Realizing there is over the usual 26 letters in the LGBTQ+ alphabet, quite often we do not tend to mention the entire acrostic, meaning that quite often we will forget some letters, or some will get “lost in translation”. One letter in the alphabet that tends to get a bit lost are the two A’s (yes there are two and they are right beside each other), which stand for Aromantic and Asexual. These two letters have a lot more in common, even though they are opposites, and the reasoning behind that is a little something called “The Ace Spectrum.”
The Ace spectrum is a basic thing all humans have within us, it’s just how you define your relationships. There are two main aspects in this spectrum, which are romantic attraction and sexual attraction. Romantic attraction is basically referring to those who you would like to be in a relationship with, whether it be kings, queens, or something in-between, you love who you love. Sexual attraction is who you would like to have a more…physical relationship with. Now that these have been defined, let’s get back to learning outside of class.
We’ll start with Aromantic because it’s easier to explain, Aromantic is basically how you don’t have romantic feelings for anyone. Nothing makes you feel as if you would want to be in a relationship, you don’t necessarily want to date someone, but you can still have the other area of the spectrum. Asexuality is a bit harder to explain because it’s not as accepted yet. Being asexual basically means that you don’t feel sexual attraction to people, this doesn’t mean you can’t be in a relationship, it’s just that you don’t want the more physical aspect. I will say however, some Aromantic people get into relationships and just don’t feel as if they are romantic in certain senses of the word. Asexual people will also get into more physical relations with someone in a relationship, they just won’t feel that attraction.
This article will be quite confusing, mostly because when I try to explain this to people, I’d use more explicit language that I can’t exactly use in the school’s newspaper. If you’d like to learn more about this, do some research, there’s a few books that have good sections on it too, one I read recently titled “This book is gay” explains it well but uses language I can’t use here.
Thank you for reading.
Man, I went through an entire article about asexuality and aromantics and never once used the word sex.
