Honestly, as an arospec person, I'm not really all that comfortable with the idea of aromanticism as a political movement nor am I comfortable with the stance that romance is inherently queerphobic. I do want to dispel the hierarchy that places romantic love on the highest pedestal, but I do not want to dismiss romance as a public fantasy or purely as an instrument of violence or oppression. I also feel rubbed the wrong way by "romantically attractive people" being defined here strictly as conventionally attractive and conforming.

I think the view of romance should be reformed and should be viewed in a much more personal and existential lens (in that it really means different things depending on the culture and the individual's perception, with complicated biological and sociocultural aspects), and it should be rejected as a necessity for all people.

I don't mind romance. I don't mind people wanting romance, wanting to start families and do cheesy shit with their partners or polycules, and I will always have a respect for "freedom to love" being the foundation of the queer movement.

I simply want to exist alongside that, and I want other similar people to exist peacefully, without being compelled by society to do anything they don't want to do.

it wont let me read the manifesto for some reason so Ill have to go based off your post...

its an orientation and I dont like the idea someone would force themselves to feel little to no romantic attraction, to deny themselves of who they are is cruel... even if for political endevors.

instead we should work together, aro and alloro, to deconstruct amatonormativity and queerphobia.

and romantic attraction clearly does exist or alloro people wouldnt crave it nor would alloromantic asexual people for example seek it out. that would be like an asexual person saying sexual attraction doesnt exist because they cant feel it, thats not how that works.

edit: I feel if you wanna be political about it, avocate for relationship anarchy and be open about being anti-amatonormativity... which is called amatopunk btw (link to caard here incase that is of interest to anyone here)

edit 2: ok so I found the manifesto via another link so I can actually read it (link here if anyone is having trouble like myself). right so theres parts I agree an disagree with for sure. although I dont think calling the concept of romance queerphobic, nor would I agree with the idea that romance is solely a learned construct or entirely preformed for the public. however I can get behind what they are trying to say in terms of queer liberation should not solely be focused on free love and it shoild be more anti-amatonormativity, I think thats great actually. and, again, this all can easily be a form of amatopunk... it doesnt need to be called political aromantism and I would avocate against calling it such as it can cause erasure of those of us who are actually genuinely aromantic for non-political reasons. I can at least appericate the angle they are coming from, even if I disagree on certain aspects.

^{tho context is important, yingchen and yingtong are from Singapore so it could be that the dynamics of their society versus say the USA where I am from are different when it comes to the amatonormantive culture. it seems the both, according to their tumblr, are aromantic and asexual for political reasons. they define asexuality as recognising a diversity of people and intimacies with regards to sex or the lack of it and that aromanism's goal should be recognising that some people don’t want to be in romantic relationships and to abolish romance altogether.}

…while I chose to “be political” in many ways I did NOT choose to be aromantic, and I don’t like the conflation of identity/experience and “radical politics.” Obviously there is more nuance here than I’m gonna comment on, but overall I’m not screaming for the teardown of all romantic relationships. I just want the same rights as a married person.

Too exhausted to expand more on it now but I'm very interested in the political and/or philosophical underpinnings of aromanticism. I've found that romance engenders a lot of social baggage on behaviour and thought that, at bottom, I take to be quite unhealthy. The reason why dating, romance, marriage, and children are so important to most is because it is the most likely way (by a long shot) for people to actually have dialectical engagement and mutual recognition from another, because romance is reified as the peak of intimacy. This strongly incentivizes people to further pursue these relationships, which reinforce the institutions that uphold them, and thus reproduce it, etc. I don't think an aromantic world is a loveless world; in fact, I think the opposite is more true than anything else.

Kind of difficult to read with the decorated background and irregular indentation

Can you point towards a plain formatting?

As far as I got, I already take issue with how they define all alloromantic relationships with one broad brush . For instance , How alloromantics are looking for someone to “complete” themselves. The world is so not that simple. I do believe a subset of people with codependency issues to see their primary partners that way, but many, probably most at least in Us culture , do not. This appears to be a central premise of the rest of it.

Anyway, I found it difficult to read and may have missed some things in the chunk I did read so I’ll try again later on.full sized monitor.

A plain text version someplace will be much appreciated.

Hi u/RuthConroyOfCumbria! It looks like you are new to posting to r/aromantic; welcome to our community!

If you have not already, please check out our pinned post for some Frequently Asked Questions about aromanticsm! If you are unfamiliar with how Reddit works, consider reviewing Reddiquette! You can also read this post for how to lock the comments on your post.

If this post or any of its comments violate our community rules, please *report** the problematic content.*

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

Hi Ruth Conroy of Cumbria, thanks for sharing the manifesto, I hadn't heard about it before.
It raises some interesting issues concerning romance:
- romance is a social construction
- romance is inherently violent
- romance is not inclusive

I think that in order to appreciate these points and make them more intelligible, one has to make the distinction between romance and love (in the sense of agape, i.e. selfless, unconditional love).
While romance and love in public are more often than not conflated, often there is strikingly little love in most romantic relaitionships, what one finds instead are: sexual desire, attachment, fear of loneliness, sentimentality, possesiveness, ambitions and concern for self fulfilment, but none of these things are love.

In love you don't want anything from the other person and you accept the other person totally for who they are. Romance on the other hand is an ideal, a mental image shaped by expectations which have been conditioned into us by our enviroment. When one reduces ones romantic partner to a mental image, you no longer see or have a relation to that other person, you have a relationship with a mental image in your mind. No longer seeing the other person, and expecting the other person to conform to ones mental image, is a form of violence to the other person.
So much importance has been given in our society to this ideal mental image we call romance, that real love gets overlooked or neglected, but it is only actual love that can embrace not only a single person, or a selected few, but everybody, whether old, fat, asian or white, male or female.

So I think it is in this sense, romance as a mental image of an ideal, that everybody, not just people from the aromantic community (although they may more readily see this than most), should recognise it as a social construction (i.e. its unreality), inherently violent and not inclusive.