Relationships

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(Long time no see, right? Even the excuses for why it’s so late provided in this comic itself are old.)

I meant to do this long ago for when Neutrois Nonsense hosted the carnival, but one thing led to another and school started and then my computer blew up.

I figure the day after Valentine’s is an appropriate enough day to get back on track. This post was supposed to be entirely about relationships anyway. There were a lot of things I wanted to say with this comic, which is why I guess I held it up for so long in addition to all the problems I had. There were a lot of words I couldn’t find but wanted to say. So please consider this an inadequate sampling of what goes on in my head when I think of relationships.

I am a demiromantic individual, I simply don’t experience romantic attraction to someone unless I form some kind of connection to them. Even then, I don’t know what kind of connection, as I have many different, many special, and many treasured connections to many people in my life, but don’t feel any romantic attraction to them. I think a lot of asexuals feel left out when it comes to relationships, and not just romantically. We often don’t have the words to tell the people we’re in relationships with how important they are to us, sometimes we’re not sure how we stand with them, and sometimes they can’t reciprocate our feelings – whatever they may be, as intangible as they may be, even if they are nonromantic feelings. I think a lot of asexuals get hurt because we don’t have names for things we want in relationships, and we don’t know how to ask for them, and any relationship that is not sexual and not romantic is devalued and therefore what are you doing looking for things in relationships that aren’t those things, you weirdo?

It’s part of the reason I’m so excited to see the asexuality community grow and engage in even more communities and create even more dialogue. I don’t think having an asexual perspective on relationships is necessarily revolutionary, (nor, sometimes, exclusively asexual) because I think traces of close friendships and the like appear on the edges of our stories and our media from time to time, but I think asexuals can better draw attention to such relationships. Maybe in the future, on social network sites, instead of “looking for <3" we'll find, "looking for queerplatonic" options, or many other wonderful words we've yet to come up with.

I also don't think that asexuals are exclusive in their search for relationships that aren't sexual/romantic. Which is why whenever people form connections to each other and it's a thing you get attached to… when something goes awry or wrong, it hurts no matter what your orientation or what kind of connection you had.

But I really, really do think it’s cool that people can even connect to each other at all. I think a lot of things get in the way of connecting to other people sometimes, but an equal number of things help make a connection, and I think it’s interesting to see what works and what doesn’t. We’re all very different, and similar, and we’ll fight or make friends because of it (or create a whole number of relationships that can’t be boiled down simply to “friend” or “enemy.”)

Isn’t that cool?

(This post is kind of a mess. It’s a bunch of half-formed thinky-thoughts. Just note that this post doesn’t intend to judge sexual/romantic or any other sorts of relationships that have actual words to go with them as lesser or gross or bad. Just that I’m really excited to see new words for relationships to happen.)

(Er, next comic will actually attempt to be humorous.)

-Annah

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