So I've been really confused lately about my romantic orientation. I've never been in a relationship and I don't have the desire to have a partner like a lot of my friends.. I've only ever had one crush, and I knew he was gay so that was strange. I only ever went on one date and the whole time I had this crazy urge to leave, the guy was nice and a friend but it was this feeling in my chest telling me I had to leave, I even pretended to have a family emergency to leave early. And then I joined *******, and got talking to this guy for a few weeks, he was really nice but as soon as he mentioned skype/texting I freaked and stopped replying.. I've read up in aromantic but I'm just unsure whether it's just me being weird and afraid of commitment. My friend is convinced I'm afraid of commitment.. I'd like to know for sure that I'm aromantic I actually kind of like labels, it helps me sort myself out I guess (or have a response for nosy family members!) I know in the end it's up to me and how I feel but as anyone felt the same way as me?
Hi and welcome to EC. What I'm offering up here is my opinion, though based on current thinking by the majority of the psychology/sexology profession. Hopefully you'll find it helpful. The separation between romantic and sexual orientations, and the gross overuse/misuse of the aromantic and asexual labels is often really problematic for a variety of reasons. For one, there's little to no evidence or research to support a demonstrable difference between romantic and sexual orientations. For another, there's almost no evidence to support the idea of the "aromantic" label; it is largely a social construct created by a small group of people with little or no scientific or psychological basis. At the same time... what you are feeling is definitely what you are feeling. ANd what you are feeling is actually pretty common. It just -- near as we know from the (credible) work of those in the field -- is a common experience that many people have that, rather than being some hardwired and unchangeable thing, is much more correlated with psychological aspects. The fact your friend thinks you may have difficulties with commitment might be an important sign here: often our friends know us better than we know ourselves. Many, many people have difficulty with emotional closeness/intimacy, and that relates directly to experiences we had growing up, our own insecurities, fear of losing the relationship, fear of not being good enough for the other person, and a million other things. None of those have anything to do with a hardwired lack of ability to connect romantically; they are conditioned by experiences we've had. And, in fact, I'd say that many, many people have difficulties with emotional intimacy to a greater or lesser degree; it isn't even remotely uncommon. So I personally see that as a good thing: Instead of being stuck with something that is hardwired and unchangable, we find out something about ourselves that we can identify and work on resolving. I hope this is helpful to you. Feel free to talk more about it, as talking about the issue is one of the best ways to start working past it.
Aromantics feel no romantic attraction. So It's possible you could be and possible you could just be turned off by relationships at the moment.
Thanks for the advice! I'm hoping to meet the right person someday, but I'm really not sure whether I'm aromantic or just have never met someone I could be romantically attracted to. :L guess I'll know for sure if I never fall in love.. but I think I'm mainly scared of judgement from others if I never have a relationship, ugh societal norms suck and for the intimacy issues, its probably a mix of very low self-confidence and my opinion on lifetime monogamy (which was heavily influenced by my parents messy messy divorce). relationship wise I'm a mess!
It sounds like you could be aromantic to me. Maybe you could head over to AVEN ask there..? Since it's a site and forum mainly about asexuality and aromanticism it might be of more help to you c:
