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:

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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“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.

Me & wanting a future as a parent, an update

This post was written for the April 2017 Carnival of Aces, which is themed around Asexuality, Aromanticism and Parenthood. The call for submissions was here – and please check out the round up post containing all of the submitted entries! http://abnormaldiversity.blogspot.com/2017/05/aromanticism-asexuality-and-parenthood.html

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Over on Asexual Activities, back in January (2017, so only a few months ago), 34 different people (including me) answered the theme on Having Children, plus one person replied to another person’s thought that being single meant they couldn’t adopt/foster and encouraged them to consider that that may not be true where they live. About 11 to 16 of the responses seemed to be “I don’t want children”, depending on how you count the “maybe one day” sentiments, meaning it actually is approximately 50/50. See all the different themes here: http://www.asexualactivities.com/tags, and click through to find the answers on asexual people’s perspectives on kids.  Which submission is mine should be pretty obvious if you read my blog regularly, or even if you just read to the end of this blog post.

About a year ago, in May 2016, aceadmiral started a conversation on tumblr also related to aces and having children, and there are two (– I think only two? Not 100% sure) different branches of the reblog chain/thread that are worth reading. If you’re interested in the topic of this Carnival, I highly recommend you click the “Read More” links, read the other linked things within the responses, there is so much that is interesting over there.

1. https://aceadmiral.tumblr.com/post/144126451728/christian-ace-nerd-aceadmiral
2. https://aceadmiral.tumblr.com/post/144128006058/tristifere-aceadmiral-luvtheheaven (yes I myself talked quite a bit in this one)

I have so many thoughts on this topic, honestly, but it’s hard for me to currently talk about. Nothing has really changed about what I desire since a-year-and-a-half ago when I wrote on Being an Aro Ace and Desiring (Foster and/or Adoptive) Parenthood, but also so much has changed since then in my life and in how feasible this desire seems!

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?

Risk & Courage, Disappointment & Resilience, Everything Changing & Me Catching Up (Part 1 of 3)

This is a post written for the June 2016 Carnival of Aces, which was themed around “Resiliency”.  

I split this post up into 3 parts to make for better ease of reading, and also because I wrote them pretty far apart lol. I wrote in separate chunks. Part 2 is here, and part 3 here.

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This long, 3-part post itself involves me taking some pretty big risks, putting myself out there in multiple ways I haven’t yet on this blog.

But a huge theme of this post will be risks I’ve taken especially in the past year or so, and the risks I continue to take, how my life has in the past year been much more categorized than in years prior by… purposefully making myself vulnerable, because hopefully, in the end, the rewards would be worth the risks I was taking. Because, as I remember Coyote spelling out in a blog post back in April,

When you take an emotional risk and aren’t punished for it — when your trust is validated, instead of your vulnerability exploited — that can make for a very rewarding experience.

That resonated SO powerfully with me.

 And if you’ve ever had a vulnerable experience that ended positively, I think it’s fairly easy to understand.  Sometimes you have to take a risk in order to see your judgement validated.

I have taken more risks recently. And a lot of them have to do with my asexuality in  some way or another. It felt like the only alternative options were to be almost completely closed off from true friendship with new people. It has felt like it would be so positive to take the risk that to not take it would leave me festering in negative feelings like regret, and like no one understands me, and…

Well first, a note: I haven’t entered a post in the Carnival of Aces since March, meaning I skipped two months worth of the carnival. I also haven’t blogged about asexuality or related issues at ALL since that post of mine in March. XD I have left lengthy comments on other people’s posts since then, but… my own blog here? It’s been quiet over in this neck of the virtual woods.

I almost entered a blog post in the carnival for April though; the beginning of my post today is going to be what was saved in my drafts from my unfinished entry for that, because while it would fit April’s theme, it also fits June’s theme of Resiliency.

My Queerplatonic Relationship: Ask us anything!

So coming up in about a week will be the four month “anniversary” (4th monthiversary) of me and Robert* deciding to officially become queerplatonic partners!

I asked him if he’d be interested in doing a thing for my blog where we interview each other and post some answers for my readers. He said he would be up for that!

And then I suggested that maybe my followers would have some questions for both of us (or in a few cases, for one or the other person). Robert thought that was a good idea, asking you guys to help us.

That means you guys, my readers, coming up with questions that the two of us in this relationship will answer (unless for whatever reason we decide we don’t want to answer – no promises on answering every question we get.).

You may pose questions just for him, especially if it’s a question where you already know how I’d answer because of my previous blogging, you can ask a question just for me, or you can ask a question that both of us will try to answer.

For basic information, I identify as both wtfromantic & aromantic, and I am asexual. I’m 26 years old, cis-female.

Robert is aromantic and gray-asexual, 27-years-old, and cis-male.

I look forward to seeing what questions you might pose for us to potentially answer in the comments below!

Alternatively, if you wish to ask a question more anonymously than in the comments, feel free to email me the question(s) at pemk7@aol.com and I will keep your identity private, no one besides you and me has to know you asked.

 

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* Robert is not his actual name. He chose this name, when I asked him to provide an alias for my blog. 😉