CHAPTER 7
ROMANCE, RECONSIDERED
“I THINK I AM IN FRIEND-LOVE WITH YOU,” says the narrator of a comic of the same name, written and illustrated by Yumi Sakugawa and published in Sadie Magazine in 2012.1
“I don’t want to date or even make out with you. Because that would be weird,” the comic continues across a series of panels, but the narrator does want:
the other person to think they are awesome
to spend a lot of time hanging out
Facebook chats after midnight
to email weird blog links
to swap favorite books
to @reply to each other’s tweets
to walk to their favorite food trucks
to find the best hole-in-the-wall cafes together
to have inside jokes
but all “in a platonic way, of course.”
I want to be close to you and special to you, the way you are to me, but I do not want to be sexual with you, this comic says. I want to be emotionally intimate with you and I want to be in love with you, but not in that way. Just as saying woman doctor implies that a doctor by default is male, clarifying this feeling as friend-love implies that love—the real thing, the romantic thing—is for sex. In truth, Sakugawa’s descriptions of platonic friend-love are similar to what many aces would call nonsexual romantic love.
Nonsexual romantic love sounds like an oxymoron. Almost all definitions of the feeling of romantic love—separate from the social role of married partners or romantic acts like saying “I love you”—fold in the sexual dimension. People might not be having sex, but wanting sex is the key to recognizing that feelings are romantic instead of platonic. Sexual desire is supposed to be the Rubicon that separates the two.
It’s not. Aces prove this. By definition, aces don’t experience sexual attraction and plenty are apathetic or averse to sex. Many still experience romantic attraction and use a romantic orientation (heteroromantic, panromantic, homoromantic, and so on) to signal the genders of the people they feel romantically toward and crush on.
Intuitively, it makes sense that people can experience romantic feelings without sexual ones, and few are confused when I define romantic orientation as separate from sexual orientation. The understanding breaks down once someone asks what it means to feel romantic love for someone if wanting to have sex with them isn’t the relevant yardstick. How is that different from loving a platonic best friend? Without sex involved, what is the difference people feel inside when they draw a line between the two types of love? What is romantic love without sexuality?
Once again, this isn’t a question only applicable to aces. Allos might feel infatuated with a new acquaintance or be more attached to their best friend than to any romantic partner, yet they can deny the possibility of romantic feeling because of the lack of sexual attraction. Allos can wave their hand and say, “There are people I want to sleep with, and I don’t want to sleep with you, so it’s only platonic.”
As convenient as it is that allos can use sexual desire to distinguish the categories, this is also a constricting way to evaluate the world, and allos can seem as bewildered by their feelings as aces. For them, emotional intimacy and excitement can be confusing or nonsensical if they don’t include sexual attraction. Many allos have shared with me their puzzlement at feeling like they were in love with friends despite no sexual attraction on either side. The writer Kim Brooks published a long essay in The Cut puzzling over how it could be that she has obsessive relationships with women despite being straight. Of her college roommate she writes, “the relationship was never sexual, but it was one of the most intimate of my young adulthood. We shared each other’s clothes and beds and boyfriends.”2
Aces know that sex is not always the dividing line that determines whether a relationship is romantic. We take another look and say, “Maybe you’re in love with your friend even if you’re not sexually attracted to her.” Questions about the definition of romantic love are the starting point for aces to think about love and romance in unexpected ways, from new, explicit categories beyond friendship and romance to the opportunities (legal, social, and more) of a world where romantic love is not the type of love valued above all others. Asexuality destabilizes the way people think about relationships, starting with the belief that passionate bonds must always have sex at the root.
For sixteen-year-old Pauline Parker, June 22, 1954, was “the day of the happy event.” She wrote those words in neat script across the top of her diary entry, marking it as a much-wished-for occasion. “I felt very excited and ‘the night before Christmas-ish’ last night,” she wrote underneath. “I am about to rise!”3
The happy event would take place as Pauline hoped, though the long-term consequences would not be what she intended. Later that afternoon, Pauline and her friend Juliet Hulme, age fifteen, took Pauline’s mother for a walk through Victoria Park in Christchurch, New Zealand. As the three went down a secluded path, Juliet dropped a stone. When Pauline’s mother bent down to pick it up, the two girls bludgeoned her to death with a brick inside a stocking, taking turns bludgeoning the woman to death and smashing her face almost beyond recognition.4
The teenagers had met a couple of years before, when Juliet—beautiful, wealthy, and from a high-class British family—was then new to the country. Pauline was less comely and less moneyed; her father ran a fish store and her mother a boardinghouse. The two became inseparable, often lost in their own rich fantasy world. The bond was threatened when Juliet’s parents decided to send her to live with relatives in South Africa. Pauline could come along if Pauline’s mother would allow it, but everyone knew that this suggestion would never be approved. For the girls, the only way forward seemed to be the brick and escaping to a new life in America.5
From the murder to Heavenly Creatures, the Peter Jackson film it inspired, to the lasting fascination the case holds today, Pauline and Juliet have never been able to dispel the suspicion that they were having sex. Juliet has denied that the two were lesbians, but her denial means little in the eyes of a world that believes only specifically sexual love could inspire that type of mutual obsession.6 This belief—that platonic love is serene while intense, passionate, or obsessive feeling must be motivated by sex—is common. It does not track with reality.
If you don’t believe aces who say that passionate feelings can exist without any sexual desire, believe University of Utah psychologist Lisa Diamond, who says the same thing. (Diamond refers to the feeling of “infatuation and emotional attachment” as “romantic love,” so I will too here. We’ll return to the question of whether this feeling is actually romantic later.) Diamond theorizes that the two can be separate because they serve different purposes. Sexual desire tricks us into spreading our genes, while romantic love exists to make us feel kindly toward someone and willing to cooperate for long enough to raise those exquisitely helpless creatures known as babies. Romantic love can be more expansive than sexual attraction because heterosexual sexual attraction, while usually necessary for producing kids, is not required for successful co-parenting. To use ace lingo, sexual attraction and romantic attraction don’t need to line up.
Diamond first noticed this conflation of passion and sex when interviewing women about how they became aware of their sexual attraction to other women. “So many [women] would tell these stories about having a really strong emotional bond to female friends when they were younger, and they’d be like, ‘So I guess this was an early sign,’” she tells me. Close female friendships do frequently use affectionate, quasi-romantic language that can confuse burgeoning sexual desires. Sometimes though, the story can be more complicated, and Diamond, an expert in sexual fluidity, began questioning whether passion must always equal secretly sexual.
If sexual desire were necessary for romantic love, kids who haven’t gone through puberty wouldn’t have crushes. Many do. Surveys show that children, including ones too young to understand partnered sex, frequently develop serious attachments. I had elementary school crushes and so did many of my allo friends.7 Adults have gone through puberty but their sexual desires don’t always dictate their emotional ones either. In one study Diamond references, 61 percent of women and 35 percent of men said they had experienced infatuation and romantic love without any desire for sex.8
It is already taken for granted that sexual desire doesn’t need to include infatuation or caring. One-night stands and fuck-buddy arrangements are all explicitly sexual and explicitly non-romantic. The opposite conclusion—that for some, infatuation never included and never turns into sexual desire—is harder for people to accept, at least in the West. The story is different elsewhere. Historical reports from cultures in Guatemala, Samoa, and Melanesia describe how these close, nonsexual relationships were acknowledged. Sometimes honored with ceremonies such as ring exchanges, these relationships were considered a middle ground between friendship and romance and were often simply called “romantic friendship,” Diamond tells me.
In these cultures, marriage was often more of an economic partnership than a love match. The marital and sexual bond was not automatically assumed to be the most important emotional relationship, unlike in current Western culture. Romantic friendships were not considered a threat to marriage and it was easier for people to believe that a nonsexual relationship could be as ardent as a sexual one. Romantic friendships were passionate on their own terms because passion is possible in many types of relationships.
Believing that everything containing a special, charged energy must be sexual is not only simplistic; it can also shift how a relationship is perceived in a harmful way. In an insightful essay for Catapult magazine, writer Joe Fassler responds to a Boston Review piece about the eroticism of teacher-student relationships9 by describing how his high school teacher coerced him into having sex and warning about the dangers of co-opting the language of sexuality.10
“The authors [of the Boston Review article] are right to point out that passionate teaching can bring about a kind of heightened energy between people. In my work in the classroom, I’ve experienced that feeling too,” he writes. “But falling back on a convenient shorthand—the language of romantic attraction—to describe that phenomenon seems to me, at best, misguided.”11 This is the same mistake that The Cut writer Kim Brooks makes when she uses the language of sexual infidelity12 to frame her intense friendships and calls them “affairs,” as if they must automatically be a betrayal, as if there are no other comparisons possible. This is the mistake all of us make when we casually sexualize language and forget that the sexualization is a lazy interpretation of a feeling and not the feeling itself.
Language betrays us by making sexual attraction the synonym for fulfillment and excitement itself. When describing different types of social energy and intimacy, like the mind-meld of creative collaborators or the trust between pastor and congregant, there are few metaphors that don’t resort to the sexual. Wanting to be “intimate” with someone—even emotionally intimate—can seem lewd. Being in a “relationship” with a friend sounds sort of odd. A thesaurus search for passionate offers as synonyms wanton, lascivious, libidinous, aroused, sultry, and, well, sexy.
“Isn’t what we need a better, more precise vocabulary to describe the intense bond between teachers and students—one set apart from the language of eros?”13 Fassler asks. With training, he continues, well-meaning educators would learn not to mistake the “sparkle of mentorship” for something more, just as therapists learn to deal with the complicated emotions they can provoke in clients without assuming the relationship is romantic in nature.
It is more than educators and therapists who need to be concerned about this dynamic. It is everyone who lives in a world where language traps us into thinking there is only one kind of pleasure and everything else is derivative. The joy of learning and the emotional fulfillment of therapy, like the closeness of friendship, are all wonderful in their own unique way. Pay attention to these feelings, their weight and heft and experience, the way they enrich our lives and how each holds their own value. “I think people sometimes make sense of things as romantic crushes when really it isn’t,” CJ Chasin, the ace researcher, says. It’s common for two close friends to be accused, even jokingly, of being romantically obsessed with each other and in denial about it. They themselves may wonder if their feelings toward each other are romantic. “Why can’t that ‘denial’ go both ways?” continues Chasin. “Maybe you’re just in denial about friend intimacy.”
Developing and normalizing language that lets us talk frankly about emotional intimacy without it seeming like a come-on will help the world come into focus. Better language will protect us from confusing intention or misinterpreting emotion when that might be inappropriate, and it allows us to enhance the energy that is present without trying to turn it into something else. It will let us talk about relationships for what they are, not what they resemble.
If sex isn’t the dividing line between romantic and platonic love, what is? Academics have long tried to isolate the emotional components that distinguish different types of relationships. Though there can be endless moving parts, one commonly used framework, developed by anthropologist Helen Fisher, features three basic components. (Fisher developed her model to explain the components and forms of romantic love specifically, but I think it can be useful for analyzing all types of feeling.) There is the desire to have sex. There is infatuation. And there is emotional intimacy and caring, which psychologists often call the rather clinical-sounding attachment.14
These components mix and match to create the specific feeling that lives between any two people. In any loving relationship, there can be a lot of infatuation or a little, a lot of sexual desire or none, and so on. The difference in feeling is real, but the feelings do not always fit neatly into the mutually exclusive categories of “platonic” or “romantic.” (Strangely, the word platonic, as used colloquially, seems only to be defined by what it is not: it is the union of nonsexual and non-romantic.) The same combination of emotions can be categorized many ways, as either platonic love or romantic love.
“Attachment plus infatuation,” for example, is how the psychologist Lisa Diamond and many others define romantic love. To others, the identical combination of attachment and infatuation feels platonic, like being excited about a friend. Attachment alone, without infatuation or sex, is usually experienced as platonic love only for friends and family—but try telling that to celibate aces in long-term relationships, or even some allos who have stopped having sex over time. “Attachment plus sex” is also a hazy case. Though often considered romantic, these are also the components of a friendly casual sex arrangement.
In every case, this game of mix and match creates a multiplicity of possible—and often opposing—labels for each combination of emotions. “Romantic” and “platonic” are categories that people experience differently. In the absence of sex or sexual desire, Juliet Hulme and Pauline Parker may have experienced their love for each other as romantic or as platonic. Two other girls might have felt the same thing and named it differently.
A more detailed attempt at breaking down and classifying the categories comes from psychologist Victor Karandashev. In his book Romantic Love in Cultural Contexts, Karandashev reviews the social science literature and lists the most common criteria that people claim divide the two feelings. Romantic feeling, according to people around the world, typically includes: infatuation, idealization, wanting physical and emotional closeness, wanting exclusivity, wanting your feelings to be reciprocated, overthinking the other person’s behavior, caring and being empathetic toward the other person, changing parts of your life for them, and becoming more obsessed if they don’t like you back.15
It all sounds reasonable enough, but when I read Karandashev’s list to Leigh Hellman, a queer ace writer in Chicago, they point out that every emotion that supposedly differentiates romance can be found in other emotional settings. Sensitivity, attachment, and caring are part of any healthy relationship. People who are polyamorous have multiple romantic partners without the desire for exclusivity. Infatuation might be the factor that aligns most closely with widespread ideas of what romantic love feels like, yet it’s common to idealize a new acquaintance or feel possessive when a best friend becomes close with someone else, and romantic love doesn’t automatically turn platonic once early energy wears off.
“I can be jealous, I can experience adoration and devotion toward my friends, all these intense qualifiers that we usually put toward romantic love,” Leigh says. “In past relationships, I was like, ‘Do I actually want a romantic and sexual relationship, or do I just have a really intense platonic love for someone and I wanted to have some sort of validation that I was significant in your life the way you are in mine?’”
While reporting this book, I asked everyone, regardless of romantic orientation, how they separated platonic and romantic love. People like Leigh did not and could not. Others claim that there is a definite difference but have trouble explaining what that difference might be. One person pointed to a difference in “touch attraction,” which is not a desire to have sex, but a desire to be close in other physical ways, like holding hands or cuddling. Another man said that even though he doesn’t feel sexual attraction toward anyone, he finds women and not men aesthetically beautiful and lets aesthetic attraction guide the romantic classification.
Simone, a grad student from Malaysia, says that though no one has been able to properly explain romantic attraction to her, she has accepted that she doesn’t experience it. “I don’t have any urge to have a relationship with someone that is more special than any of the friendships I have with my very good friends,” Simone says. Still other aces say they want a devoted relationship that looks and is structured exactly like what many people consider to be a romantic relationship—in other words, they want someone to fill the social role of romantic partner—even if they don’t feel romantically toward the other person.
Alicia, a soft-spoken scholar in her thirties, has been with her partner since her teens. She knows what it’s like to be romantically attracted to men and women. She knows what it’s like to look at her boyfriend and admire how good-looking he is and not want to have sex with him at all. “And I know what a friend crush feels like,” Alicia adds. She’s familiar with that feeling of infatuation, of hoping that the other person reciprocates and likes her too. She still feels something different when it comes to her partner. She pauses, looking frustrated. It is impossible for her to describe anything more.
To try and answer this question myself, I mentally compared my romantic love toward my boyfriend, Noah, with my platonic love for my friend Jane, and found that much of the contrast stems from different expectations and all the heavy, complicated emotions that go with such. To isolate romantic feeling, I asked that we peel away social role and performance, but the differences seem partially created by both. “Platonic” and “romantic” are types of feeling while “friend” and “romantic partner” are social designations, and the latter molds the former.
As much as I love Jane, she lives a few states away and I’m lucky if I see her twice a year. Our lives long ago diverged; there’s little chance they will intersect again in the future and little expectation that we will work together to make that happen. In a conventional romantic relationship like mine and Noah’s, the assumption is that we will stay together for the rest of our lives, and that brings new anxieties and a greater shared dependency.
Shallow as it is, each of Noah’s choices feels far more personal because they reflect more on me and my own social value. Small habits and considerations have more consequences too, and emotions are accordingly turned up. Hating Jane’s eating habits would be an annoyance but not at all hard to endure the few times I see her. Hating Noah’s eating habits would raise the question of whether I can endure this forever, whether I should have to endure this forever, why can’t he be exactly the way I want him to be, why can’t I be less uptight, and on and on. Tiny annoyances snowball. Everything is harder to bear when you might need to bear the situation every day for the rest of your life.
Such distinctions seem situational more than innate. If Jane and I committed to living together indefinitely, the same mix of emotions and expectations might develop too. If I knew that we would be seeing each other daily for the next five decades, Jane’s eating habits might take on a more ominous implication as well. I might scrutinize her choices more closely, not only because I care about her, but also because I care about what they’d mean for me and for us and our life.
Differentiating emotion, like figuring out whether someone experiences sexual attraction, is a problem of phenomenology. No one has invented a way to perfectly compare if my experience of a bitter taste is the same as yours, or whether we’re feeling the same thing but you call it romantic love and I call it platonic love because of how we have been socialized. Or whether the emotion we feel toward different people is the same, but we change what we call that feeling based on the role someone plays in our life. I am infatuated with Noah in a way I am not with Jane—but this may partly be because it is common and expected to continuously praise your romantic partner and the same is not true for friends. Perhaps, over time, the emotions grow to be different because of the different ways we reinforce them, having been taught to praise and feed in one case and to benignly neglect in another.
Don’t get me wrong. I am not claiming that romantic and platonic love are secretly the same; there can be any number of small factors or combination of factors that differentiate the two. There are, after all, reasons that Jane and I have not committed to living together indefinitely. I am aesthetically attracted to Noah and not Jane. Both are dear to me, but Noah is currently about the only person on earth I would sleep with.
Nor am I claiming that romantic love is platonic love but deeper somehow. Shallow romantic obsessions exist without being love at all, as do profound, loving friendships that trump romantic bonds. I am saying that people think of romantic and platonic love as two distinct categories, but, frequently, there is overlap and no clean separation, no one emotional feature or essential component that makes a relationship one or the other.
There is attachment, and there is the desire to have sex, and there is infatuation, and it all can be felt in all sorts of circumstances and all types of relationships, shaped by different expectations and called by different names. “Romantic attraction, much like sexual attraction, is something that you know it when you feel it or you don’t,” says Chasin, who identifies as aromantic. “Which isn’t very helpful. There isn’t going to be a checklist. There isn’t going to be a set of necessary or sufficient conditions because once you get into classifying kinds of relationships, there are just going to be blurry boundaries and that’s okay. That’s the landscape.”
For Leigh Hellman, the writer in Chicago, recognizing the blurriness of these categories provided a new opportunity. Accepting that overlap made it possible to use language in a new way, to brush away the ease and baggage of old assumptions and shape outer experience to more closely match inner feeling.
Leigh came out as queer at sixteen, half a lifetime ago. “I spent a lot of time being single,” they say. “I’m 6’1”, I’m not a skinny supermodel, I’m a lot of person. And before I understood my gender identity, that was also at odds with the ideas of traditional femininity.”
Leigh moved to Korea on a Fulbright scholarship after college and met the man who would become their husband. After five years in Asia, Leigh decided to return to the States for grad school and knew that if the two wanted to stay together, a spousal visa would make it easier to emigrate. So they got married. It was weird, Leigh says. Not bad, just unexpected for someone long used to being alone and who sometimes thinks they’re panromantic and sometimes thinks they’re aromantic.
Back in the US, Leigh started studying creative writing and spending time with artists and met Taylor. Leigh liked that Taylor was extroverted while Leigh was introverted and that Taylor had a practical streak and got shit done. “A lot of people sit around and want to do something and they don’t do it,” Leigh says. “Which I get! Things are hard and life is hard and you’re tired, we’re all tired. It’s not a judgment thing, but it takes a particular type of person to be like, ‘I want this, what do I have to do to get it?’ And Taylor was like that.”
Leigh, who had until then identified as queer and allosexual, was starting to understand their asexuality. Taylor realized they were aromantic through talking with Leigh. The two became close friends and then decided that they wanted their relationship to be something different.
In another time, this relationship might have been one of the romantic friendships that psychologist Lisa Diamond writes about, passionate and effusively affectionate without being sexual. It was a relationship of that same mold, existing in the Western world but not legible or easily understood here because for so long there has been a lack of vocabulary and concepts. In this era, Leigh and Taylor use a different term, one of the few explicit titles available to describe the social space between “friend” and “romantic partner”: queerplatonic partner.
The idea of queerplatonic partners (or QPP) originated in ace and aro communities. “We developed [the concept] out of frustration with a world where romance is the center of how people relate,” says s.e. smith, a journalist who coined the term with fellow writer Kaz in 2010. It is undeniable that culturally, romance trumps friendship. Romance is higher on the hierarchy of importance and is portrayed as more interesting and essential. Casual phrases like “just friends” and “more than friends” relegate friendship to something less special and less whole. Frustration over the devaluation of friendship is not new; the term QPP is.
The bond between queerplatonic partners is not sexual, nor does it necessarily seem romantic to the people in such a partnership. Some people feel differently about their queerplatonic partner than about either a friend or a romantic partner. For others, a queerplatonic partnership is less about a unique feeling and more about acknowledging each other’s importance in a way that is rare for relationships that aren’t explicitly romantic. These relationships transcend the bounds of what is typically found in friendship alone, even when “romantic” as a descriptor seems wrong. The queer part is not about genders, but about queering that social border. Mutuality is key: smith plays an active role in the life of a friend’s child, but none of the adults involved view the relationship as queerplatonic, even though others in the same situation might describe the relationship differently.
“Queerplatonic” is an attempt to develop more precise language to fit the range of roles that people can occupy in our lives, roles more varied than the few words available. Social labels provide information; they are signals and instructions. Labels carry emotional weight, whether for the people who are dating, but it’s “not really a thing” or for the monogamous couple who refuse to call each other boyfriend and girlfriend because that would take the relationship one step too far.
The simplest way to capture a meaning of queerplatonic may come from the medical melodrama Grey’s Anatomy. Coworkers Meredith Grey and Cristina Yang were never sexually or romantically involved, but their relationship contained a level of trust and commitment not typically seen between colleagues or even many friends. In the pivotal scene, Cristina tells Meredith that she put her down as an emergency contact for an abortion procedure. “The clinic has a policy. They wouldn’t let me confirm my appointment unless I designated an emergency contact person, someone to be there just in case and help me home, you know . . . after,” Cristina says. “Anyway, I put your name down. That’s why I told you I’m pregnant. You’re my person.”16
“You’re my person” has worked its way into popular culture, inspiring listicles in the vein of “10 Grey’s Anatomy Quotes That Remind You of Your Person”17 and an entire ecosystem of You’re My Person merchandise (mugs, shirts, jewelry) wherever kitschy goods are sold. It has become a shorthand stronger than best friend, a gender-neutral way of saying “soul mate” or “the one I trust most.”
“You’re my person” isn’t tied to official romantic relationship status. Meredith isn’t Cristina’s person because Cristina can’t find someone to date. The women didn’t abandon each other once they found boyfriends. Their importance to each other is of a different tenor. Explaining her relationship with Meredith to her boyfriend, Cristina tells him this: “If I murdered someone, she’s the person I’d call to help me drag the corpse across the living room floor.” She is, not him.
The way Leigh and Taylor treated each other didn’t change much after they became queerplatonic partners. The two were already so close, and besides, Leigh was married, so their talks didn’t focus on logistics like how often they’d see each other. “It came down to explicit discussion of our emotional commitment to each other,” Leigh says. “How do we see the way our relationship works and the way we want to define ourselves and be defined by others?”
For Leigh, a QPP was not about proving that their feelings for Taylor were the most important of all, stronger than their feelings for anyone else. It’s not like a QPP is like a special friendship—if that were the case, then friendship itself goes back to being more casual and less devoted and Leigh, who is one of the most thoughtful people I have ever met, has no interest in denigrating friendship yet again. Their QPP was about action and attitude more than entirely unique feeling, in the same way that traditional romantic relationships often work because of an explicit commitment to the partner and the bond. Leigh was extending an invitation to Taylor to, together, create a set of norms and a container for their feelings. The QPP was about being vulnerable and boldly asking for something back, about that intense relationship and the security of explicit validation that Leigh had often thought they wanted.
Precisely because social labels provide signals and instructions, they also constrict. Queerplatonic resets from the unspoken expectations of either friend or romantic partner and forces the relationship into a new place, with the ability to build new obligations and new expectations together. The switch to queerplatonic is a change in both language and thought, a relational example of what the Russian literary theorists called defamiliarization, or taking something and trying to see it anew and then noticing what you might not have seen before.
In friendship, Leigh explains, it can be unclear where you stand. Conversations about emotional commitment are uncommon, and if you don’t know where you stand, you don’t know your place. In a QPP, these questions have been tackled already, their answers cocreated. It became possible to voice opinions and preferences on a more even ground. Everything became freer. Taylor told their mom about Leigh. Leigh called Taylor their partner in queer spaces and “my really good friend” in situations where partner might bring up questions that would take too long to answer.
Leigh’s other partner, their husband, knew about the “intense friendship” with Taylor but didn’t exactly understand the concept of a QPP. Nor was he interested in delving into the specifics. His concerns were primarily about sexual fidelity, and once it became clear that Leigh and Taylor were not sleeping together and had no intention of doing so, any worries and further curiosity vanished.
Do you consider yourself poly? I asked Leigh. Unsure. Leigh’s husband didn’t consider their marriage to be open and Leigh and Taylor’s relationship wasn’t exactly romantic. On the other hand, as Leigh says: “I don’t know if my feelings were really different for my husband and QPP. If you’re in the small group of people I care about, I feel pretty much the same about all of you. That’s just how I do relationships.”
It can be eye-opening to look more closely at the meaning of romantic or platonic, but it is not necessary to litigate semantics. It is meaningful to separate romance from sex and puzzle over the term queerplatonic, but I am more interested in changing the way people behave around relationships than in forcing everyone to change the words.
Language is shared with others and policing word choice can backfire. I wouldn’t demand that Yumi Sakugawa rename her comic “I Am in a Non-Sexual Romance with You,” or insist that her feelings are truly romantic. I would not point to two close friends and tell them their relationship is not friendship but actually queerplatonic. Telling people what their relationship actually is or insisting that people cannot use friend and romantic partner to describe conventional social roles is not the road to progress. That way lies a rabbit hole of definitional confusion and linguistic tricks. Plus, it’s disrespectful. These new ideas are meant to provoke, not to prescribe.
I am, however, curious about what would happen if everyone more carefully considered the distinction we make between friendship and romance, and the way we treat them differently and why. Many people are hesitant to say “I love you” to friends, much less ask, “How do you feel about time? What are we to each other?” As Leigh noted, outside of romance, there is no “defining the relationship” talk unless something has already gone wrong. Couples therapists usually focus on romantic couples, and no advice industry is available to help people recover from the loss of a friendship, though friend breakups can be as devastating as the romantic kind. The looseness of friendship and lack of official obligation is a delight for many, but as a general rule, people tend to treat casually that which is less important.
This doesn’t have to be so. As queerplatonic relationships show, we can borrow from the language and norms of romantic relationships to structure other types of feeling. Queerplatonic partners take a type of relationship that is usually taken lightly and decide that it is important enough to merit unusual and potentially awkward conversations. Relationships of many kinds can be important enough to risk those talks, to set expectations and dig in.
Instead of letting labels like romantic and platonic (or friend versus partner) guide actions and expectations, it is possible for the desires themselves to guide actions and expectations. More effective than relying on labels to provide instruction is skipping directly to asking for what we want—around time, touch, commitment, and so on as David Jay wrote—regardless of whether those desires confuse hardline ideas of what these two categories are supposed to look like. When the desires don’t fit the labels, it is often the labels that should be adjusted or discarded, not the desires. If everyone is behaving ethically, it doesn’t matter if a relationship doesn’t fit into a preconceived social role, if it feels neither platonic nor romantic or if it feels like both at the same time.
Taylor and Leigh broke up a year after they got together, for reasons that had nothing to do with sexual identity or labels. That’s important to note too, Leigh says. Queerplatonic partnerships shouldn’t be infantilized or idealized as these “too pure, too good” relationships protected from emotional storms. They may be subversive; they may challenge entrenched hierarchies; but they are still relationships between people and people are always flawed. The emotional components supposedly unique to romantic love can be experienced in other contexts, and so the challenges and struggles of romantic relationships can be experienced in other types of partnerships too. And though the relationship with Taylor ended, working through the relationship together helped Leigh recognize what they wanted and deserved in a relationship and helped Leigh leave their abusive marriage.
Love and caring are precious and appear in contexts beyond the romantic; they are not necessarily the most powerful in romantic contexts either. One group of people feels this truth especially acutely: those who are aromantic, or aro. They know that elevating romantic love ends up harming everyone. They’re waiting for others to catch up.
“Only someone in love / has the right to be called human,” wrote the Russian poet Alexander Blok in 1908.18 A century later, the pop singer Demi Lovato had a similar message: “You ain’t nobody ‘til you got somebody.”19
So long as there is no romantic partner in the picture, others will think the picture incomplete. To say that only someone in love—and the poem suggests Blok is referring to love for a romantic partner—has the right to be called human implies that our humanity depends on circumstances largely out of our control: other people, the way the world works, sheer luck. It is ghastly to believe we are only human when we can experience one specific emotion or when others feel that way about us. Regardless, the desire for romantic relationships is often necessary to prove one’s morality, and so aros are judged, their humanity denied.
David Collins, for instance, loves romance novels, loves his friends, and for a while wondered whether he was a sociopath. “There is an idea that this—caring about people but not romantically—is what bad people do,” he says. “It really made me feel like, ‘Okay, I’m not a good person, I can’t relate to people, this is some shit that [fictional serial killer] Dexter Morgan does.”
The aromantic community is connected to the asexual community, but not everyone who is aromantic is asexual. David is not. He’s pansexual and experiences sexual attraction but doesn’t know what it’s like to want a specifically romantic relationship. His story hits many of the same points that I have heard from aces: As a kid, David, who is now in his twenties, saw others partner up and assumed that he’d grow to want romance like everyone around him. Despite having relationships from age fourteen onward, the hoped-for change never happened. It was hard to shake the worry that deep down, he was a sick, selfish person who wanted to use people for their bodies.
Around the time David was eighteen, a friend told him about aromanticism. He first dismissed it as an “incel thing.” Then David decided it might be a made-up term for people with depression or for people in denial about some obscure psychological problem.
A few months later, walking through Times Square with his girlfriend, David was forced to reconsider. As they passed through that tourist trap, his girlfriend turned to tell David how passionately she loved him. This was a woman David could relate to on every level. Both studied computer science, agreed on politics, loved horror movies and analyzing pop culture and writing fan fiction. They supported each other, enjoyed each other’s company. Yet the only thing David could think was that he could not return her words. He cared about her and wanted her to be happy and wanted to treat her well, but he did not feel the same way about her as she did about him. Something, some ineffable feeling, was missing. Whatever she felt toward him, whatever she was describing, he had not experienced—not with her and not with anyone else.
“That’s probably one of the few times in my life where I literally sat down and said to myself, ‘What is wrong with you?’” David says. “‘We gotta figure this out right now.’” A lonely year followed as he began to wonder if it was true, that as much as he might love people, he would never want the kind of relationship he was supposed to aspire to—and because of that, he might always be seen as cold or amoral. The people he saw like him in the media were killers. The stories available about lives without romance were few and far between.
The ubiquity of romantic plotlines first came to my attention when Tired Asexual wrote to Slate advice columnist Dear Prudence asking for suggestions for books without romance.20 Helpful readers responded with a short list, many from young adult fiction.21 Surely, I thought, the list of eligible novels had to be much longer.
For my own version of the test, I developed the following criteria:
• The novel is not young adult fiction or science fiction/fantasy. (There are plenty of YA books without romantic subplots, both because intended readers are younger and because recent YA authors are more likely to incorporate characters along the sexuality spectrum.)
• The novel is not about romance, and romance—or yearning for romance—isn’t a major plot point even if it’s there. Maybe there’s a couple, but their relationship is taken for granted and the book doesn’t focus on its evolution. Maybe someone goes on a date, but dating doesn’t move the story forward.
• The novel has no explicit sex scenes or sexual themes (including sexual assault).
• The novel doesn’t present romantic love as necessary and central to flourishing. This last requirement is crucial. Even if there are no sex scenes and nobody goes on a date, if the main character is constantly thinking about how they should be dating, the novel is disqualified.
Go ahead, see what you can come up with.
It is only when forced to provide these examples that it becomes clear that it shouldn’t be this hard. And though it’s easy to understand why it would be frustrating for someone who is aromantic to be surrounded by books implying that life is pathetic without romance, this state of affairs is harmful no matter how one identifies.
Culture may not always create the desires for the things it valorizes—sex, romance, money—but having a single story about what these things signify can amplify them and make them seem necessary. If the vast majority of stories posit romantic love as the ultimate goal and unpartnered people as losers, people are unlikely to think outside those narrow lanes. If accurate representation matters when it comes to class and race and gender (and it does), representation also matters when it comes to storylines, the narratives that are present about what matters, what people want and should want, and what is necessary for a good life.
Hunter wanted to feel like a hero, and he learned from American Pie that the easiest way to become one would be to have sex. I want to feel deeply, and the story I see all around is that the easiest way to do so is to stir up romantic drama. Lauren Jankowski, the aro-ace fantasy writer, wants to write about friendship, but has been told by literary agents that asexuality and aromanticism won’t sell because they’re not compelling enough. “Why can’t we just have a narrative where you have two best friends fighting for each other, fighting to protect each other?” she asks. “Why can’t we have a group of friends going off on adventure? It’s like, unless they’re attached to somebody, why would that be a story?” To Lauren, the answer obvious: “Because it’s fucking interesting.”
The ubiquity of romantic subplots, even in books that aren’t romance novels, suggest that only stories with romance can involve big emotions and that romance is automatically more interesting than almost all the other strands of human experience. What if books focused more on the emotions that are generated from friendship, ambition, family, work? What if that intensity were just as elevated?
There are books that meet the criteria of my test. Albert Camus’s The Stranger and The Plague and many works of Knut Hamsun fit within the parameters, as do surrealist novels from Borges, Calvino, and Markson. Historical and family stories are also a good bet: Per Petterson’s Out Stealing Horses and Harry Mulisch’s The Assault deal with complicated family dynamics during World War II. More contemporary selections include Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping; Catherine Chung’s Forgotten Country, about family secrets, the Koreas, and immigrant experience; Chaim Potok’s My Name is Asher Lev, about individual desire versus community expectation. The story that has moved me most in recent months—Duncan Macmillan’s play People, Places, and Things—chronicles an actress’s repeated attempts at rehab. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is bleak and dystopian; in that universe, the most important love is between a father and a son.
The catch is that almost all these selections fit into a secondary genre. All are acclaimed and considered literary, but they’re also usually described as philosophical novels, or Holocaust novels, or immigrant novels; they’re pegged to something else. You need always to be looking for something that makes the novel “other.” At the core, as one friend pointed out, the nuclear family and romantic love are key parts of the genre of serious literary fiction without needing to add another descriptor.
Some of the books I mentioned may still feature romance. I lack the time to reread them all and so fully expect to discover that some include a romantic subplot or fail my criteria in another way. Others who helped me brainstorm encountered the same problem. Again and again, friends would respond with a suggestion, only to see someone else chime in and point out that, actually, Watership Down and East of Eden do have romantic and sexual themes, you simply forgot. Romance is so taken for granted that we often don’t register it, the way we rarely register if all the characters in a novel are white. This message affects our values and our hopes, all while fading so cleanly into the background that it’s barely even evident.
Rice University philosopher Elizabeth Brake calls this undeserved elevation and centrality of romantic love amatonormativity, from the Latin word for love, amare. She coined the term in her book Minimizing Marriage: Marriage, Morality, and the Law to describe the assumption that “a central, exclusive, amorous relationship is normal for humans.” Not simply normal, but preferable. Not only preferable either, but ideal and necessary—better than being polyamorous, better than having a strong web of family, better than having a close-knit group of friends.22 A good that we should universally work toward and are incomplete without.
It is not difficult to find examples of amatonormativity points out psychology writer Drake Baer. As philosopher Carrie Jenkins says, even well-intentioned phrases like “You’re so lovely, I can’t believe you’re single”23 imply that single people are lacking somehow. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy’s much-applauded opinion in favor of same-sex marriage stated that being denied the right to marriage meant being “condemned to live in loneliness.”24 Lyrical court opinions and throwaway comments alike can make it difficult to figure out whether you truly want a relationship or just believe that without one you will always be pitied. Amatonormativity is also responsible for a lack of research on single people, Baer adds. Social scientists assume that everyone wants to be in a relationship, creating a missed opportunity to learn more about people for whom this is not true and what their perspectives could teach everyone else.25
Amatonormativity, like every kind of normativity, erases variation. The erasure of variation means the erasure of choice and the triumph of stereotype and stigma. If someone is not in a romantic relationship, they are to be pitied or mocked. If someone doesn’t want a romantic relationship at all, they are heartless like a serial killer. The spinster becomes a pathetic creature, a strange and unwanted woman. The bachelor is either closeted or emotionally stunted. If he’s hot, he’s irresponsible and a rake. If he’s not, like South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham, there may be something more seriously wrong. When Graham tried to run for president in 2015, he faced scrutiny over his bachelor status and had to defend himself as “not defective,”26 even joking that if everyone were so desperate for a First Lady, his sister could do the job. Graham should be disqualified from presidency because of his policy proposals, not because he has little interest in romantic relationships.
A person’s value and humanity—regardless of their political views or attractiveness or gender—should never be dependent on either their familiarity with the very particular emotion of romantic love or their ability to inspire it in others. Yet “people immediately think that if you can’t relate to someone on a romantic level, you are mentally malformed,” David says. They will ask if he’s autistic (a negative, ableist stereotype). Other Black people have told him he’s gay and in denial about it. “Depression” and “you’re an asshole with no feelings” are two commonly suggested explanations.
The stereotype of the sociopathic aro is so common that Simone from Malaysia has started embracing it. “It’s not an identity, exactly,” they say. “It’s a character that I sometimes play facetiously. I pretend to be an alien observer who doesn’t really understand how humans function and I’ll jokingly be like, ‘Ah yes, how fascinating, these humans and how they press their fleshy bodies together and have feelings.’”
Simone is the Tin Man without a heart, or an alien in the world of romantic love. It’s part performance and part coping mechanism because there is an uneasy balance between joking about being a robot and the genuine feeling of being perceived as robotic for being aromantic. “I think that’s why I’m interested in concepts like post-humanism and trans-humanism,” Simone adds. “It’s appealing to think that, ‘Well, if I can’t feel like this and if I have to feel less human because I’m aromantic, I am just going to be human differently.’”
Being both human and judgmental, I am not immune to a form of amatonormativity myself. I found it easy to sympathize with nearly everyone I interviewed. Asexual and aromantic? I get that. Same with women who were aromantic but not asexual, like Elana, who is in her twenties and lives in rural Ohio (but says her greatest wish is to leave the state). “I won’t feel terrible if I never have someone in my life that I can spend the rest of my life with,” she says. “It’s not necessarily a priority for me.” A boyfriend broke up with Elana over text right when she finished reading The Fault in Our Stars and she was “more upset over the fact that a book character had died than that I had been dumped.”
Yet, the one group I felt knee-jerk skepticism toward were men like David, who are aromantic but not asexual. I am a woman who has spent a decent chunk of my life listening to friends’ horror stories about men, many of them jerks who wanted nothing but sex. Part of me remained suspicious that “aromantic but not asexual” was a cop-out for an immature man trying to justify bad behavior.
Intellectually, I knew this suspicion made little sense. If people can be asexual and not aromantic, they can be aromantic and not asexual. There’s also no reason why only women could be aromantic and asexual. It was always clear that my beliefs—that an aro-allo woman was independent while an aro-allo man was a fuckboy—were gendered stereotypes I should disavow. Still, it was hearing David talk about how these same stereotypes hurt him that changed the situation for me emotionally. Because he’s male, people will say he’s “just a horny guy” and a monster, he tells me, even though he really does care about others. “The friendships I have, I try to hold that close,” he says. “Human connection is important and I think there are way more people who crave human connection than crave romance, if that makes sense.”
Little doubt exists that someone will end up using aromanticism to defend cruelty. Don’t fall for this. Callous behavior is a problem on its own terms, regardless of any kind of orientation. Lisa Wade, the Occidental sociologist and author of American Hookup, writes that the problem with hookups is not the casual sex itself but the culture that has developed around casual sex, which encourages people to treat each other coldly to show they don’t have feelings. It is entirely possible to be clear about boundaries, to want sex without romance and treat others with kindness and respect.27 That’s not “using people for their bodies,” it’s communicating and entering a consensual agreement and it’s the route David wants to go. He makes it clear from the beginning that he’s not interested in dating but will do his best to be attentive, check in on others, and care for them.
Now, David is in a friends-with-benefits arrangement that seems, as he says, pretty much perfect. He enjoys giving relationship advice—“I feel like I can be more impartial”—and spends time on the aromanticism subreddit helping others who wonder whether they’re aromantic or late bloomers or afflicted with emotional baggage and likely to change. Change is certainly possible, and fine too (though the existence of happily single people at every age suggests it’s not inevitable). Just as with asexuality, the possibility of change should not justify disbelieving what someone says is their experience or being overly concerned that they might miss out on a part of life they currently don’t want.
David has even started reaching out to people from the Men Going Their Own Way community. The societal expectations around romance that hurt him are the same ones that make incels feel lonely and isolated, so “being there to help them deconstruct romance as a concept has actually been fairly decent in terms of getting them to open up,” he says. As for other people who think they might be aromantic, “the biggest piece of advice I always give is to just wait, you’ll have [a sense of your identity] in time,” David adds. Don’t believe that you’re sick for not wanting a romantic relationship. You’re probably not going to find the answer on a Reddit thread, he tells them, but whatever you are is fine.
Amatonormativity permeates more than TV shows and books. It is woven into our legal rights, creating forms of discrimination that become more and more apparent as people age. Romantic love within marriage confers privileges that other forms of devotion cannot, including over 1,100 laws that benefit married couples at the federal level. Spouses can share each other’s health insurance, as well as military, social security, and disability benefits. They can make medical decisions for each other.28 Companies grant bereavement leave for spouses, no questions asked, but there will be more hesitation if leave is requested for a mere friend. It is possible to marry a stranger and give them your health insurance but not possible to give health insurance to a parent.
Marriage, in its ideal form, is a promise of love and mutual responsibility, a declaration of importance in the eyes of everyone. That such a promise is celebrated and comes with legal benefits and special standing can make sense. That such a promise can only be made and legally recognized in romantic and sexual contexts does not. In debates over marriage, people on all sides “share an assumption that our most important non-blood relationships must be with people we have, or at least have had, sex with,” writes philosopher Julian Baggini in Prospect Magazine.29
Criteria based on sex made sense when the main purpose of marriage was to merge fortunes and produce children, but today, as Baggini points out, marriage is more about a match of devotion than a match of trade. In many cases, the point is no longer to create an heir and a spare. Plenty of married couples don’t have children (or sex, for that matter), and bad marriages with little caring are common.
One particularly poignant example of what happens when romance is required for rights occurred in 2012. That year, the Canadian government deported seventy-three-year-old Nancy Inferrera, an American woman who had lived with her eighty-three-year-old friend Mildred Sanford. The two had moved to Nova Scotia several years earlier and pooled their money to buy a $14,000 mobile home together. They were described as “inseparable,” and Nancy helped take care of Mildred, who had dementia.30 “Such a friendship serves one of the primary purposes of marriage—mutual long-term caretaking and companionship,” writes Brake of the case. “As such, it deserves legal protections similar to those in marriage.”31 Yet, a couple in an abusive marriage would have received more protection from deportation than Nancy and Mildred did (though, seven years later, Nancy did finally gain permanent Canadian residency32).
Offering legal and social benefits only to the romantically attached suggests that the mere presence of romantic feeling elevates the care and deserves special protections, even though friendship and other forms of care, which can come with less obligation, can include more love, more freely given. Therefore, the legal and social privileges of marriage should be extended to all mutually consenting adults who wish for them.
Baggini advocates for allowing siblings or just very close friends to “have the same rights as those in civil partnerships.”33 Reed College political scientist Tamara Metz has argued that the state should recognize and support “intimate care-giving unions”34 even if they are not sexual or romantic in nature. And Brake adds that extending these privileges will have a big effect in other areas too. “In terms of policy, marriage law really reaches into all areas of law, like tax and immigration and property,” Brake tells me. “It doesn’t matter if it’s different-sex only or same-sex marriage, so long as we restrict marriage to romantic and sexual partners we will ensure amatonormativity.” Reforming marriage law by abolishing it altogether or extending marriage-like rights to friends (to small groups or networks) is one way to eradicate discrimination.
Jo the Australian policy worker originally identified as homoromantic. Even in the ace community, she explains, there’s a narrative that romantic aces can have relationships and regular lives but aromanticism is one step further from normal. Using the label of homoromantic felt less confrontational and easier for both others and herself to accept. Today, Jo identifies as aromantic and is realizing that she will need to contend with amatonormativity for the rest of her life. Amatonormativity extends well beyond marriage, compounding and affecting the very fabric of society and our chances of flourishing in later years.
In the West, couples often pair up, marry, and then seclude themselves into a new, separate unit, sometimes retreating from their prior community of friends and family. With this as the norm, it becomes harder and harder for aros to build the social network they need. Milestones become bittersweet, like when Jo’s best friend moved out to live with her boyfriend.
“I can’t begrudge her for this, of course, and I am happy for her because she is happy,” Jo says. “But it was hard because we had this really good thing going but I have now been deprioritized. This will probably keep happening for the rest of my life because that tends to be what people do. Their primary romantic relationship takes precedence over friendships and sometimes their family.” Jo won’t be the one moving out to live with a romantic partner, and that makes her both value friendship more and become frustrated when others don’t value it as much. In the past few months, two of Jo’s other friends have gotten engaged, emphasizing the lack of options for those who aren’t interested in traditional romantic cohabitation.
“If only we could bring back Boston marriages,” Jo says, referring to the arrangements of adult women living together in the late nineteenth century.35 The term comes from such a relationship depicted in Henry James’s novel The Bostonians, and though some in Boston marriages were lesbians, that was not always the case. Boston marriages were not glorified roommates but true partnerships that provided structure and companionship, which is what Jo wants: a non-romantic, cohabitating relationship, the “kind that would last for a lifetime.”
Instead, amatonormativity makes Boston marriages uncommon and contributes to the problem of care in old age. When the nuclear family is the ideal, it is commonly assumed that members of the family (the children, the spouse) will act as unpaid caregivers later in life, leading to questions like, “Who will take care of you when you’re old?”
“It’s a pretty intense thing to worry about,” says Julie Sondra Decker, who is aromantic and in her forties. Julie emphasizes that a romantic partner is not a perfect guarantee of future security. People get sick. People get divorced. “I think even if you’re looking at having this sort of built-in support from another person, you need to look at your wider networks and other resources,” she says. “It takes a lot of effort to maintain friendships and take them seriously, to understand how much you can give to other people. Sometimes I worry I cross the line into giving too much to someone, but I also know that those people will be there for me if I ever need anything, so there’s no way I will be alone in this world.”
Julie is right that it is possible to build a chosen family for support in later years. Justice Anthony Kennedy was wrong when he wrote that those who aren’t married are “condemned to live in loneliness.” It is still unfair that people worry that not having a romantic partner means they can’t take care of themselves in old age. Amatonormativity and the assumption of free familial care have made it easier to ignore the necessity of changing welfare and labor laws to make eldercare more financially accessible and also to compensate the caregivers more fairly. When the infrastructure of care work and eldercare changes, it will help those who are aromantic, as well as everyone who has this worry—including the many people in the so-called sandwich generation, who have a nuclear family but drain their financial resources caring for ailing parents as well.36 Many policy changes are necessary to ensure fairness for anyone who doesn’t have, or doesn’t want to have, a spouse and kids around a picket fence.
It is connection and personal fulfillment that count, not received ideas of what different types of relationships should look like or which forms of relating are superior. Life can take so many shapes and look like so many things, like devotion to family, friends, a cause. It can look like strong feelings for others even when those feelings don’t slot neatly into categories, and falling in love without sexual desire. Simple stories—about passion equaling sex or passion reserved only for romance, about needing to be validated by the love of others and about friendship not being as important as that fuzzy category of romantic love—all distract. The effect of these stories is powerful. The disadvantages they can bring are real. But look a little closer, and the authority can begin to crack.