Life under Amatonormativity

This is what it’s like to be asexual and greyromantic in an amatonormative society:

Before you realized you were different, you had already made peace with loneliness.

For reasons you couldn’t articulate yet, you sensed you might never get married. Heterosexual marriage never seemed to appeal to you, and, due to a lack of visible alternatives, you assumed that the only other option was to die alone. You raised your head towards your future, and the prospect of a life of loneliness stared you back down. 

So you learned to cope. When the sharp pain of loneliness hit you, you turned on music and danced in your kitchen, cooked yourself your favorite meal. You browsed stores and went on hikes with only yourself for company, exploring your hometown or other, far-flung places on your own, just to prove that you could. 

For some reason, it was important to you to know that you could survive on your own, live on your own, find joy on your own. 

You found some respite among trees, hiking along paths where the only sounds were the birds and your breaths. 

You hoped, in the back of your mind, that maybe your best friend will just continue being your roommate forever. 

And then you find out who you are. You now have words to express your experiences, your hopes for the future, your desires. You know you crave intimacy, domesticity, someone to stand beside as you both live your lives. 

But it is readily made apparent to you that this is hard to come by in the ways that you want it, because what would be a full and fulfilling life to you is still lacking to others, missing those oh-so-crucial ingredients of romantic and sexual attraction. It’s hard to fill a space in someone’s life that seems could be more completely filled by someone else. 

So you begin to notice that everyone has their person, their partner in life who is their #1 priority.

Except you. You’re no one’s #1 priority.

Yes, you have the love of family and friends, but your best friend gets a boyfriend and suddenly her time is split in half between the two of you, and if push comes to shove, she’ll choose to spend time with the boyfriend. If you’re in the middle of hanging out and he calls, she leaves the room for an hour-long chat. Even if they went out for lunch earlier that day, she can’t go out in the evening with the girls because they’re also doing a date night. You don’t miss the fact that your unscheduled hang out time with her is now empty time that she can be called away from. Your latent hopes of a queerplatonic relationship with her grow dimmer and dimmer. 

You no longer have her undivided attention, and it feels selfish to even consider mourning that. She hints that you could also get a boyfriend so you all could go on double dates. It doesn’t slip your notice that it now will take the addition of another person, a man, to bring you back as a priority. That you will not be enough unless you come as a matched set. That you are not enough anymore on your own.

You become priority #2 to the person you would have made your #1. 

You lean on another friendship to compensate, spending a summer of fun together, hammocking and drinking bubble tea as she moves on from a spring breakup, but soon enough that friend gets a new boyfriend, and you are #2 again. You spent the summer working through a video game together, but now it’s winter, and although she and the boyfriend play video games together often, you haven’t touched the console in months. 

You can never tell this to your friends. You know in your head that there’s nothing wrong with having a boyfriend and making them a priority, but your heart still hurts. You feel selfish for wanting to deny your friends these relationships that make them so happy, even if it comes at the cost of your own happiness with them, the demolition of a future with just the two of you in it. 

You know that you are still important to your friends; it’s just that amatonormativity gives romantic relationships more importance than platonic ones. 

But maybe the issue is also with you; maybe you’re falling into the same traps as everyone else by devaluing your platonic role in your friends’ lives, and by devaluing the familial and platonic love you do receive. 

Maybe one way to fight amatonormativity is to stand tall and say that, yes, you are enough on your own, and the types of love you do receive are enough; that not having one or two of the various types of love you can receive doesn’t mean you’re missing out or that you are pitiable.

But maybe you’re not there yet, not yet wanting to look for light at the end of a painful tunnel. Maybe it’s okay that you’re still in the process of mourning a platonic love. 

The road is long. But at least you have yourself for company.