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.

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:

Learning to See Experiences Related to Asexuality as Potentially “Poetic”

This is my submission for the October 2018 Carnival of Aces, which had the theme “Poetry”.

I apologize for any autocorrect typos, I wrote this whole thing on my phone. Let me know kindly and I can fix them.

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Two years ago, in September 2016, I wrote a prose poem about my asexual experience without really realizing I was writing poetry again. (“Again”, because I hadn’t written any poetry in 4.5 years, since my Creative Writing class my final semester of college ended.) September 2016 was during that blip in time when Imzy existed and I was in the 100 words community, challenged to write exactly 100 words, no more and no less, on a different prompt each week.

The prompt that time was “Clocks” and somehow I ended up writing:

The concept was always framed with a presupposition; there would of course come a point in time when I’d be ready. When that time came, I needed to be armed with knowledge. I must brace for the emotional consequences. Itwas an inevitability.

So I learned. For over a decade of my life, I prepared. I absorbed more information than was really necessary. I planned ahead.

But society was wrong. Maybe all along I’d been a broken clock. I’d felt stuck. I tried to push myself forward.

As it turns out, though, I am the flower doomed to never bloom.

I am still not entirely sure if it counts as a poem. But writing about an asexual experience with metaphors and without ever once using the word asexual seemed poetic somehow to me.

It was a start of something.

A key concept from those hundred words made it into a stanza of my new poem, No “Just” About It that I wrote two years later in September 2018 — just last month (as of the time of me writing this blog post) — and which was published in The Asexual (edit/update: AZE Journal now), a literary journal. My second piece of writing to be published in one of the issues of this journal but my first poem.

https://azejournal.com/article/2018/9/28/no-just-about-it

This poem is kinda… Political. It’s also fun. We’re often our own harshest critics but to me it seems apparent that it’s not very impressive from an artistic standpoint. But I’m glad I decided to write it, and I didn’t let the genre of poetry intimidate me away from something relatively simple like this.

If The Asexual didn’t exist as a platform I never would’ve thought to write poetry with asexual themes so I’m very grateful to Michael Paramo and everyone there who keeps it running.

From 2004 through 2008 when I was ages 14 through 18 and in high school, all four years I participated as part of the literary magazine club after school. We accepted fiction but mainly received poetry and a little bit of art. Once a week after school our club would read aloud as a group, discuss the merits of, and also respectfully criticize each submission. They would be typed up to anonymize each submission ahead of the discussion, no author listed and no handwriting to recognize. We were always keeping in mind the possibility that the author could be one of us in the room so we had to be careful not to be unkind in our criticism. (I don’t think the visual art pieces needed to be discussed; I think maybe they automatically got in.)

Tumblr Aro Asks meme, my answers (part 4 of 4)

As I said here in part 1, and also part 2 and part 3, I’m gonna answer all of these, in a 4 part series of answers. Cross-posted to tumblr.

This is part 4 of 4.

Onto the final chunk of questions… some of these are much more fun than the previous parts.

13. do you headcanon any characters as arospec?

Tumblr Aro Asks meme, my answers (part 3 of 4)

As I said here in part 1, and also part 2, I’m gonna answer all of these, in a 4 part series of answers. Cross-posted to tumblr.

This is part 3 of 4.

(And as it turns out… I didn’t just “kind of” fail to finish these in time for Aro Spec Awareness Week… lmao. I completely totally am insanely late finishing up. However I want to post the final 2 parts before I post my March Carnival of Aces post, so I’m kicking this into high gear really quickly.)

As I explained before, I’m answering many of these with long paragraph answers, rather than just 1 word, because I feel like sometimes long answers are necessary, and I have a lot to say.

That being said, we’re finally at the parts where I plan to give some… shorter answers.

4. what’s your stance on romantic attraction?

Tumblr Aro Asks meme, my answers (part 1 of 4)

Happy Aromantic Spectrum Awareness Week, everybody! I know the week started on Sunday and it’s already almost Saturday… XD

Before this week over, I’m gonna answer all of these, in a 4 part series of answers. Cross-posted to tumblr.

This is part 1 of 4. Part 2 is here.

I’m gonna answer these with long paragraph answers, rather than just 1 word, because I feel like long answers are necessary? XD

1. where are you on the aromantic spectrum?

Don’t know! Lol I’m gray aro. I’m wtfromantic and quoiromantic (I see these words as synonyms.) I’m bi/pan in terms of who I’d consider as a queerplatonic partner/who I’d “date”. Meaning gender isn’t a factor there for me. I think it’s related to the fact that I’m actually completely aro in many ways. Similarly I don’t identify as polyamorous however I do feel quite a lot of affinity for “non-monogamy” or rather… I’m not monogamous exactly either.  I usually feel completely devoid of any form of attraction to people: sexual, aesthetic, sensual, romantic… And I think it’s all a part of me being a 100% Asexual person with no grayness there at all. I think the way sexual orientation and romantic orientation are tied together for most people, being heterosexual also means heteroromantic and separating the two is tricky for your average straight person…  I am in some ways that kind of aroace. However I am way more “romantic”, for lack of a better word, than a lot of aros. I am a shipper in fandom. I did try dating prior to understanding my orientation and…

2. do you have a qpp/qpps?

…well, also, yes I have an amazing queerplatonic partner. We’re basically dating, a romantic relationship minus the romantic feelings. We’re both aro ace (however we do experience these orientations in different ways – My queerplatonic partner and I were talking this week about this stuff, aromantic awareness week brought some of it up, and he mentioned “I’d say I feel [asthetic and sexual] attraction, but not much desire to take that anywhere”).

Our relationship feels like “best friends as adults”, in a way most adults our age (I’m 27, he’s 28) don’t have. Our relationship feels like a practical decision to be committed to each other, to plan for our futures jointly but to do so mainly because we already have similar plans for our futures and if those plans were to change we would revert back to a typical friendship, albeit possibly a better friendship than a lot of people are lucky enough to have but I’d consider him equal to a few other very close friends I have, if not for our current commitment to each other to be queerplatonic partners. Also because we are together we are going to like, prioritize each other in certain situations, meet each other’s extended families, be automatic “plus one” options if going to an event kind of a thing. So again basically we look like a romantic relationship and act like one in big ways but we don’t feel like one on the inside, we don’t kiss (neither of us has ever liked kissing) or hold hands or feel butterflies. We don’t feel feelings that are different than deep, companionate love.

My qpp told me in a message this week: “I like what we have, and I don’t really have any expectations or visions of what our relationship is supposed to be Like ‘oh we need to be more romantic’ or something” and I think that sums us up well.

Being an Aro Ace and Desiring (Foster and/or Adoptive) Parenthood

This is a late entry for the October 2015 Carnival of Aces on Aromanticsm and the Aromantic Spectrum, which I myself was hosting here on this blog. Sorry for the delay. The full round up will be posted within the hour!

First things first: I must update you loyal readers of my blog. Some of you may remember I identified as wtfromantic. That still accurately describes my feelings toward romantic and platonic “feelings” and “attractions”, even the whole relationships aspect of it… It still describes my place on the aro spectrum pretty accurately, I think.  But I’ve slowly started to ease into identifying as aromantic lately. For a lot of reasons. I feel like the more I think about it, the more it’s just easier to embrace being aro ace (meaning “aromantic asexual”) — that my life is playing out that way. I’m aromantic in a practical sense, in the way I live my life, in the way romantic… relationships, feelings, anything — just aren’t a factor anymore. I consider myself both wtfromantic and aromantic, while also being asexual. It felt freeing when I realized I could claim both aromantic & wtfromantic at once, that I didn’t have to choose.

I could write a whole blog post on the subject, but today I want to address another topic. I want to talk about being an aro ace, yet desiring to become a parent.

Allow me to backtrack.

Like many kids raised by a single mother who was abusive, I often felt drawn toward fictional stories about orphans. About children struggling, or even children whose parents abandoned them and made them practical orphans despite their parents being alive. For me and my younger brother, growing up was living in a constant state of fear that Mom would “get mad”. It meant us constantly walking on metaphorical eggshells and my dad commenting that the extreme ease with which something might startle me is because living with my mother made me hypervigilant. I was always hoping that maybe if I was prepared enough, careful enough, etc, I could prevent her rage. I was always hoping that maybe I wouldn’t have to spend hours crying, so many tears running down my face I would wonder if this might be why I’d get dehydration headaches sometimes.

I fantasized about her disappearing, about a life where she didn’t exist, and I didn’t care if it was death or what because it was all so abstract and just focused on me, and my brother, and not needing to live in this environment anymore.

I also fantasized about being a mother one day.

October 2015 Carnival of Aces Call for Submissions — Aromanticsm & the Aromantic Spectrum

The “Carnival of Aces” is a blogging carnival where each month people are invited to write on a specific topic that is related to asexuality/the ace spectrum in some way.

(Also, vloggers are invited to speak on the topic in videos, artists/poets invited to be inspired by the topic, etc — whatever format you wish to participate with, please, use that format.)

Check out the masterpost of all of the other amazing topics previous carnivals have been on: https://asexualagenda.wordpress.com/a-carnival-of-aces-masterpost/

September’s was on “Living Asexuality” and was hosted by Jo over at A Life Unexamined.

For this current month, October, I am hosting, and I decided to make the topic Aromanticism & the Aromantic Spectrum. Honestly, I’m surprised this has never been a topic in the carnival before.

The topic is meant to be broad.

Some ideas on what people might write about:

• What led you to identify as aromantic or with an identity on the aro-spectrum?
• What did you first think when you heard about romantic orientations and that an aromantic orientation was an option?
• What are your thoughts on the conflation — or perhaps, the separation — of aromanticsm and asexuality?
• What does it mean to be aromantic, or aro-spectrum, in a practical sense in your current life?
• How does being aromantic or on the aromantic spectrum influence your plans for your personal future?
• How do you feel society treats romance, and how do aromantic people fit in?
• What does it mean to “participate in romantically coded things” while being aromantic?
• What counts as romantic/non-romantic to you, personally?
• What does it mean for aromanticsm to be most often talked about in asexual communities?
• How is aromanticsm currently portrayed in fiction? In non-fiction news and documentary/biography media?
• In an ideal future, how would you hope aromanticsm would be portrayed in either fiction or non-fiction?

Please consider these as some jumping off points. You may blog about anything that is related to the topic though. Surprise us!

Let me know in the comments if you have any questions or concerns.

To submit your entry, either leave a comment below or send an email to me at pemk7@aol.com . If you would like to post anonymously, I can copy and paste text from an email into a Guest post on this blog of mine, just let me know that this is your wish.

Thanks!