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It's apparently aromantic awareness week. At 60, I only realised a few years ago that this is what I was. Before that, I didn't have a name, only the reality.

One of the things I always knew, from quite a young age, was that I would never be married. As a teen and young man, I was painfully aware of the pressure to settle down and get into a settled relationship. But, to be honest, I never had the desire to. It's not that I didn't try, but it was certainly more in terms of thinking that I should do, rather than because I had any real desire to. It was not a pleasant time in my life. The relationships I did attempt never ended well, which was hardly surprising and almost totally my fault and I always felt a certain amount of guilt about that. I also felt a degree of shame about the way I felt and the need to hide it. It was yet another way in which I was different and the sort of different that stood out and set me apart from others.

Of course, being an undiagnosed autistic, this feeling was nothing new. I had always been different, in so many ways and learning how to hide that, at least as best as I could, had become second nature by then. It also gave me another reason to, that I was so fundamentally broken, that I couldn't even function normally in this way. That it wasn't me, it was all the ways in which I was wrong and dysfunctional and the low self-esteem that arose from this, that made me this way and that if only I could find the key to understanding and therefore potentially fixing this, then I could be alright.

Not that I was going to get to that point for a long time, or that fixing this was ever really an option. But, as the years rolled by and the pressure to be in a relationship faded, I did manage to settle more into my solitary life, without feeling the guilt and failure as much as I did, but with it still being there. Of course, as a man, I had the advantage of being able to do this. There is a quantifiable and appalling difference in the way men and women are treated in this respect. In the ways in which society views unmarried, or unpartnered, men and women, that has nothing to do with the reality and everything to do with prejudice, bigotry and sexism. Something that may never entirely be eradicated. Because the normative expectations of what it means and the ways it should be expressed are deeply engrained.

But, the simple fact is that, being in a traditional romantic relationship is as impossible for me to imagine, or want, as being in a homosexual relationship is for a straight person, or vice versa. We are the way we are, simple as. Not because we're broken, or wrong, or defective in any way. But, because it is our nature. I am aromantic, just as I'm autistic, and there really is nothing wrong with that.

#Aromantic
#Autism