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.
