links.mimuki.net

Charmingly dated site, besides some characterizations of autism that are...not the best.

Only when I started reading more broadly about different kinds of bonds and decentralizing romance, about how deeply romance-centered our culture is, did I begin to understand that what I wanted was not romance at all.

I am a loving person. I form deep, committed friendships. I crave emotional and intellectual intimacy. I can admire people the way I admire a painting or an intriguing book cover, aesthetically, intellectually, with curiosity and warmth. This kind of looking isn’t pursuit but attention without possession, closeness without claim, something our language rarely makes room for.

But the gravitational pull everyone described, the merging of lives around a romantic feeling, did not happen. And I certainly didn’t want anyone in my bed. What I wanted was connection, and society taught me I could only truly find it in romance.

Particularly the book recommendations on compulsory sexuality seem interesting.

In short:

• Sexual arousal refers to the set of automatic physiological reactions, with no defined direction or cause, and with variable frequency and intensity.
• Sexual desire is the intentionality or impulse to engage in sexual activity, either with oneself or with another person. [...] Desire appears after arousal.
• And finally, sexual attraction is the focus or direction of desire: the concreteness of desire toward a specific person who sparks interest or with whom one wants to engage in sexual activity.

Sexual attachment, on the other hand, can be defined as the development or strengthening of a bond between two people after sexual activity, caused, among other things, by hormonal interaction and the neurological and psychological adjustments this entails. Sexual attachment will strengthen if the experience is repeated between the same people and, to some extent, will create emotional dependency.

That is to say an asexual person could develop sexual attachment toward their partner—if they have sex recurrently, of course—despite having no attraction, no sexual desire or even no sexual arousal.

In my particular case, as I have already mentioned, I do experience sexual arousal occasionally; but once out of the relationship, I realized that my sexual desire and my "sexual attraction", upon returning to their natural state, so to speak, became practically nonexistent or diffuse.

Do I think labels are useful for me right now? No. Do I feel called the hell out anyway? Absolutely.

Food for thought, and if nothing else corroborates with the "I haven't (yet) experienced romantic attraction" theory.

The relevance of this model lies in a particularly suggestive idea: romance may not be an autonomous form of intimacy, but rather a cultural narrative built from several combined intimacies.

From this perspective, what we call “romance” ceases to be a fixed essence and becomes instead a particular relational configuration among many others.

[...]

In [queerplatonic] relationships, what matters is not necessarily romance or sexuality, but the structural quality of the bond itself: mutual care, deep intimacy, emotional continuity, shared meaning-making, and sustained presence in one another’s lives.

Rather than rejecting romance outright, queerplatonic relationships seem to question the assumption that every profound bond must necessarily be organized around the classical romantic model.

Content warnings: descriptions of child abuse, domestic violence, improvised weapons