Could I possibly be aromantic? Someone define me please?

Sometimes I feel like I'm fighting an uphill battle against the influx of these unrecognized labels for which little to no research or credible evidence of their existence is available.

We can define absolutely anything and stick a label on it and claim that it exists... But that doesn't mean that it actually does, at least, not if the label is going to be of any actual use in helping us to better understand ourselves.

With regard to this specific issue, love is a very complex emotion, condition, or whatever you want to call it. There are specific emotional, psychological and biochemical events that happen when you fall in love, the most well documented of which is the expression of oxytocin, sometimes referred to as 'the love hormone'. It is largely responsible for many of the feelings we experience when wen feel love, or a strong crush.

But there are other factors as well: how much access to our emotions we have, particularly fear and grief, play heavily into our ability to experience love, joy, and the factors that go along with that. The research is clear that we can only love someone as much as we are willing to be hurt (feel grief and fear.) When we numb vulnerability, we also numb the ability to experience love.

And my very strong suspicion (supported to some extent by research on asexuality that unwittingly provides some support for the idea) is that most people who have not experienced strong sensations from a crush or love of another are, in fact, simply numbing vulnerability. They aren't "aromantic", at least, not any more than I am "anappetite" (having no appetite) when I have a bad case of the flu. They simply have something going on, emotionally and/or psychologically, that limits their ability to connect deeply and feel love. And that 'something' certainly isn't hard wired, unchangeable, or core to who they are; it is, at least in most cases, most likely simply a byproduct of numbing vulnerability, which is something we can certainly change.

Completely aside from that, I also know plenty of people who simply never really felt much of anything until they happened to meet The Right Person, and all of the sudden, they felt things they'd never felt before. Thousands of romantic novels, songs, poetry, and other expression have been written that describe such situations. So certainly those people aren't 'aromantic' either.

As such, slapping a label on what you are experiencing and saying "this is who I am" or simply reducing all of that down and saying "oh, you're aromantic" is at best ill advised, and at worst, a gross mischaracterization of what's actually going on.

If any of the above resonates for you, then there are lots of ways you can work on connecting to vulnerability more.

All of the above said: I am pretty confident that there is a tiny portion of the population for whom it is simply not possible, under any circumstances, to feel romantic connection, and would therefore properly be described as 'aromantic'. But those numbers are infinitesimally small, while the numbers of people who fit into the above described categories are much greater. As such, I do not want to devalue anyone who wants to identify with they 'aromantic' label. Hell, you can identify as a lobster for all I care if it serves your needs.

But I do think we need to be really careful when we start throwing around as factual terms and labels for which there is scant or nonexistent evidence, and that, to the extent they exist at all, legitimately describe only a very tiny portion of the population. As the saying goes, when you hear hoof beats, think horses, not zebras.