Ashamed to be an aroace adult

[meep]

To start with, I’m in my 30s, so no I’m not just a “late bloomer.” Also please don’t recommend that I get a pet to make up for my deficiency: I have pets, I love them, but it’s not the same as a real relationship.

I have NEVER met anyone I want to date, be in a relationship with, or be sexual with. I have never had a crush, been sexually attracted to anyone, or been interested in asking anyone out specifically.

However, I am brutally lonely, and really want a relationship for the same reasons all of my peers date and are in relationships.

I hate this, I hate this about myself and I hate that my future will be lonely and boring. Don’t tell me about QPRs, because that’s not a thing in the real world where I live. The only single people I know are miserable losers, and life is made so much easier for people in relationships. (YES I know that bad and abusive relationships exist, NO knowing that does not make being single any easier!) I feel like a massive failure.

I try to cultivate emotional intimacy in my friendships, but it’s never enough for me. Because my friends all have partners to invest in emotionally, and I am just a fun add-on to their life. The second I ask for investment or emotional reciprocity, they vanish. I’m not worth it.

Frankly after 30 something years of having to live like this, I am tired of it. I dread the future because no matter what I will be a lower priority to everyone.

All of my family members, all of my friends, all of my coworkers - EVERYONE gets to fall in love but me. I am a broken outsider with no one to care for, which is something I desperately want.

How do I fix this?? I will do ANYTHING to NOT be aroace. I genuinely do not see this as an orientation, but rather an emotional disability. Everything in life is based on couples, so what does that say about me? I can’t even get surgery or medical procedures done, because I have no one to drive me home. I have no emergency contact.

I am dying from shame, loneliness, and despair. There is no “it gets better” for aroace people. I’m tired of pretending that my life is worth as much as a normal person’s life, because that’s flat out untrue.

[maille]

Hi there.

I can hear the pain in your writing when you say you are 'a massive failure' and 'not worth it'. Before we get to any aroace questions, I want to check in with how you are feeling safety wise. Here at Scarleteen, we don't have the resources to help people like a hotline would. Have you ever reached out or would consider reaching out to line like 988? I like that they have a user friendly text option in addition to being a traditional hotline. Same with the Trevor Project if you feel like something more queer informed would be a better fit to keep you safe in the present. I am just communicating this to you out of an abundance of caution for your well-being because you are in fact worth it.

Sending good vibes <3

[meep]

OP here, thank you for your kindness!

I am not actively “at risk,” and in the past I have availed myself to the resources you mentioned. Unfortunately, there isn’t a ton they can do to help me. They can’t change society to be kinder to single people, they can’t erase amatonormativity, they can’t force my friends to suddenly care more and invest more in their platonic relationships.

I’ve also tried multiple advice columns, with extremely mixed results. The fact of the matter is: in a world where 99% of everyone can fall in love, and have normal relationships, why would any of the 99% care to emotionally invest in the 1% who cannot reciprocate feelings the “right” way? If it’s convenient I am a fun time killer and casual acquaintance. If I ask for more, it’s too much.

Writing out this response sort of answered my question for me: there won’t be any saving me from being aroace. I will never matter to my friends as much as they matter to me, because they always have the potential for a real relationship instead of just tolerating my presence in their life.

Posting this was a desperate attempt for SOME hope that I will someday be loved and cherished the way a normal, non-aroace person could hope to be. But I genuinely do not believe that’s possible. So like… even though I’m not suicidal, what is even there to look forward to. Other than loneliness and social isolation.

[maille]

Great, meep! I am glad to hear that you aren't at any sort of risk in this moment and applaud your bravery to use those resources in the past.

And you're right no one can wave a magic wand and make society kinder to single people or erase the idea of amatonormativity. Unfortunately we live in a culture that assumes everyone's main priority is hopping into a heterosexual monogamous relationship. You and the folks here at Scarleteen know that is simply not the case and believing so doesn't do folks any favors.

What does mental health support look like for you right now, in the sense of resources like therapy? I ask because while we can not change your identity (nor do we want to!), we can learn to undo some of that shame.

If you can't tell from my writing (lol), I am not the authority on aroace matters. However, we do have some volunteers who may have some more personal insight to share. I'll ping them and let them know your post is here next time they are in. In the meantime, I am going to link you an article that I hope you can find some solidarity in. Let me know what you think of it! Unveiling Amatonormativity

[meep]

Thank you, again, for your kindness! I hope you appreciate your life and alloromantic attraction, because frankly I would kill to be you. I would not wish being aroace on my worst enemy. It is a fast track to a miserable and isolated life.

Thank you for the article, I actually read it before when I was searching for aro info on this site! I can try to wave off amatonormativity, but even if I think it’s bogus, it has a profound impact on my life: I cannot afford to live a life I love, as a single person. I cannot afford housing beyond a studio apartment, I cannot save any money, and I cannot plan for a fun future because all of those things cost money that I don’t have. Living alone as a single person is punishingly expensive. People love to tell me there is no timeline to “finding your person” or whatever, but there ABSOLUTELY is! I will eventually become old and disabled (currently mostly not disabled, but old age comes for everyone), I will be able to do less and less in my life, and I want to enjoy my remaining pain-free years with someone I love. And being aroace means I don’t get to have that, or be loved, or even HOPE that things change in the future.

I don’t know why I’m writing this out. To any younger aroace people reading this: for the love of god, try to prove yourself wrong and find someone you like. This is a depressing, sad, and loser-filled future, and you do NOT want it. The internet keeps trying to tell me that being aro is okay, but my lived experiences prove that it is not. Don’t be like me.

[Heather]

Hey there, meep. I'm so sorry that you've been feeling this way for so long, and I understand why you're feeling the way you are, but I also don't think that the advice you're giving to younger aroace people here is good advice. Flatly, as someone for whom advice-giving has been a central part of my job for almost 30 years now, I don't think anyone in the kind of headspace you're in is in a good one to be giving advice. I know for myself that when I am deep down in really hard feelings, advice is the last thing I should be giving anyone. Too, no one person's lived experience is representative of everyone else's who is also a member of the same population or group they are. Again, I get it, shit has clearly SUCKED for you, and part of that has been about being aroace in a world -- and it sounds like areas and communities -- that is structured far more to center allosexual and romantically-oriented people. But this isn't everyone's future, and I also hope your own life changes. I remember being 30 and feeling like my life at that time was going to be my life forever, but for many of us, life is far longer than that. There is still time for things to turn around for you, and goodness, I really hope they do.

I want to offer you a few things, and you can do with them what you will, but my aim is to give you some things to consider, but also some of a future to envision. I don't know about you, but I find it really difficult to envision futures for myself I don't see anywhere else. I might go on a bit here, but again, feel free to take what you need and leave the rest.

Before anything else though, I want to say that as someone who has suffered from severe depression at times in my life, I am seeing what looks to me like something where on top of everything else, depression may be in the mix. Do you think that's a possibility for you? If it is, please know that it is so, so much harder to navigate any kind of challenge or hardship when we are in the thick of depression. If you think this might be an issue for you, and you have access to this kind of care, I'd encourage you to seek out an evaluation with a therapist, psychiatrist, or even a general doctor. If you are depressed, finding treatment that helps will make all of this hitting you so hard all the time hit a lot less harder and feel a lot more manageable. <3

That said, look, you're right. I'm not aroace, but I am someone deeply -- and since I was a kid -- opposed to marriage, and opposed to anything else in the world that only confers benefits to couples in romantic relationships, or what is supposed to be or presumed to be romantic relationships. I have always thought and still think that privileging is grotesque. I've been single for long stretches of life (and yes, unhappy some of that time, but most certainly not a miserable loser for most of it -- I have mostly enjoyed singlehood during those times, myself). I'm also a person with disabilities who has lived on my own for a lot of my life, so I hear you with the intense financial challenges. And I am someone who, for around 16 years, had a partner I raised a kid with part-time (we were long distance most of those years) who has my platonic best friend. That relationship was certainly given the respect and acknowledgement it should have been by my fellow queer friends (and this was even before people really talked about QPRs, a term ironically coined by s.e., one of our longtime staffers here). It was not, as you will be unsurprised to know, typically given that same recognition/import by straight people, something that became particularly terrible when she died. Her family didn't recognize our relationship as a legit partnership at all (and also forever had decided that since I was queer, I must have been secretly in love with her the whole time, even though I did have other sexual or romantic partners who were also very important to me), and it made going through what was already one of the most terrible losses of my life even more terrible. So again, I hear you: you're right about how this can go with people and the world as a whole. That said, even though we had our own challenges in that relationship even inside of it, as is often the case with many intimate relationships, and even though I lost her in the end and had a lot of people be awful about it, I'd do it again in a heartbeat. Bri was one of the greatest loves of my whole life so far.

At the same time, while I understand it's not been part of your world or life yet, long-term loving partnerships that are not sexual or romantic exist, and the idea they can exist for other people but not for you because they haven't yet (I met my friend when I was 34, for the record) isn't sound. They can and do exist and, if it is something you want, which it sounds like is is, they can and may exist sometime for you. I have known many people in my 55 years on this planet who have had those kinds of partnerships, and I know many right now.

You also don't have to live alone if that's not something you want: I'll risk stating the obvious here to remind you that a lot of people live with other people who are not their sexual or romantic partners, and some of those people do not because they can't have anything else, but because that's how they want to live. I know people who have bought and share 2 and 3-flats with chosen family and friends, I know people who have lived with roommates for many years very gladly and happily. If you want to talk about how you can seek that out, I'm happy to talk about that with you.

I also disagree with you, for the record, that we can find our people at any time of life. Not only did I meet my best friend in my mid-thirties, I'm currently in one of the most loving relationships of my life, a relationship that started when both myself and the person I'm in it with were in our fifties. There's a pair of people I know with a great love I admire and love to see who met in their 70s after they both had already lost partners who were great loves before them. It is harder to be on your own for a while before that? Sometimes. But I also know a loooooooot of people who are or have been in long, crummy, sometimes even abusive marriages or other relationships who sure, may have gotten breaks on their taxes and cheaper costs of daily living, but often at the price of being really lonely and unloved for decades, often when the rest of the world figured they were doing just fine because look at them, they have a spouse and kids and a house and everyone is smiling in pictures. :/ People can suffer as much in relationships, very much including the culturally-celebrated kinds, as outside of them. That's probably obvious, but I always think it's worth a reminder.

Being aroace isn't the barrier to a longtime partner who is a platonic friend or a cohabitation situation you love and value. There are barriers to those things sometimes, but that actually isn't one of them, or rather, I don't think it has to be: not for you, not for anyone. <3

I'm happy to talk more with you about any of this if you'd like, I do just want to let you know I'm in the middle of an end-of-life situation with a beloved pet (which, for me, is very much a real relationship, right on par with those I have with people), so I'm both in and out a bit here at the moment, and I'm also not going to be as resilient to anger as I am at other times, so I'm probably not the best person atm to work through the angry feelings you're having.

[meep]

Hello, I greatly appreciate your responses here! I honestly didn’t expect anything more, because as you rightly identified, my comments were shitty and cruel. I tried to find an edit post button to delete them but couldn’t, so my bad take will stay up there. I am just very tired of people telling me that platonic partnerships are possible, because it takes two people to agree to it, and I have never met anyone else who isn’t entirely immersed in romantic relationship superiority. And nor do I expect to.

I’m sorry for your loss.

[Tara]

Hi, meep:

I also send my regrets that you are dealing with this right now - the depression on top of life issues you are trying to solve. I agree with Heather that making decisions or solving for our issues within a depressed state is difficult and does not bring our best selves to the table to enact change or see things from a different angle. I do want to encourage you to possibly see your situation from a different angle as I am right now. First of all, it seems you are thinking very definitively and fixed about all of this. You may be aroace right now, but does that mean you 100% will be always? It's just a consideration. Also, if you will continue to be aroace, I think you are making lots of generalizations about what it means, what is possible, and what to expect. There are lots of aroaces who enjoy life - maybe with challenges, and maybe in ways different from those who are not aroace, but still find satisfaction, contentment, and happiness. I disagree that you will never meet someone not totally immersed in a romantic relationship. There are so many people in the world that this is so mathematically impossible. The question is, what does it look like currently for you to put yourself out there and meet different people in different environments. This will increase your opportunities for meeting someone new and different.

Just for context, I am not aroace, but I do semi-identify as someone who does not want a typical romantic relationship - do not want to get married or live with anyone. I also choose to abstain from sex right now. While I am sexual individually, I have placed more of my sexuality and my capacity for relationship towards developing one with myself. I have done this to alleviate the pain of thinking I will find everything I need in another person and to recover from some deep feelings of loneliess. This does not mean I do not pursue relationship with others, but I do so in a way that I am free from developing intense attachment or neediness for the other that makes it seem like I can't exist or live without the other person.

I encourage you to think differently and more openly about the possibility of relationship and the many ways they can exist. Does this sound reasonable to you?