Aromantic Awareness Week 2025

On aromantic awareness and stigma

Happy belated Aromantic Awareness Week! Aromantic Awareness Week always follows Valentines day, so this year (2025) it was February 16-22.

Aromanticism is a romantic orientation referring to people who don't experience romantic attraction, or experience romantic attraction rarely or only under certain circumstances. Romantic attraction can be hard to pin down with just a short definition, but a simple way of looking at it is that aromantic (aro) people usually don't experience romantic crushes or fall in love. We don't normally talk about romantic orientations because it's assumed that your sexuality is a monolith, so sexual orientation tells you everything you need to know about someone's identity. For example, if someone is heterosexual, we expect that they are sexually and romantically attracted to people of a different gender. However, for some people sexual and romantic attraction can be distinct experiences. Aromantic people can be asexual (not experience sexual attraction) or any other orientation, such as heterosexual or bisexual.

This year for aromantic awareness week, I'd like discuss the way we talk about aromantic awareness. Articles about aromanticism are few and far between, but I usually see 2 or 3 come out every year during February that are designed to educate a general audience about aromanticism. Unfortunately, even though these articles are geared at spreading awareness, they consistently reinforce offensive assumptions about the aro community.

The biggest stereotype I commonly see is the assumption that aros are emotionless psychopaths. Articles tend to follow an explanation of aromanticism directly with the assurance that, actually, aro people do have feelings. Take this example from VICE: "Psychopaths, right? I’m talking about psychopaths? No. Unlike psychopaths...aros are capable of love. Love like the kind you feel for your dog, or chicken nuggets..." [1]. Obviously, the author thinks that any reasonable reader would assume aros are psychopaths upon learning for the first time that we don't experience romantic attraction, so this conclusion has to be directly disputed. The idea that aros are psychopaths is framed as a reasonable assumption that is unexpectedly untrue, rather than a harmful misconception.

Sometimes the author themselves doesn't seem convinced that we aren't psychopaths. A 2023 article posted on Cardinal Points segued directly from an explanation of how stressful it is to be pressured to find a partner (a legitimate point) into a story about an incel mass murderer:

"The societal pressure of finding a life partner can be crushing. It has sent some into violent outbursts, such as the likes of Elliot Rodger who murdered six because he was unsuccessful in obtaining a partner” [2].

At no point did the author specify that the man in question is not aro nor is he affiliated with the aro community in any way. The implication is clear: this is just what happens to people who can't find love. But don't worry, the author reassures us, it doesn't have to be this way! "It does not always have to end in bloodshed," as long as we aros remember that "love isn't just romantic” [2]. Yikes. For an ostensibly supportive article, this piece sends an alarming and entirely unfounded negative message about the aromantic community.

To be fair, these articles are not prime examples of current releases from mainstream sources. The VICE article is from 2014, and the Cardinal Points article is from a minor college paper. As much as I'd like to believe that this mindset is in the past or relegated to questionable sources, I continue to see this sentiment in relatively current articles by big-name queer organizations, albeit couched in marginally less offensive language. Educational articles are consistently written as if the the idea that aros must fundamentally lack all feeling and empathy is a natural conclusion.

Stonewall UK clarified in their "5 things you should know about aromantic people" article published in 2022 that aros are (shocker!) "capable of the full range of human emotion" [3]. The fact that aro people aren't "cold and heartless" made number 3 on the list of essential facts [3].

Them, the online magazine for LGBTQ issues, found it necessary to specify as the second point on their "10 Facts You Should Know About Aro People" list that "not all aromantic people are bitter and lonely" (they're not willing to make a blanket statement on the subject, though. Emphasis mine) [4]. If that didn't get the point across, item 9 was devoted to a similar message: "aros aren't emotionless" [4]. These articles may be well intentioned, but they only serve to perpetuate the idea that a lack of romantic attraction implies a lack of emotion in its entirety.

While familiarity with the term "aromantic" isn't widespread, the link between aromanticism and a lack of empathy or humanity is promoted in other ways. Aro-coding of characters in media (framing a character as not experiencing or understanding romantic love without explicitly using the term aromantic) is well documented as being widely used for villains and non-human characters. There are several James Bond villains who are expressly described as having no interest in sex or romance [5]. BBC's Sherlock is heavily aromantic-asexual coded, and while he's not a villain he openly describes himself as a sociopath [5]. Aromantic coded non-human characters are everywhere, from the Doctor in Doctor Who to Michael in The Good Place to Murderbot (the security cyborg) of The Murderbot Diaries [6]. These are just a few examples, but this trend is common enough to have been deemed a trope: the Villainous Aromantic Asexual [5].

The pervasiveness of this framing demonstrates broader cultural expectations about love: we have idealized romantic love to such a degree that it has eclipsed other forms of connection. In American society, we are consistently given the message that romantic love is true love and the epitome of the human experience. Where does that leave people who don't feel it? Lacking in the fundamental experience that makes people human? Lacking in the only kind of love that supposedly matters? Our obsession with romantic love has blinded us to the myriad of other ways in which people experience love and live their lives.

There are some aros who feel so disconnected from the concept of love that they would say they don't experience love in any capacity - romantic or otherwise. Aros who feel this was may identity as "loveless” [7]. But whether or not someone experiences love or attraction has no bearing on their capacity for empathy or experience of other emotions. It certainly doesn't make them less human. And there are many aros like myself who do experience love in our own way, even if it's not romantic.

I don't think this complete idealization of romantic love serves anyone, aromantic or otherwise. Aromantics are not the only ones who may go through life without a romantic partner. Irrespective of someone’s relationship status, needing to prove one's goodness, humanity, or capacity for love by experiencing romantic love is an unhelpful expectation that serves only to make people feel worse about themselves for not living up to cultural relationship ideals. Romantic love is great! But it's not everything. I think it's high time we take a little pressure off of romantic love and make space for acknowledging that there are other meaningful forms of connection and meaningful ways to live one's life that aren't centered on romantic partnership.

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References

[1] Tait, A. (2014, September 18). Aromantics just want to be your friend. VICE. Retrieved February 27, 2025, from https://www.vice.com/en/article/aromantics-amelia-tait-322/

[2] Fawn, B. (2023, February 17). Aromantic Awareness Week Approaches. Cardinal Points. Retrieved February 27, 2025, from https://cardinalpointsonline.com/editorial-desantis-gives-college-conservative-reformation/

[3] Stonewall. (2022, February 18). 5 things you should know about aromantic people. Retrieved February 27, 2025, from https://www.stonewall.org.uk/news/5-things-you-should-know-about-aromantic-people

[4] Plonski, L. (2022, September 2). 10 Facts You Should Know About Aromantic People. Them. https://www.them.us/story/facts-you-should-know-about-aromantic-people

[5] Brown, S. J. (2022). Unhuman. In Refusing Compulsory Sexuality: A Black Asexual Lens on Our Sex-Obsessed Culture (pp. 110–112). essay, North Atlantic Books.

[6] Autlaw. (2024, October 3). “The Murderbot Diaries” is Hugely Popular Amongst Neurodivergent and LGBTQ Folks. Medium. https://medium.com/@theautlaw/murderbot-is-hugely-popular-amongst-neurodivergent-and-lgbtqia-folks-a7638d3d62fe

[7] Loveless Aromantic. (2022, June 11). LGBTQIA+ Wiki. Retrieved February 27, 2025, from https://lgbtqia.wiki/wiki/Loveless_Aromantic