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:

luvtheheaven’s Gray-Aro Narrative

shades-of-grayro on tumblr asked for submissions of experiences/narratives of what it’s like for individual people to be grayromantic.

I decided to write up a long post that will also serve as my belated submission to the Carnival of Aros this past month of August 2019, which had a theme of “Relationships” and is being hosted by assignedgothatbirth on The Aro Anarchist. The call for submissions was here. (This post of mine has been cross-posted to my tumblr as well.)

I think it fits this carnival because I cover what it’s been like dating-while-aro throughout this post, cover my relationship to a term like queerplatonic, etc. I cover a lot throughout this post, a fair amount of which has to do with various relationships? Hopefully you all think it fits enough. I didn’t have time to write my own separate blog post for the carnival this month even though I wanted to. My writing inspiration just took me down this path.

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I identify as gray-aro and gray-panromantic, alongside my sex-averse asexual identity, and prefer the term “gray-aro” over “grayro”, probably because I appreciate how it emphasizes how close to aromantic I am.

Lately I’ve been wondering if I’m only pan-alterous and pan-demi-sensual, rather than gray-panromantic. That would mean, in my case, that I’m capable of alterous attraction to people of any gender, and capable of developing a desire to touch and hug people of any gender—but in this case of “sensual attraction” it only develops after a strong emotional connection with the person. I don’t think I really have any attraction that’s actually romantic at all, ever. Unless my alterous attraction is partially romantic, which is certainly a way you can define alterous. I find it extremely complicated/confusing to define and it’s why I liked the “WTFromantic” labels for years and relate strongly to other similar labels like quoiromantic and platoniromantic. It just took me a long time to figure that out, to learn alterous terminology, etc. Even if I decide romantic attraction isn’t something I feel, my (a)romantic orientation is still gray because of reasons other than romantic attraction. The gray in gray-aro still needs to be there because of who I date and who I feel other types of attraction toward (types of attraction that are often a part of romantic attraction in other people’s experiences of those attractions).

And for more context, I’m a white 29-year-old cis woman in the USA, who grew up in a relatively conservative town. I assumed I was straight until I was well into age 23, then for a few more months thought I was heteroromantic asexual. I was 24 when I started to realize I wasn’t heteroromantic and started to consider that I might be pan or might indeed be aro.

During times when I can’t use too many words to describe my identity (for fear people will judge me for listing too many terms, for fear people won’t take the time to try to understand all of them, or just because certain website bios have very limited space available), I emphasize being aro-spec over being pan anything. Sometimes I phrase it “gray-aro” and other times I like the even more vague “aro-spec” (where I’m trying to express that I’m somewhere on the aromantic spectrum but you’ll have to ask me to find out where exactly).

I can’t really tell sometimes which of my experiences are related to being sex-averse asexual vs which are my gray-aromanticism, and plenty of things could also be a result of something else entirely and neither of the two.

But some of my experiences are:

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.)

My Body & My Asexuality

In March 2018 I hosted the Carnival of Aces here on my blog, on the topic of “Physical Health and/or Our Bodies”. This was the Call for Submissions: https://luvtheheaven.wordpress.com/2018/03/01/physical-health-and-or-our-bodies-the-march-2018-carnival-of-aces-call-for-submissions/

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I have a lot of thoughts on physical health and, often unrelated, on my body that don’t feel very directly connected to asexuality. I wasn’t sure if I was going to write a post for this carnival theme, even though I myself was hosting this month.

But let me try, a day late, to throw something out there nonetheless.

1) Well a big thing I’m starting to feel a little less alone with is that I have no libido/sex-drive/ability to feel arousal and orgasm, which is a topic people don’t talk about very often in asexual communities since we focus on the psychological experiences and because masturbation etc is a fairly taboo/too “persona/private” topic in many spaces. And because when does the lack of it even “come up” naturally in conversation?

I think the asexual community has more of us who have no sex drive than many of us realize, and I’m constantly desperate to not be alone in whatever I’m experiencing, including that, so I’m glad I’m in a community of people where my experience is some degree acknowledged. I especially appreciate the context of for some of us being a lifelong thing, not a lost sex drive, and that even if it was lost due to side effects of medications or due to other illness, it’s not a “problem to be solved” but rather a plus side for at least a handful of ace folks.

Me & Squishes (a Lack of Experiencing Crushes)

The question of the week this week, Question of the Week: March 20th, 2018, over on The Asexual Agenda, is:

How do you tell the difference between a friend and a crush?

I once saw a post on facebook saying ‘that tingly feeling you get when you like someone is common sense leaving your body’.   I really like this definition because the only way I can really tell that I have a crush on someone is that I notice myself being kinda stupid around them.  Even then though, I don’t really think I treat crushes much differently to how I treat new friends. Either way, what I want is to get to hang out and talk and do fun things with them, so it all ends the same.

Can you describe what it feels like to have a crush?  Or a squish or other types of attraction? Are these things easy for you to differentiate?  How do you decide what to do about your shiny new feelings?

I have a whole blog post worth of an answer. Please check out the other comments there for other people’s answers! There are plenty of good ones.

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My Mental Health Journey & My Asexuality Journey

This is my submission for the February 2018 Carnival of Aces themed around mental health, and per usual, all of us participating linking our blog post submissions in some way back to both asexuality & the theme. The call for submissions was here. The round-up of all submissions is now here: https://hurricanesophia.com/2018/03/01/carnival-of-aces-mental-health-wrap-up/

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When I first posted this blog post it had been written entirely on my phone within the final 2 days of February, most of it within one sitting, and it was extra ramble-y and a few of the parts didn’t tie back to asexuality as much as I wanted. So I added a bit more on March 1st in the middle of the day/edited on a computer and hopefully the post is slightly improved, even if the rambling and random nature can’t be entirely fixed as this is kinda stuck as my blogging style.

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I’ve been through a bunch of traumatic experiences related to my abusive mother. I’m 28-years-old now—my birthday was last month—which means I’m well into adulthood. That’s hard for he to believe sometimes, as it took me a while to start doing a lot of adult type things, such as to be gainfully employed, and part of what delayed me might’ve been my process of recovering from my childhood—my experiences with my mother largely were contained to my childhood or teenage adulthood years (18/19).

There were more of these experiences than I can easily count, more than I’ve ever really blogged about, including the two times most recently:

1) being in a deposition for a civil case between her and her former fiancé, as a character witness against her/in her fiancé’s defense at the end of 2014 (when I was 24) which shook me much more than I anticipated, and

2) at the end of 2016 (when I was 26) the experience of seeing her again at my grandmother’s funeral and witnessing how much this woman I’ve been successfully avoiding entirely (other than her voicemails) just hasn’t changed at all, seeing her siblings call the cops to have her removed from the funeral home.

Then, on the other side of my family and while she remained completely unaware of this part of my life—because my brother, father, and I successfully went No Contact with her years prior—I witnessed my uncle die by suicide, in November 2013. (I was 23, and this occurred about 1 month after I settled for sure on the asexual label for myself.)

4 years later, almost exactly 4 years from the date in fact, a person I considered a friend and a peer perpetrated a murder-suicide in November 2017. Yesterday was the 3 month mark since this transpired.

These events all have almost no overlap with asexuality, but these traumatic things all certainly did affect my mental health. (Also I’ll note that while I experienced abuse, none of it was sexual abuse, nor abuse in the context of a sexual relationship of any kind.)

At the same time, despite the lack of overlap, my asexuality affects all my interpersonal relationships, and always has (even before I had the word asexual to categorize myself with!). It affects who I am and the context I’m in when I repeatedly find myself needing to process traumatic things.

(For instance, those 2 most recent experiences with my mom happened after the summer of 2014—which was the moment in time at which I slowly started making friends via the in-person asexual meetup group in my city. I had grown extremely isolated over my 4 years at college and 2 years post graduation, and my only friends were via online friendships… until meetup.com kinda saved me from that life. I spoke to at least one ace friend about the deposition at the time, and I talked to a number of ace friends about that horrible experience with my mom at my grandmother’s funeral.)

“The Romance of Friendship” in ScreenPrism’s analysis of the TV series “Friends”

This isn’t a real blog post or anything. I just thought people who are interested in the concepts of:

• queerplatonic relationships
• what is romantic vs. platonic
• What does it mean to value friendships really highly even as an adult?

Etc…

I felt like you guys might, um, need to see this analysis of the TV series Friends, because wow it presents quite an interesting argument:

 

Also note I included only Chandler&Joey of the Friends core group as a possible queerplatonic type bond when I hosted my own fanvideo collaboration about queerplatonic-type-bonds on TV shows I know…

(Actually I hosted two fanvideo collaborations about queerplatonic bonds, but this is the collab containing Chandler/Joey.)

(I didn’t vid Chandler/Joey, my friend who vidded them though did capture multiple moments referenced in ScreenPrisim’s later-published analysis video, above.)

 

Anyway… I just felt like basically “reblogging” someone else’s (or, as I’m pretty sure it’s a team working with ScreenPrism, multiple someone elses’) awesome analysis work and a video I really appreciated. So check it out.

Kissing Aversion, but Demi-Sensual About Other Touch

This is my entry for the May 2017 Carnival of Aces, which I hosted and chose to theme around “Kissing, Hand Holding, Bed Sharing, etc!”. The round-up of all 12 submissions that month can be found here. I’m sorry this post is so long. I’m sort of overflowing with thoughts. Also this was written in one sitting late at night so please feel free to point out errors. This was cross-posted to my tumblr as well.

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I don’t feel like I need touch in my life much at all, most of the time.

That being said, I have the ability to really like it. In a kinda demi-sensual kind of way, if that’s a thing. (I’m 100% asexual, no grayness there, no sexual attraction, but if I have a lot of trust-feelings for you, like a LOT of positive feelings about our relationship, then there is a pretty good chance I’ll like touch.)

I am comfortable but fairly neutral with touch when it comes to me and small children. (They can still cross boundaries that make me uncomfortable, such as making me take off my glasses and then I feel overly vulnerable, which kind of happened to me a week and a half ago with a 3 year old in my extended family lol.) I don’t crave touch from small children – I crave other types of attention from children, I want to make them happy, I love the emotional reaction they can have to me at times, but I’m not overly touchy feely unless they initiate it. I am much more comfortable holding babies than holding any animal though.

With people who are peers though, fellow young adults, or from older family members… I can have positive associations with touch!

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?