It is a strange thing living as a demisexual and aromantic individual in our culture. I think it is easier for people to grasp the understanding of the asexual spectrum as there is something more tangible there, an easily defined action (or group of actions) that is not desired by an individual. Don’t get me wrong, many people still think it is made up. As a demisexual I have been told on many occasions that I am wrong about how I feel because there has to be a physical attraction. But at least those of us on the asexual spectrum can find the ‘thing we lack’ a lot easier as it’s right there, obvious.

Being aromatic is a bit of a different story and where I would like to focus my thoughts. For me it has always been harder to find and define what romantic love or romantic feelings are. I know I feel love, I know I love deeply, I know the pain of my loved one causes me pain and their joy causes me joy. There are many people in my life I truly love, such as my friends and family. There are a few people in my life I love more deeply. I love my other. Its a weird, seemingly ever evolving love, but it is genuine and deep, I know it’s real and I know it’s mutual. I love my husband. He is my best friend and I can’t really imagine life without him around in some capacity, but I have always felt he loves me more that I love him, that some how his love was more focused than I was able to love and therefore he could give me more than I had the ability to offer. Like the difference between a macro and a micro lens for a camera, I just couldn’t narrow my focus quite that small. I view my love style as one that is very broad, covering more people which is a good thing, I have always been happy about my ability to love easily and to love strangers, but my love never reaches the intensity that my husband’s love for me seems to. Sometimes it is hard to reconcile the concern that my love has quantity but lacks in quality.

Recently life got overwhelming for me and I spent a couple of weeks in a very deep depression. I haven’t had depression to that extent in about 2 or 3 years and it was a wake up call that I need to start looking after myself better. But it also lead me to another activity that I have not done in years. I read the Twilight series (please don’t judge, we all have our vices). For many reasons, back when my depression first became suicidal about 12 years ago, the series got me through and now it is the thing I turn to when my depression it too much and I need to escape life for a bit and wait for it to subside.

This time I had a unique experience though, being in a new place in life led me to pick up on different themes in the story. I have recently been trying to define romantic love for a workshop I want to do and have been struggling. It is what initially lead me to question if I am aromatic in the first place. (As a side note, when I discussed the possibility that I might be aromantic to my husband he replied, most unsurprised, ‘That makes sense, you have never been into that kind of thing’. I thought it was a revelation, but to him it was old news. We are always the last to see ourselves…) Reading the Twilight series this time around kind of solidified how I feel about love, and romantic love specifically.

There is one part in the 3^rd book where Jacob explains to Bella how they are supposed to be together. They love each other deeply, need each other in their lives, feel pain when the other hurts and feel the need to protect each other. Jacob describes how if the world were as it should be, if they had never run into the supernatural things in life, they would have been together and been happy. Bella, who sees Jacob as her best friend, acknowledges this love and need for him and agrees that would be the case. That was my epiphany moment, the moment I realized why love songs and romance movies always make me uncomfortable and upset. I always feel they were describing feelings that aren’t real, that the feelings they describe weren’t part of real life but rather some idealistic concept, something people are to strive for but something that is not attainable. To me that type of romantic love is part of the supernatural world, belonging right next to other fantasies like dragons and unicorns. I have always been able to tolerate romance better when it came packaged with fantasy.

But maybe for others it is actually part of their world. Maybe people do feel love like that. Maybe there are people that live in a world that I subjectively associate with fantasy and fiction. Maybe for them it is their subjective reality, the same as Bella’s love for Edward would be fiction in one world but is real in another, in the world she lives in.

The whole concept has made it easier for me to define what romantic love is. To see it in others and understand how they may be feeling and know it is real for them. It has helped me to see that the way I love is not less, does no lack quality, but is just part of a different world. My broad, macro lens love has a place and is valuable because it is the love of my world and I offer it as deeply as my husband offers his more focused, micro lens love. It also helps me understand how to move through the world easier, seeing others striving for or expressing romantic love, but not judging them for attempting to attain what is, to me, unattainable. Maybe I should have been able to understand this a lot sooner, but we are all slaves to our own views of the world, stuck in our own minds, unable to really know how others experience or view their world until we read or hear the right thing at the right time that gives us a bit of perspective and give us a glimpse of what their world may look like.

While I have written fairly exclusively about romantic love in this article, the concept I have described can be used to explain sexual attraction as well. It can be used to understand both aromantic and asexual people. I write of this epiphany in hopes that maybe I can help people who are aromantic or asexual and are as confused about these concepts as I have been, but I also hope to bring understanding to those who live in a world where romantic love and sexual attraction exists. I hope to maybe shed some light on how the culture we live in, which places romantic love and sexual attraction as highly important and valuable, might be alienating to some. I am not looking to change the world in a way to make it more comfortable for myself or others like me, I don’t think the importance placed on romantic love or sexual attraction is going anywhere any time soon. What I hope to achieve is an understanding. To offer a world view that might explain why a person might not enjoy romantic comedies, get frustrated when everyone has to fall in love and kiss at the end of a movie, might be uncomfortable during sex scenes, might want to (or have to) get to know another person before engaging in a romantic or sexual relationship, or might not even want that kind of relationship. I am hoping that my new understanding can be taken and reversed to allow people who are romantic or sexual to get their own glimpse about how the world looks to someone who is less typical in these areas.

For some of us, our worlds do not involve romance or sex, but it does not mean we don’t love deeply, or that we are not as committed to those we love. We do have the capacity to love just as fiercely as anyone else, we just live in a slightly different, slightly less common world with slightly difference experiences.