When people ask me how I knew I was aro-ace and when, the answer is: for a long time, I didn’t. I realised I was asexual at age 30 and aromantic just around a year ago.
It’s a long time to go knowing you’re different but not knowing why and what you’re missing.
How do you even know you’re missing something if it’s not visible or easily defined, when society is built so completely around it?
I’d been trying so hard to fit in since I was a teen, part of my autistic masking, to have what everyone else did, to reciprocate what others were sharing with me, and I kept hurting others (and myself) in the process, especially when there was little of me left to mask.
Throw some co-dependency and trauma into the mix and you get a recipe full of shame and loneliness (and a cPTSD disability). It’s like failing at the one thing you’re force-fed from literal infancy through patriarchal lenses: women are meant to be the love epicentre of society, are sexual and sensual, and their main achievements in life are to have a home and a family. Great. I should feel like a proud rebel, but I don’t.
Even before I understood who I was, I grieved the kind of connection society is built around, and what I couldn’t feel or give. I was lying to myself, I was being lied to, I was lying. I was coerced into doing and saying things ‘everyone did’. Eventually, I had had enough and was broken beyond repair and I tried looking into ‘fixing myself’.
Of course, beyond the cPTSD, the root cause of all this was something that could never have been fixed. If only I’d known, if only I’d had the words to express my feelings with, I could’ve enforced boundaries I knew I had but kept being pushed because ‘it’s what everyone does’.
But I can’t change my brain or body, all I can do is accept it. I’m grateful that my current husband, Demi himself, has accepted and understood me along the way, and has never abandoned me out of fear or refusal to understand. I am who he met in 2019, I just know a bit better now what works and what doesn’t work for me. My feelings haven’t changed; they are just clearer to express.
Had I not emigrated, though, I likely would never have known, and this terrifies me. Romania has one of the lowest LGBTQIA+ acceptance rates, and I received lots of messages from people offering to ‘fix me’: making derogatory comments about my husband and denying my lived experience and identity.
I probably would’ve kept trying to fit within a patriarchal heteronormative box I never fitted into in the first place, being made to feel cold and worth cheating on, without there ever being a question about how I feel and what I like.
The UK isn’t perfect either – we’re still marginalised within the LGBTQ+ community. I’ve had people assume that ‘I was abusing my husband by withholding sex’ because they heard I was asexual, or that I was only using my husband because I was aromantic.
Others have assumed I couldn’t be asexual because I dress in such an attractive way sometimes.
I do not need fixing; I need to be believed, understood and accepted as I am.
You see humans
I see the colour shades
The shadows and the sparks
The hidden and the precious
It’s heavenly, holy art
It implodes my chest with its beauty.
I don’t want to say sorry
That I see the world
Through tinted glass – A barrier unfurled,
Not a phase, won’t pass.
Tried, I can’t be fixed,
What will it take
You to believe me?
I just love differently.
Cristina Costache (she/her) is an outgoing national council representative and council representative to the patient liaison group’s aroaceness.