Seeing asexuality defined for the first time, it was like a glowing neon sign suddenly illuminated before my eyes after wandering lost in a dense fog so much of my life.

Yet when it comes to aromanticism, I’m still waiting for the haze to clear.

The first obstacle, which is still much too close in my rearview mirror? A desperate internalized pressure to be “normal” in even the smallest way. Growing up not only ace aro but neurodivergent without knowing it, very early on I felt it like a thousand invisible needles in my skin- different, weird, alien, came the whispers whenever I ventured outside of my own safe little circle. If there was one aspect of me and my interests that would not leave classmates, teachers, relatives, everyone eyeing me as if I’d just stepped out of a UFO, I would take it and hold onto it for dear life… even if it was only ever a lie. Tired of sitting in silent bewilderment as her young classmates gushed over crushes at slumber parties (is it any wonder I was the obligation invite), I decided that surely, surely anything from my desire to befriend the class clown to thinking that guy in High School Musical was a good dancer had to be exactly what everyone was so worked up about… right?

My path was illuminated for a moment when like a bolt of lightning I discovered that platonic attraction was real and valid beyond the ‘friend crushes’ I’d dismiss whenever I found myself drawn to a girl. My sturdy partition lost a few bricks, as I was forced to acknowledge for the first time that I wasn’t exactly the heteronorm… yet there was still some small part of me that desperately wanted to be. It’s the part that can still see the bewilderment on the faces of the girls at the pizza party when I sent their conversation grinding to a halt by bringing up an obscure special interest; that blocked out memories of elementary school bullying to have a chance at survival in the high school halls. Seeing only a handful of openly queer students in my small town stand out like a vibrant ROYGBIV in cloudy skies, my internalized queerphobia was entrenched in fear. Anything not the heteronorm, anything that invited more critical stares was not something I dared even imagine could be inside of me. Around me, fine, even friends with me, fine- friendship trumped that every time- but another reason for anyone to gawk at me specifically? Though it was like clinging to a cactus, that was reason enough for me to hold onto the label ‘heteroromantic’ for a long time, even if I was forced to downgrade to gray and/or demi/and or just-not-very all too quickly… however, it was far from the only reason.

Fear of being really and truly alone is a chasm I’m still looking for a way through, that I hardly dare approach- when I drop a rock down, I can’t even hear it hit the ground. In the end, this fear stains everything else, from my weirdness complex to my internalized queerphobia. Immediately upon discovering I was ace, I was overcome with relief… and a crippling sense of hopelessness. Even as a presumed romantic ace- even as a presumed straight-but-bad-at-it- the notion of finding what I was looking for seemed nothing more than a fantasy, another tale I was writing myself. Realizing all along I’d wanted a sexless partnership that didn’t conform to amatonorms (and that I wasn’t the only one) didn’t change that. If anything I avoided identifying as aromantic because somewhere deep down I imagined it cleaved my chances of not just having a partner but simply not being well and truly alone when society and everyone around me placed romance on an unreachable pedestal.

If this wasn’t enough, I’d had two strange instances of intensive attraction that I couldn’t just dismiss as purely platonic or purely romantic, neither seemed to fit at the time. Though I puzzled and agonized for many a night, it seems almost painfully clear in hindsight that the first was one last desperate cling to heteronormativity and the idea of a life not totally alone before I was flung into the rainbow seas. How easy it would have been- have a ‘crush’ on the boy in the Japanese guest house who becomes your honorary oniichan and friend in your summer of dreams. Convince yourself that only now with this intensity do you finally understand what had classmates obsessing- never mind that none of the physical attraction is there and you don’t want to date him so much as you just want him around; in the end, it makes sense that it’s only happening here in Japan, you feel more at home anyway, far from the shadow of the Alice everyone knew.

Though you’ve accepted that sexual attraction is nowhere to be found, once again in a far away land comes attraction more intensive than the rest; it’s easy to convince yourself maybe romanticish does happen now and again, but it has to be a friend and you have to be at ease and that’s all more easily had in Japan. An ace aro couldn’t get enough when squishing for their lives over a straight man, but maybe, just maybe if there’s romantic thrown in it’d be enough to date for a spell, to be intoxicated by a fulfilling squish for just a little while before it’s squashed in the end.

With years of perspective, it’s easy to break these into a million pieces, point to a shard and say “that’s the fear of being alone, that’s the fear of no friends in 5000 miles, that’s…” Yet the truth is they’re just fossils. As much as I can study and over think and guess, when they’re dead relics of another Alice, I can never know if they were truly anything unusual, or merely an intoxicating draught of platonic feelings and inner demons I’m still drinking to this day.

So crushed by the weight of nuance I just couldn’t get comfortable in the ‘aromantic’ box, I must’ve read a hundred accounts of everything romantic spectrum. In the end my hands were still just as tied by others’ prying eyes- it wasn’t about what I was comfortable with when I was alone in my room (as often as that was), it was about finding one convenient little word to convey everything I wanted to. It was an attempt to buy myself the understanding I could never seem to get in 20 years’ worth of words. I was waiting and waiting for a perfect fit that didn’t exist and it wasn’t the first time. Long before the definition burned through my denial, I encountered once in a thousand fanfictions a character explicitly stated to be asexual… and inexplicably, promptly dismissed it because the character depicted wasn’t a fan of sex but would willingly compromise for a partner. Well, that’s not me, I scoffed (with zero understanding of what sexual attraction actually was), yet again everyone is fine with participating but me! The wider implications that this still meant it was far from just me who was “weird” somehow evaded me, lost like everything else in the ghostly fog overhead.

That’s when… I gave up. I returned to Japan as a jaded working adult, identifying as aromantic on paper but truly just not identifying at all. I’m whatever, it’s whatever, I just don’t know and I just don’t care. For the first time open to whatever may happen without fixating on slapping a label on it, I found myself squishing more hardcore than ever all across the board. Maybe some of it was desperate loneliness on what felt like a cruel foreign planet, maybe none of it was. Some were no different than any of the dozens of squishes in my history; some summoned all of the things people most consistently claimed was intrinsic to romantic attraction yet still offered no glowing neon sign. Yet, I just didn’t care. Somehow, after years of stumbling about in the fog, grasping for another light switch, I became ok with the fact that it may simply not exist. Having experienced the full spectrum of how fluid and irrational emotional attraction is, whatever category you want to force it into- having felt more secure in the friendships I’d somehow found for myself than I ever thought possible- finally what friends and strangers had advised me for years resonated: Labels are for you in the end.

Tuning out everything but my own instincts, I found my own comfortable place on the spectrum- aromantic and quioromantic, my imperfect best fit. Aromantic to convey that I experience no romantic attraction so far as I’m aware (and conveniently insinuate my lack of interest in engaging in all things traditionally romantic). Quioromantic to convey that I don’t actually comprehend the big difference between romantic and platonic attraction beyond societal constructs, and either way I just don’t resonate with a binary black and white separation. It finally feels valid that there’s nothing more specific that seems to cover it; it finally seems ok that I use ‘squish’ for convenience yet can’t actually identify much of my attraction nowadays, that I differentiate no longer by attraction type but by intensity. While I wish there were handy words to differentiate the squish that keeps me up at night with dreams of a platonic partnership (yet stays far away from romantic cliché) and the squish I forget after five seconds having never learned the person’s name and everything in between, it doesn’t leave me changed. At the end of the day I still don’t doubt that a traditional ‘romantic’ relationship isn’t what I actually want and that I’d struggle to engage in one for the sake of an alloromantic partner. Forcing myself into another romantic label for an even less comfy fit isn’t going to change that. Instead of always chasing “easier” labels and life paths that only lead me to dead ends, it’s time to follow my heart, even if the road ahead is a little foggy.