, I was not spending time in any LGBTQ+ community spaces yet, including online ones. A possible exception was enjoying fanvideos with canonically queer ships. In 2006 when I had been 16 years old, I’d entered the vidding fandom community. By the time I was 20, I had already become entranced with a handful of stories of people questioning their sexuality, all while stuck feeling convinced I must be straight if I was not actively attracted to women. I didn’t know there were any other options.

I was also 20 years old when I first started reading fanfiction in some of my favorite fandoms, and encountering sexually explicit scenes at times, although never purposefully seeking them out. I was starting to grow more and more aware that I didn’t fit allosexual narratives, and yet I didn’t understand why or how.

With only one Asexual Awareness Week having taken place, and the target audience that first year being LGTBQ communities, it’s no surprise I was not yet aware of asexuality. As far as I’m aware, I didn’t hear the word asexual in relation to sexual orientation for the first time in my life until May 2011. If I had heard it at any earlier point in time, it left absolutely no impression on me.

2011:

Carnival of Aros – November 2020 Call for Submissions: “Commitment”

The Carnival of Aros is a month-long recurring blogging festival where bloggers on different platforms all write (or vlog, or create content) on a specific theme. Submissions are typically posted on everyone’s own blog (or whatever platform they use, such as YouTube). If you need me to host your post on my blog (as either a “guest post” submission crediting you or as an anonymous submission) please let me know. Different bloggers typically host the carnival each month. For more information about the Carnival of Aros, please look here! And don’t be afraid to host the carnival yourself sometime soon. The only rules are that a) submissions are tied back to aromanticism in some way, and b) the theme inspires your submission in some way.

Feel free to ask me below, or at my email address luvtheheaven5@gmail.com if you have any questions! Also feel free to reblog the post I just made, cross-posting this call for submissions to tumblr.

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For November 2020, the theme I chose is “Commitment”. The prompts below are meant to help give you ideas of various directions you could take your submissions, but the topic is meant to be broad so anything that the word inspires, even if it has nothing to do with any of the prompts below, is welcome!

The dictionary of “commitment” that I was imagining would be most likely to be focused on:

n. The state of being emotionally or intellectually devoted, as to a belief,
a course of action, or another person.

There are also other common definitions, such as:

n. A pledge or obligation, as to follow a certain course of action.

There are other definitions of the word, especially if you expand to the verb “commit”, such as “committing a crime”, which you are welcome to explore if you’re interested. However, the prompts I have below are mostly based on the first two definitions I just listed up above.

Prompts:

Some Bullet Points – luvtheheaven’s Aro Thoughts On Music

This is my (late) submission for the Carnival of Aros in July 2020 hosted by Zazz. The Call for Submissions was here, and the theme was “Music”.

I forgot to write a coherent post on this theme while there was still time in the month, and now it’s 3 AM in my time zone on August 1st and I’m just now starting the post. But here is something because I did really want to participate.

My bullet points idea was short one sentence things and then I wrote this mess below. Lol oh well.

• Music is something that often conveys emotions, and connecting strongly to certain emotions expressed in swelling instrumentals or passionately sung lines is a way that some aromantic people can prove to both themselves and to others just how emotional they are as human beings.
  • Conversely, not relating or caring about extremely emotional music is stigmatized and people are even dehumanized sometimes for not appreciating certain musical things, whether the person is aro or not. Music is not as universal as many would like to believe.
  • Not relating to romantic songs, not feeling those feelings, could be a good sign you’re aro
• Amatonormativity is perhaps more strongly evident in the songs on a typical radio station or playing in the shopping mall than almost anywhere else in life, although fictional stories in movies, television, entire libraries and bookstores do compete. But musical lyrics are often harder to curate your life around avoiding the specifics of when they are played in public even, and reminders of specific amatonormative ideas are not just prevalent but truly pervasive.
  • Taylor Swift just came out with a new album, and the first song on it is “The 1”, which by using the numeral digit instead of the word “One” is differentiating it in part from SO MANY other songs you could find on iTunes called “The One”. Although at least one other artist already has one using the numeral and calling it “The 1” as well. There is a monogamous romantic ideal of “The One” you’ll get a happily ever after with that people keep writing songs about – I wish these artists would name the songs over a more unique phrase or couple of words in their songs lol.
    • I feel like an imposter/fraud at being an aro when I relate to songs like this. The lyrics are about “And if my wishes came true / It would’ve been you” kind of stuff, about someone you wanted to be “The one”, and I’ve had that twice now in my life. First with my former queerplatonic partner I call Robert on this blog, then with my more recent alterous partner who I use the pseudonym Asher for. I wished each of them could have been the person I built a life with as a co-parenting partner, and it’s… not romantic to me but it’s still clearly a romantic-adjacent idea.
  • I’m frustrated by how often kissing comes up in the lyrics to songs, because for me it’s the one main “romantic” actions that people engage in, in a way that fills them with positive emotions, that I just cannot relate to because of my orientation(s) and aversions. I can twist a lot of lyrics into a platonic or alterous kind of love that works for what I can experience. But when I’ve tried kissing, it’s been upsetting and extremely uncomfortable and lessens the intimacy I feel between me and the person who was interested in kissing, and I never miss with longing what it was like to kiss someone, etc. It reminds me how different I am from the rest of the allo world more than most things do when I hear lyrics about kissing, which I do hear more often than lyrics about explicitly sexual things, because of my taste in musical artists and what they tend to focus on.
  • There often feels like a frustratingly low percentage of songs on certain topics. For instance: why do people sing about the deaths of loved ones so infrequently that many grievers find themselves re-interpreting some breakup songs as about bereavement? Yes, there are quite a lot of songs about grief, but percentage-wise it feels like so little.
    • There are not enough songs about cutting abusive parents out of your life, so for the past 12+ years I’ve tended to relate to breakup songs in the not-intended way of many lyrics applying to cutting my mom out of my life, or relating to the anger I would feel towards her as someone who treated me poorly and I’m glad it’s my past now.
    • Relatedly, most of the songs about abusive relationships I would come across, such as “No Love” by Simple Plan, “99 Biker Friends” by Bowling For Soup, and “Face Down” by The Red Jumpsuit Apparatus were all very heteronormative stories of romantic partner-abuse, even “Jar of Hearts” by Christina Perri mentions the abusive/hurtful person being someone she once “kissed” on a regular basis, but where are the songs about abuse occurring in other types of relationship dynamics?
      • I can think of about two songs that are pretty clearly about abusive parents in my mind, although the implication is not actually all that explicit – “Numb” by Linkin Park and “Just Like You” by Three Days Grace. I also love how non-specific Taylor Swift’s “Tell Me Why” song is on who the abuser is, so it could easily fit a non-romantic dynamic too.
  • It’s not just each individual song that contributes to amatonormativity. It’s them all together to form a societal “norm” of what the vast majority feels and wants and experiences. The stories told in these songs collectively explain what common threads are, and cause young aros who don’t yet know they’re aro to assume this will be their future, because they aren’t hearing songs on the radio about the experience of being aro.
  • There are also countless songs that incorporate amatonormative generalizations into the lyrics.
    • “Everybody” by Ingrid Michaelson claims: “Everybody, everybody wants to love / Everybody, everybody wants to be loved”, continuing into the bridge:
      Oh, everybody knows the love
      Everybody holds the love
      Everybody folds for love
      Everybody feels the love
      Everybody steals the love
      Everybody heals with love

      And I, before I knew I was aro (over a decade ago actually), vidded this song for Valentine’s Day because it felt super romantic to me. I still don’t feel like this is really the kind of song where you could re-interpret love intended to be non-romantic, although maybe that’s just my bias of what my video was:

      Regardless, I think even re-interpreting generously the love described as possibly as platonic, claiming that “everybody” knows this love excludes people who don’t feel things they describe as “love” for their friends or family, some aplatonic people, etc.

    • I love the song “Moonlight” by Thriving Ivory, as another example. I feel like I still relate in my way I experience longing for partnership etc when they include the lyrics:
      See we’re all looking
      For something, for someone
      For anything. For anyone
      But I’m, I’m still looking for you

      And yet they do strike me as amatonormative nonetheless, like everyone is seeking a partner when that’s not true.

    • “Gotta Be Somebody” by Nickelback starts off right away with the opening lyrics:

      This time I wonder what it feels like
      To find the one in this life
      The one we all dream of

      As if “we all” dream of “the one”, and the song continues to discuss “the one that I’ll spend forever with”, making the bold claims that:

      “nobody wants to go it on their own” throughout the choruses.

    • Obviously there are countless songs like these. These songs convinced me I would relate one day because they so confidently discuss “everybody”. I really wasn’t prepared for the fact that some people might be exceptions to these rules and not want the same things or feel the same attractions etc.
• Being both aro and ace opens my eyes to the amatonormativity in music even if I’m possibly aegoromantic (often feeling excited by romantic narratives even if I don’t feel romantic myself, enjoying “shipping” in fandoms, etc), even if I do date and partner with people, even if I relate more to romantic songs than many aros do – I’m still more aware of the amatonormativity than I probably would be if this wasn’t my identity. It affects how I listen to music so much so that I was considering years ago starting a series of blog posts on discussing the lyrics to songs from a gray-aro ace perspective, because I think about it with such a high percentage of songs I listen to.
• I think there are more songs that aren’t about romance than people realize, because even songs meant to be about friendship, or a Christian love for God, or familial, etc our amatonormative culture tends to hear as romantic, but part of that is intentionally vague lyrics about “love” in many cases because of marketability. Like it’s a self-fulfilling cycle of too many songs about romance and people being afraid non-romance songs won’t do well.
  • I’m thinking now of “Love Song” by Sara Bareilles who basically was angrily saying she was forced to write a love song for the record label inside of generic lyrics that could also be interpreted as what one might sing to a love interest.

I probably have a lot of other thoughts and feelings on music but… This is what I’ve got for you at now 4 AM on a Friday night/Saturday morning lol.

Sometimes I wish I never had stopped practicing playing a musical instrument. I’ve played guitar, and piano. I also sung in school choruses 6 separate years of my life plus an all-county middle school chorus, and sung in a couple middle school musicals. Most of this has nothing to do with my aromanticism or my asexuality, as far as I’m aware.

I edit fanvideos and have for about 14 years now. I have written already on ways it might intersect with my asexuality, but the two part post also applies to my aromanticism.

Please let me know if you have thoughts, comments, curiosities, etc after reading this post today. Thanks!

 

Going Through Thoughts After My Mom’s Death [a poem] (+ link to see slideshow)

Hi, it is now after midnight in my timezone, but it was Saturday, June 27th, 2020, which would’ve been my mom’s 58th birthday and which seemed like a good day to power through and finish writing the poem I started the first week in February.

If you’d like to see the memorial slideshow I made for my mom, I’d be happy to share it in a temporary download link.

I followed advice I found via Googling to use her own handwriting from the backs of photos and scan those too for the slideshow, to caption photos so people can tell who they’re looking at, etc.

I discuss the slideshow in my poem below, a poem I started writing while I was still in the process of creating the slideshow. So without further ado, this is a start to some of my thoughts in the aftermath of my mother’s death.

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Going Through Thoughts After My Mom’s Death

Going through shots for a memorial slideshow
Many of two toddlers and their youthful glow
Christmas morning, playtime, in others’ arms, etcetera
But I’m looking for the woman behind the camera

Her love for her children wasn’t a ruse
But laws aren’t equipped to prevent all types of abuse
In another life, she might’ve been a good mom
Might’ve been equipped with patience, joy, and calm

So evident in the pictures is her affection
Toward unexpected people, the flash in their direction
She photographed her husband long after they separated
Sisters, brothers, those to whom she was related

She held onto images mailed from an in-law or a friend
Occasionally she herself appeared, her smile not pretend
It certainly is not the part of her I remember best
I recall her as always bitter, angry, and depressed

Life Upheavals and Developments (Part 2)

This post is continued from Part 1. Please read Part 1 first.

When I broke up with Asher, I also moved out immediately. However, the first bed bug treatment was happening in a week, and I needed to work very hard on trying to make sure the apartment complex didn’t file for eviction or anything drastic because of us not being prepared. Despite over 90% of the work to be done involving Asher’s stuff, it was my problem, I had to figure out how to handle it.

Friday of that week, only two days after breaking up with Asher, I received a Corrective Action email from my supervisor for my productivity having begun to suffer over the course of the past three or so weeks at work.

I ended up bringing my dad, my brother, and two friends over to see the apartment for the sake of helping with tons of physical labor of moving stuff around, taking things out to the dumpsters (the apartment being on the 3rd floor with no elevator), taking tons of clothing and linens to laundromats, taking many storage bins to a new storage unit over multiple car trips, etc. We did most of the work over the course of 2 weekend days, Christmas Eve, and still weren’t finished and had to keep working hard on Christmas Day.

Asher and I cooperated during this time, although Asher’s new partner was extremely angry at me and wouldn’t speak to me and it was a whole… dramatic thing. Asher and I stayed in contact and tried to figure out if there was any way we could be just friends but still in each other’s lives, or to get back together as a different type of polyamorous partner with no intention to be nesting partners (to be living together), no intention any longer to raise kids together one day, etc. We navigated a lot of complicated emotions and painful conversations.

My friends and family talked me into the fact that if it was at all posssible to terminate the lease early, I should not keep paying for the entirety of the remaining 9+ months I would not be living there. I discussed with Asher, who would’ve preferred to keep living there, but in the end we were able to terminate the 1 year lease fairly easily, with a minimal monetary penalty, all things considered. We gave our 30 day notice on January 2nd. Asher began to work toward finding a place (i.e. a room) to move in alongside their partner they’d been dating since September, in large part because the two of them could much more easily afford a place together, but also because they did want to live together.

That same day, at 10:30 PM, I received a phone call from the police, where I was informed that my estranged, abusive mother had been found dead in her home. My brother and I were next of kin because she was not married, and we had to decide what to do with her body and everything relating to her estate. She was renting a home, so we needed to empty it so that the landlord could rent it to the next tenant.

Over the course of January, I needed to prepare to present on sessions relating to asexuality and aromanticism at the Creating Change conference, for the third year in row, as the slideshows and plans were not even yet formulated. Meanwhile, I needed to figure out the practicalities in the wake of my mother’s death, and I was under more scrutiny at work, and it was all a lot.

Life Upheavals and Developments (Part 1)

I moved in with my partner less than a week after my last blog post, the one called Crying Over A Fictional Kiss that I wrote for the Carnival of Aros and posted on the last day of September 2019. 

A week or so before we moved in together, Asher (my partner) met another person they had begun to date. Asher and I are polyamorous and Asher and this new partner were beginning to really hit it off.

I haven’t been able to bring myself to finish a blog post since then, but I really wanted to update all of my followers on a few things briefly even if I haven’t written a full blog post yet on any of these specific topics, some of which do really deserve their own posts. This draft for just quick updates was something I started and thought I’d post in February, before the COVID-19 pandemic really reached my part of the USA, before that was even on my radar as a topic that would consume everything. This post has nearly nothing to do with COVID-19.

Starting the very first weekend we were in our new apartment, Asher’s new partner slept over in the queen? king? (I can’t remember) bed in the master bedroom, while I’d sleep in the second bedroom in a twin bed on days said new partner was over. During the weekdays, I’d sleep in the queen bed with Asher. Asher’s partner usually stayed Sunday overnight and only left Monday during the day.

Here’s a rudimentary illustration:

In early December, possibly end of November, I started a blog post that I haven’t touched since the morning of December 10th entitled Hopes and Dreams for Life with My Partner, Snags in the Plans and Changing Course?? My Uncertain Future. The post already is a thousand words long.

Crying Over A Fictional Kiss

This is my submission for the September 2019 Carnival of Aros, hosted by aceofarrows, on the theme of “Aromanticism and Fiction”. I’ve also cross-posted this to my tumblr if you want to reblog it or anything.

Content Note: discussion of varied kissing experiences, including my kissing-aversion. Let me know if I should’ve warned for something else.

Also… I’m not sure how much of what I am focusing on is about my (gray-)aromanticism and how much is my asexuality… it’s hard to really categorize some of this into one or the other category. But I know this is meant to be aro-centric and if you stick with this post I’ll make sure it ties back to aromanticism.

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Last month, I listened to the audiobook version of Alice Isn’t Dead by Joseph Fink.

Potential spoilers are in this blog post below by the way, so you have been forewarned. I’ll try to minimize the spoilers (and I’m not spoiling the ending or anything). I’ll also mention, later in the post, details from over halfway through the book All the Wrong Places by Ann Gallagher, and a few details from The Flash (2014 TV series) season 2 and the Veronica Mars 2014 film and 2019 revival for a season 4.

I loved the audiobook of Alice Isn’t Dead. I found it really compelling. I have heard the podcast was probably a better way to first be introduced to the story, but I instead only consumed this fictional tale in its book form, because my asexual meetup group had decided to read it for its book club. It’s a story with a lesbian married couple at its heart—a romance.

Keisha is the main character. Her wife, Alice, went missing and was presumed dead before the start of the story. When Keisha first sees Alice in this story, Keisha is so angry about the depth of grief she’s been in, grief which is all Alice’s fault due to the circumstance of Alice faking her own death and then… they passionately kiss. And I kinda felt like I was triggered by the way the kiss was used in this work of fiction. I don’t know how else to describe it. I had a visceral negative reaction to it.

This is the paragraph:

Keisha could have hit her. Could have killed her, honestly. Let Alice finally actually be dead if she wanted to be dead that badly. But what she did instead was pull her toward her, and their lips met, and it could have been the day they met, could have been the day they got married, could have been any weekday evening before she disappeared. Keisha felt love, right where she had left it, and kissed Alice so hard that it hurt both of them, because what she really wanted to do was to find her way into Alice’s chest and live there among the bones and blood. She wanted them to be one person, but also to be two people; she wanted so many things, most of them contradictory. She pushed Alice away.

I just said I loved this book. I swear, I really truly did. There was so much I loved about this book, the #ownvoices portrayal of anxiety with a ton of depth (and kinda turning it into a superpower without minimizing how hard it is to live that way), the way the horror played out, the characters, and even the way the romance was written. (I’m usually a pretty big fan of romance in fiction even though I’m not alloromantic. I enjoy romantic arcs, and I even feel shipper type feelings a fair amount of the time.)

But also, listening to this audiobook in my car on a drive home late on a Sunday night, hearing about kissing, and how through kissing a character (whom I could otherwise actually emotionally- and personality-wise relate to quite a bit) was feeling a strong positive sensation of love coming rushing into her… it made me cry. I shed real, actual tears. I got distracted by my own thoughts and angst and had to pause the book and switch to playing music on the radio for a little while. I had to rewind it later because I’d missed parts of what came next. I was just. Not in the right headspace for this romantic kissing situation. Not at all.

The timing was partially to blame. I heard this moment in the book while I was driving home from a day spent with the person I’m dating, Asher. (Asher is the pseudonym I use on this blog for my alterous partner.) We had, just that evening, explored if maybe my kissing-averse self might be able to handle closed-mouth chaste kissing on the mouth, but first I had gotten confused and thought I was agreeing to trying open-mouthed kissing for the first time in nearly 6 years. I had indeed agreed on a previous night that I’d try that too, but when we’d get to trying a number of things had still been unclear. But I knew making out would be a thing we tried at least once… eventually.