Love Requires a Hunger I Don't Have
I'm aromantic and that means my love is better than yours
For a while I said that I was obsessed with love; not as an academic concept, but the idea of falling in love, being monogamous for once, and living the fairytale dream. Recently I realized I was an addict. I was not a Greek tragic figure caught fantasizing about the unreachable, someone given a taste of love only to have it yanked away when I wanted it most; I was an addict. Love is like a pack of cigarettes to me. It hungers inside of me, feels like a years worth of therapy and the best sex of your life compressed into an instant. I was using anything I could to act as nicotine patches for my heart.
Over these past few months my romantic life has been in a whirl. I felt romantic attraction for the second time in my life only to have any hope torn to shreds in front of me. I cried for three hours that day, rare feelings wasted on something that I knew wouldn’t happen but I still found myself caught in the storm. I was broken. I thought I was over her, all the signs pointed to yes, and then at the last possible moment the hunger came back. Seeing her was like an alcoholic walking into a bar to catch up with friends. The relapse wasn’t an if, but a when. Despite the pain, she was useful. I replaced my old addiction; the ex who broke my broke my soul had no space in my heart anymore. Or so I thought. You can’t replace one addiction with another hoping the first will go away. At the first whiff of cigarette smoke I was back in her arms. We got back together, we said I love you and made out, but it felt so wrong. I love her, I really do, but I couldn’t go back.
It was the middle of lockdown, I had been dating Francis long distance since the day after I came out; my first real romance. We texted all day every day, but only ever talked twice before then. I was drunk and at a party in the woods with some friends. I texted them I love you. We would break up come New Year.
Something I have found myself repeating time and time is that you don’t be gay by being straight; the more rules of theirs we play by, the more they’ll want us to play by all of them. This has been a useful phrase for fighting against assimilationist tendencies in my community and letting people know why I was a relationship anarchist. Relationships aren’t something that need to be defined, they are just a feeling. I am not dating one of my best friends, we’re exes actually, but we still intensely cuddle and find intimate comfort in each other’s presence. Dating just wasn’t for us, and that is ok. I want her in the rest of my life, whatever form that takes. Despite preaching this creed for over a year I never made the next logical step.
Yesterday I was talking to a friend about how much of a sapphic mess our summers were, how now that we both got what we wanted and somehow still there was this emptiness. We always talked about how much-failed romance hurt because we never knew when the next one was going to pop up. Love was lightning in a bottle, getting close to being captured but always teasing us, never sure when it would stay caught or just zip away. It is pure agony watching what feels like a finite resource disappear. We could be smoking our last cigarette and not know it.
In my commiseration something clicked: just because it is our last cigarette doesn’t mean we need to hold onto it forever, making each hit count. We cherish the love we have because we know what it is worth.
Two months into dating Shira I knew I wanted to marry her, I said I love you with the most passion I had in my heart. We had only kissed for the first time a few weeks ago. She asked to wait, she wanted to love me but wasn’t quite sure. She would say it a month later. Come June she would break up with me thinking that she was aromantic.
In my writing on Love in the Locked Tomb Trilogy I talked about how Nona had the purest love out of everyone in the third book. More than the people who fused their souls together, more than the people who sacrificed everything so that the other could live forever, more than the person who would rather lobotomize her way out of divinity just so she didn’t have to deal with the pain of loss. Nona’s love was pure because she didn’t feel it. She had to be taught what love was; if you know love anecdotally you see a very different picture than everyone else. My idea of love was a fire burning bright and proud, something always hungering for more and always satiated, easy, just like keeping a fire going with lighter fluid. This is still love of course, but it is not the love that was built for us as aromantic people. Instead of something burning so bright it’s visible from orbit, we create a pile of charcoals that burn just as bright, but we appreciate every source of love that comes our way and everything that makes it special.
We have been freed from traditional structures of love; free from the rules of any heteronormativity filtered throughout queer culture. So instead of clinging to scraps from people who do not treat us right, we should accept what we have and treat the bright fires of romantic love as a treat instead of a meal. And maybe it is a full-course dessert, or maybe it is just a chocolate bar; but we should enjoy it for what it is instead of a replacement for the healthy diet of loved ones we have alongside it. Dousing the embers in gasoline just because we remember the warmth isn’t what we were made for. We are this way so we can keep the coals burning. We let our love take the form it does so naturally and cherish what we have. We know love better because it isn’t instinct. Our simulacra of “real love” is more important because we had to put it all together instead of it just being handed to us. Our love is purer because there aren't any fuzzy brain chemicals controlling us against our will.
We went apple picking, she was going to go home to do work. I asked if saying I love you would make her stay for a bit. It did and later in the day I made sure she knew that I meant it. She isn’t sure if she wants to say it back, but does so in a few weeks during a fit of passion. We break up in April right before nationals.
When I wrote my piece about Nona I don’t think I knew I was aromantic, which means all that talk about not understanding love making her the most loving a call from inside the house. I wrote that while I was in a relationship and I said I love you because it felt right to say, but as soon as I said it, the feeling went away. I didn’t know what love was. I just stared at one painting for eight months and so when I moved on to the next one it was my only understanding of art so I tried to apply the same framework and failed.
The Greeks had eight words for love while we only have one. In some ways this diminishes the word’s power, but often so do we. You do not love the Backstreet Boys in the same way you love your sister nor her in the same way you love a life-long companion. When I say I love my friends I mean it with every fiber of my being, but there is no way for me to describe that other than writing 2,000 words on the matter because our language does not have the room for that. Some have tried to use the term queer-platonic to describe that relationship, but there is nothing platonic about this love. This is trivializing my undying passion for those who mean most to me by contrasting it to the heteronormative understanding of relationships and bastardizing what makes us special. Just because you cannot wrap your head around loving anyone like this, spending the rest of your life with someone you have no desire to have a relationship with, does not make what we have is any less beautiful. I often refer to my friend from earlier (the ex) as my partner to my coworkers and friends because it is just so much easier to explain, but we are not partners, we are friends. Who cares if we do so much that a couple would together, she is my friend and I do not have to explain this love we have just so things are easier for you. I am the first person who will tell you to burn every label down and that passing is fake, but I am still the one using them as a crutch when it comes to fitting in.
Eight months after she and I broke up, I came to her and said, “I want to spend the rest of my life with you. Like our parents and their friends from college they will always cherish. I want people to look at what we had and say ‘They were really good friends’ and have it be genuine, not some erasure of queerness from history”. While it is easy to laugh, joke, and say “they were roommates” when any historical queer couple gets brought up, but why do they only exist in that framework? Why can’t you love your friends in a way that only makes sense to you? Why is it only queer erasure or romantic relationship?
Most people’s understanding of love comes down to linguistic semantics and is used to question everything that does not fit within the bounds of monogamy. My friendships don’t make sense within that framework, and even if you seem to understand, I do not think you do. It is the difference between knowing and understanding. You may know, but understanding takes time. My understanding of love is built from the ground up because I had to; your love came naturally. You cannot appreciate your sight until you have lost it. What is second nature to so much of the world is a skill that cannot even be learned. It is the hardest to see beauty in your own language but easy when you learn another.
Love is the most powerful force in the universe, one of the most beautiful things I have ever had the pleasure of experiencing. Despite this, we constrain what it can mean so often. If we look at those eight Greek loves, they are just different contexts, not describing anything novel. How can something so powerful, so indescribable outside of the abstract, have such a narrow definition? When we talk about love we rarely talk about it outside of the romantic. The love of the boybands and siblings is never roped into the discussion because even though it is love, we do not see it as such. It is being constrained because most of the population only experiences it in one context, and as such, does not value its worth. Most people do not know what it’s worth, they claim to care so much about it but clearly do not otherwise they would celebrate it as much as I do.
Life is too short, and love is too long to do otherwise.
Over the next eight months, I yearn for Ashley’s companionship until we make-out on NYE and she says it back to me again, this time not romantically. We realize we don’t work as a couple but instead as this weird relationship anarchy dyad that exists around each other which inspired this piece. I feel more comfort in her arms than anyone else. We are there for each other when things go wrong and when they go right. I love her with every bone in my body but not in any way that could be called romance.
I am going to be honest: lost the plot somewhere in here, but that’s what you signed up for. If you wanted something coherent, well put together, and not written across various lunch breaks in a massive stream of consciousness you really should’ve put your phone down back in 2023 when I started this blog. Just like my love, my writing doesn’t make sense, is filled with too many metaphors, and is all over the place, but it is still so G-ddamn beautiful you can’t help but stare and follow along. That is ok, I write these mostly for me just as I love for myself and not for anyone else. Just know my love is better than yours because I built it myself 😘
Rose is a nerd who got her degree in media studies who loves her some gay shit in comics. Everything here is subjective but also completely correct so suck it up neckbeard. Pretty girlies can give constructive feedback if they want. Follow me on everything @mrsdrmaestro