Guest post by Former Nonbinary Sunbeam

Happy Pride to those who celebrate! This is actually just my second Pride since I realized Pride was about me, too. When I was growing up, the definition of LGBT I was taught didn’t include me, and while something always felt off about that, I still accepted that Pride was about other people, not me. [1] A couple of years ago I read that the A in LGBTQIA could also stand for aromatic, so I thought “I guess that means I’m LGBTQIA. That will take some getting used to.” About thirty seconds later I thought, “You know, I bet my lack of gender fits into those letters somehow too.” So I was just a little decade late to figuring that out.

I thought as a kind of follow up to my post here at Wheat&Tares about being asexual and LDS I’d write about being aromantic and LDS. There’s a common misconception that to be aromantic you have to be asexual, but that isn’t true. I’m not asexual. I feel like that makes navigating being aromatic more complicated, not less. I don’t think I’ve read anything before about how the Church affects aromantic people who aren’t asexual, so this post could be a Wheat and Tares exclusive!

I had my first crush[2] when I was 11 and it hit like a truck. It was strange to me how my brain decided that this physically attractive but otherwise apparently randomly selected person I’d never noticed before was suddenly both Amazing and Very Important. [3] I’m not gonna lie. There were some parts of having a crush I really liked, but I could tell that something was wrong. I didn’t even want to be in the same room. Some of that was nerves, but not all of it.

As I got older there were two things I noticed about my crushes: they seemed much longer lived than those of the other kids, and even though eventually I stopped feeling repulsed by romantic attraction, I never felt motivated by it to do anything about it like the other kids did. I made friends with my crushes because that’s what I thought I was supposed to be doing but I can’t even say for sure that I felt motivated to do that.

I have very vivid memories of some of the most important points in my life[4], so I can tell you exactly when and where I was and what I was doing when I realized I was aromantic. I was 15 years old, standing in my room, looking at the carpet to the left of the door. “Aromantic” wasn’t a word I’d heard, of course, but I had heard before about people who were single and didn’t show any interest in dating. I knew a lot of them were probably closeted gay people, but it seemed reasonable to me that not all of them were and I had the thought that I was probably like those people. It was not that I was entirely opposed to being in a romantic relationship, but I just couldn’t see myself ever going through the effort and heartache to form one.

That realization was both relieving and unsatisfying. The more it percolated over the next few weeks the more unsatisfying it was.

Realizing I was aromantic didn’t make me stop being allosexual. I still had certain urges and needs, and I came to the horrifying realization that there was no socially acceptable way I could ever fulfill them. It was a lot like how the Church expects gay people to live. It was very frustrating.

In desperation I even tried to pray the straight away[5]. Life would have been a lot easier if I just didn’t have those needs. It was only once or twice, and I feel kind of embarrassed about it looking back now, but it shows just how much pain I felt.

You might expect that the Church’s rule against dating before 16 would have helped me at that point in my life, but, reader, it did not. Even in the 90’s teenage social customs had changed enough in the almost entirely nonmember area I lived in that I had no way of knowing what was allowed and what was forbidden, and that made me uncomfortable. I don’t think that I would have done anything differently even if that rule didn’t exist, but it did increase my anxiety about anything remotely romance adjacent. I also knew that the impending pressure to start dating the moment I turned 16 was going to be intense, too, as if my sixteenth birthday would magically change me in some great way.

Fortunately, the worst period of agonizing over my conflicting needs only lasted for a few weeks. I wanted children and I wanted them to be raised in a two-parent household, and so I realized that that didn’t leave me with many options. I decided that I’d try to have something resembling a romantic relationship for the benefit of my future children even if I was just going through the motions.

That decision made things easier but certainly didn’t make them easy.

Ironically the realization I was aromatic happened when I was probably the closest to alloromantic I’ve ever been in my entire life.

I did not date when I turned 16. If I had a crush on a member at the time I might have, but I had a crush on a nonmember who wasn’t interested in me in that way, and by the time of my birthday that crush was more or less over anyway. After that crush faded away another never came to replace it. It took me a few months to notice that but I when I did felt a bit relieved and didn’t worry about it.

A little more than a year later my father asked me who I was interested in romantically. I told him I wasn’t interested in anyone. He said that was okay but wanted to know who I was interested in most recently. I told him I didn’t remember being interested in anyone for quite a while, not even a little. He then told me it was ok if I was gay and that he just wanted to know what was going on. I replied that I was very sure that I wasn’t gay. I could tell he didn’t really believe me but he stopped asking questions. 

The opportunity to meet more eligible members wasn’t the only reason I chose to go to BYU, but it was a large factor in my mind. I figured a large pool of options would provide the best chance of finding someone that would interest me.

After a few months of being at BYU I felt a lot of stress. I met a lot of nice people but no one that I was even a little interested in romantically. I didn’t worry about not dating in high school, but I felt like the time to start had arrived and I was wasting valuable time. I was a teenager, so my body made me quite aware of the fact that there were a lot of physically attractive people around, but that seemed like something too superficial to treat someone differently because of. 

Finally, I decided to ask my best friend out. I really loved being with my best friend, who met all the minimum requirements for being a suitable mate, so I thought that maybe even if I never developed any romantic feelings I could make a marriage work. At that point it had been two and a half years since the last time I had been romantically interested in anyone and I had no way of knowing if I’d ever feel that way about anyone again.

Unfortunately, before I could decide where to ask my friend out on a date to, my friend told me that they were dating sometime. My mouth said “Congratulations! šŸ˜€” but my brain said “There goes that idea! šŸ„ŗ” That relationship didn’t last long but I had eternally chickened out by the time it was over, and so I never tried again. Knowing what I know now I really do think I could have made a spousal relationship with that friend work and I occasionally wonder how my life would have gone differently if I had just made that decision a week or two earlier. I never told my friend any of those things.

At the MTC I developed a full-fledged crush on one of the missionaries in my district. It completely shocked me. I wasn’t doing anything different than I did at BYU, and I certainly wasn’t actively looking for anyone at the MTC. It turns out that I’m what they call aroflux. There are periods in my life when I can feel romantic attraction and there are times I really can’t.[6] For some aroflux people those shifts can happen several times in a day, but for me I can go years before a noticeable change. I have tried my whole life to find some kind of a pattern but there isn’t one.

While the Church’s rules about turning on and off your romantic desires at arbitrarily chosen life events are just as broken as the ones about turning on and off sexual desires, I have to admit it was pretty easy for me to keep the rules on my mission against fraternizing with the enemy gender. I was slightly interested in one of the members in one of the wards I was assigned to, but it was no big deal.

I did end up becoming romantically interested in someone at BYU a few days before the last session of the last class I needed to graduate. It didn’t go anywhere, for obvious logistical reasons.

It probably doesn’t surprise you to hear that I spent a few years in a singles ward after that. I liked the fact that the congregation was quieter than a regular ward but everything else was a bit uncomfortable. Unlike BYU there was often a bit of an undertone to the meetings that we were delinquent or at least lazy. It would have been a lot worse but I always took solace in the doctrine that if you didn’t find anyone in this life you’d have the opportunity in the next. That doctrine was usually presented with very pointed commentary on who they thought was worthy of getting that opportunity and that people like me weren’t on that list, but I figured the Lord knew my heart better than they did.

I did get set up on a few blind dates by people who knew me well, and one of them ended up working out for me. I’m now married to one of the handful of people in my life I’ve ever been romantically attracted to. We love spending time together, are devoted to our children, and generally are very happy together. My spouse is Amazing and Very Important to me.

I am still aroflux. I still go for years without feeling romantic attraction for anyone, even the person I’m married to. I honestly don’t think my spouse can tell the difference. I don’t need to feel romantic attraction to love someone, and we do all the same things whether I’m feeling romantic attraction or not. I like the way romantic attraction feels but I don’t miss it when it’s gone.

It was a rough road. I’m glad I’ve ended up in a good place. I realize several places in my life I’ve been unreasonably lucky and resilient. I know it doesn’t work out that way for all of us.

Questions: 

1. How many Mormon kids do you think decide to “pray the straight away”?

2. It’s not just the Church but our entire society that puts romantic relationships on a pedestal, and certain aspects of life are gatekept by requiring a romantic relationship to obtain. How does that harm people?

3. The phrase “just friends” really bothers me, like it does for a lot of aromantic people. Can you see why?

4. Does nagging people attending singles wards about the importance of marriage actually benefit anyone ever?

[1] Even though I was excluded by overly strict definitions, I still knew that the way I felt about gender could get me killed and so for a few years in high school it seemed to me like it was really important to avoid bringing attention to that part of myself and that associating with LGBT people might do that. No child should ever have to come to that kind of a realization, and yet new ones do every day.

[2] Obviously that means that even though I’m aromatic spectrum I do have some limited ability to feel romantic attraction. Also, the term “aromantic” is usually understood to include atypical reactions to romantic attraction when it occurs, not just the lack of it.

[3] When I was that age I actually tried to find an encyclopedia article that would explain to me how brains pick out who to have a crush on. Turns out no one knows.

[4] This is why it took me so long to realize I have PTSD. My flashbacks don’t seem any more vivid or real than some of my other memories. They just kind of make me feel bad and my other memories don’t. (I have pretty much every other possible symptom of PTSD.)

[5] There aren’t generally agreed on definitions for the words “homosexual” and “heterosexual” when applied to nonbinary people like me, but I definitely understood myself to be straight at that time and if you asked me to describe my sexuality in one commonly known word, “straight” is still the one I’d use, even though it’s not that clear cut. I’m only attracted to one gender, but some aspects of that experience are more like what binary heterosexuals experience and some are more like what binary homosexuals experience. In particular, I’ve learned I’m a lot more like binary homosexuals in my romantic expectations and that’s just not the role someone who looked like me was expected to play in romantic relationships. In other words, my natural instincts were all “wrong” for a context with as strictly separated gender roles as Mormon dating and that made things even harder for me.

[6] This is a considerable simplification of what it means to be aroflux and even a considerable simplification of the different experiences I’ve fluctuated between, but it’s sufficient for this post. For more information I’d start with AUREA at https://www.aromanticism.org