Possibilities (1/?): Ace Theorizing and Ace Practice

Perhaps the most contentious part of A Life Unexamined’s post on things they’d wished they’d known about being an Aro Ace in a relationship is their line: “Sometimes you’ll feel like screaming at the aces who talk about what their ideal relationship would look like, at their checklists of what exact things they’d do and wouldn’t do, at the endless hypothetical discussions that actual, real life relationships never seem to feature in.” This quote points to something that I can definitely see, both in myself and in the parts of the ace community that I interact with online. There is an eagerness to define or describe or imagine a perfect asexual aromantic relationship, or relational system, but the stories of people who have made it happen are few and far between.

               This is not to say that theorizing about relationships that break from allosexual norms is bad, but following a weak form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, theory and practice must inform each other, there must be a praxis: whereby theory opens up new forms of relationships and offers new ways of understanding (perceiving) existing ones, and on the other hand, practice must provide new things to understand and must push the boundaries of what we can theorize about.

               Now, that’s all well and doctrinally sound to say, but in truth relationships are much easier to theorize about than they are to practice. I don’t mean to imply that theorizing about ideal relationships is unnecessary, or unimportant, dreams of the future are intensely hopeful (and I am a creature craving hope), and in my own life I lean heavily toward the theory end of almost everything. But it is precisely because ace relationships are harder in practice (because maintaining a relationship takes more time, emotional investment, interpersonal dedication, etc. than writing about an ideal relationship), that they are at least as important. Ace relationships, even when they fail to follow the theory to the letter, even when they don’t last, have the gravitas and impact of interpersonal relationships that have succeeded at least for a time. Each relationship like this, whether or not it succeeds in the long term, can be used as the fodder for a next generation of theory.

               This prescript is mostly a reminder to myself, cause I’m going to write about what some possible futures look like for me, and, since I’m relatively young, those futures exist almost solely in the realm of theory, largely unpracticed – barely more than pieced together dreams and collected wishes, but at the same time, those wishes and dreams couldn’t happen until I had met and loved people who I could imagine those futures happening with. So the following ideas are unlived, but they aren’t uninfluenced by real relationships, and I’ll do my best to stay away from endless checklists and hard and fast boundaries.