On Loving Love
Mom, dad? I don’t think I’m ever going to find love.
Is it because you don’t love each other? Is it because you don’t love me? Or, maybe, it’s the other way around. Is it because I am unloving as well as unlovable? Deep down, you knew that I was incapable of love, so I didn’t deserve to receive it.
How can I possibly explain this to you? Is it possible to explain the absence of something, to place you in my unpaired shoes?
It starts like this: you realize you are not attracted to men. It is like a little star-turned-black-hole that you clutch to your chest, consuming you. If you aren’t attracted to men, you rationalize, then you must be attracted to women. You tell your friends that you are bi–after all, maybe you’ll get lucky and meet “the right man” one day, a man who will save you from yourself.
Five years later, after breaking up with a steady stream of boyfriends, you decide that you are a lesbian. Women are pretty, right? At least it’s something, even if it isn’t a man like you’d hoped for. You have three girlfriends throughout college.
The first is unremarkable. You date, and then you break up with her. You avoided her so much that you question whether this counts.
The second is the worst; she won’t stop touching you, even though you say that you are not interested. You always feel repulsed in the moment and worse afterward, skin scratched raw from the need to crawl out from the oh-so-appealing flesh that imprisons you. She brings back memories of another person who wouldn’t take no for an answer, and he didn’t listen to you either, so why bother protesting anymore? She is the one who catalyzes the horrified realization that you are asexual. After you break up with her, you cannot deny it anymore. You are afraid of what will happen to you, of what you will do to yourself, if you experiment again.
The third is new. It is the first time you ask someone out, and it is the first time that you are broken up with. If you were to like anyone, you tell yourself as you ask her on a date, it would be her. When you tell her that you are asexual, a fact that she already knew from when you were friends before dating, she seems upset. Her love language is physical touch, which you dislike to the point of nausea. You try to be enough, pushing your boundaries until they shatter, exhaustion to the point of burnout. She is nice, you tell yourself. She could be the one. She could save you from yourself, from a life of solitude. When she breaks up with you, she tells you that you are not enough. You swallow back the accusation that she is too much. Later, during your attempt to remain friends, she tells you that she is upset that you never said “I love you.”
It takes a few weeks to realize that it is because you did not love her. At least, not in the way she wanted you to, in the way you expected yourself to.
Now, I’m not sure I can live with myself. I treated them like unwanted things because I did not want them. Despite my fervent attempts to love them in the ways that they wanted, I could not, and they knew it. Discarded experiments–it had to have hurt. It hurt me, too, grasping desperately for what I felt I owed them–but what is my pain after how I treated them? I am not allowed to matter.
I am afraid of being alone.
Does it begin with genetics? With upbringing? Is there a correlation with unloved children and aroace adults? It comes as no surprise that little research has been conducted on the topic. I am torn between wanting to know more and wanting to distance myself from it.
But I’ve had too much of distance, so I read. There is little content, if any, about people like me. I give up on fiction and search for personal accounts instead. When I do, it is like looking in a mirror. They echo my fears, my insecurities, my want to want sex and romance. But wanting to want something is different than wanting it.
Am I doomed to be alone?
In a world that values romantic love over platonic love, it can be hard to care for people when there is always the possibility that, at any moment, they might be taken away from you because of a love that society has deemed more important. The thought terrifies me, but as I skim snippets of acoace lives, I see people who answer these panicked questions. They have found happiness. There are QPRs and creative pursuits and self-love. There are homes full of warmth and connection, a far cry from the lonely mausoleum I had pictured for my future.
When you are told that the meaning of life is to find romantic love, it is overwhelming to realize that once romance is no longer an option, you have to make your own meaning. What is my meaning? I’m not sure I know yet.
At first, I say that I have never been in love.
But there are different types of love, aren’t there? Philia, Agape, Philautia. I cry into my best friend’s shoulder, I run into their arms after too-long separation. When I make eye contact with a stranger on the subway, she smiles at me. A poem brings tears to my eyes. I look in the mirror and accept that I am beautiful.
I have finally managed to convince myself that my love is different, but not lesser. I hope that this has convinced you, too.
