a blog for non-SAM aros, "just aros", and more

filling out medical questionaires be like

"does your partner notice/complain of [symptom]?"

like. we could just say, "have people told you you snore" for example. why partner :/

out of curiousity, how did y'all realize you were aro? if the feeling and the label came separately, feel free to share both!

scrolling through the aro tag when ur not aroace be like

welcome to the label if you'd like to claim it :)

<2

hi! if you look on @aro-culture-is we get plenty of submissions about aro song recs. your mileage may vary per song, and I do not monitor for content, but here's a youtube playlist with submitted songs from the last year or so!

it's explicitly not part of the aroallo, aroace, or aromid system. it's opting out. the whole point is that it's for anyone who doesn't want to be labeled in that way, and just wants to use the aro label. i want to address this, and also say that it's clear you didn't mean harm by it, but calling non-sam aro folks allosexual is explicitly denying them their identity.

to quote from AUREA:

Non-SAM aro

Describes an aromantic person who does not use the Split Attraction Model (SAM) to characterize their orientation. Non-SAM aros do not identify with an allosexual or asexual spectrum orientation, regardless of whether or not they experience sexual attraction.

--

I do think, historically, the folks most attracted to this label have tended to neither feel represented in aroace nor alloaro communities, but historically were much, much more accepted by and talked about in alloaro spaces. to be perfectly frank, when non-sam aro started to be a more known identity, the aroace community was... honestly somewhat hostile to any aro folks who were not "fully" aroace.

it was a problem, and one that a number of folks were struggling to address, as both aro and ace communities were recovering from total devastation, and no one wanted to cause in fighting. this isn't to say everyone picked sides or that everyone was knowingly being an asshole, but that a lot of popular aroace posts regularly equated being ace to being aro, being aro to being ace, and several (not all) popular aroace blogs responded very poorly to being asked if they could phrase things differently.

to the best of my memory, this was perhaps... 6 months or so before folks started to talk more about non-sam aro as a Thing. and... when that first started, this blog received countless asks saying "isn't non sam aro just aroace?" because people could not fundamentally imagine aromanticism as a complete, singular label. so...

you can absolutely identify as non-sam aro. the entire point is that you do what fits you best. but I hope I've provided some history that might help share why the non-sam aro community is the way it currently is, maybe 7 years after it truly took off.

(discussions about alt terms began almost immediately, too, so it can be hard to research if you weren't there)

any chance y'all could reply with/send your coining post, if you've made one? that would be nice to link to here, and folks can hear about it and know the definition.

y'know i wonder if part of the reason aro content is so fandom focused is that it's really hard to identify each other and form IRL communities, but fandom is often a first point-of-connection to communities outside of IRL spaces.

--phoenix

it really can be isolating. i hope things get better for you.

sometimes it's so very draining that the majority of aro content is about fictional relationships.

irl, i live alone. irl, i am disabled. irl, that intersection and my lack of interest in partnering actively makes life really hard. everything is expensive. i can't always cook when i want to or have fresh ingredients, because my symptoms don't care if I want to cut up vegetables and eat something homemade before they go bad. if I have a bad flareup and getting up is not in the cards, that's it. i have what's next to me. the lack of social support for single folks, for disabled folks, for folks whose family care is inadequate or damaging... it's impactful.

I talk about how i once visited a place with an ex partner. i mention how our relationship started because i was pressured into it, and i wasn't really into the level of seriousness and 'forever' she treated it with. everyone says it's weird that i agreed if i didn't want it to be serious. i remember being 16, saying no, and a chorus of people telling me i was stupid and immature, that her family was rich, that we would be cute and to listen to them, not my heart. my heart was saying nothing.

i look at my current age and life goals. for many of my peers, dating and marriage and eventual kids are common goals. i am watching my rights erode and trying to practice good mental hygeine. my five year goal is to be alive. my next major life milestone is a nebulous desire to find a life i can tolerate living.

being aromantic significantly impacts my day to day. i want to see aro people living their lives, and doing so with joy. i want to see aro adults making it, ones like me. i want aro people to thrive. i want to live, aromantically.

i scroll the aro tag. it's fandom and shipping and asexual posts.

it can be - there are folks who identify as non sam aro because they feel more connection to their aromanticism than any sexual orientation they may have. that's how we (mods are plural) generally mean it.

there's also a history of debate about what term is best for that. non sam aro, archaro (like "overarching identity is aromantic"), primearo (primarily aromantic), unit aro (like aromantic is the "one" ie "unit" identity), and honestly several we forget. it was a really active conversation for a minute, and then.... it kinda just never lead to anything tbh.

I think these terms all are useful for assorted reasons, but have different vibes which fit better for some folks. non sam aro has a history to it that we like, archaro sounds really good and i like the meaning, and unit aro is honestly just solid. primearo just... doesn't feel right for us, specifically, but I feel like I remember it having more support as a term at the time of this debate? that could be bias tho

i hope this helps?

-- mod phoenix

ngl i desperately want a character who is aro and does not have a clear sex aversion. idgaf what their sexual orientation is, i just really, really want to see people like me.

-phoenix

so... there's been discussion about how non-SAM isn't a perfect term, because it technically has the implication you're seeing. but no other term really gained popularity, and so non-SAM aro has stuck.

essentially, while romantic and sexual attraction are different, they can be inherently tied together for some folks, and many non-SAM aros use the term to mean that. for our system, sexual attraction cannot be untied from the lack of romantic attraction. no matter what else is going on, it's aromantic, and that, culturally, is very different than what many folks mean when they talk about sexuality.

this could be expressed via other terms that have come around - archaro (ie, overarchingly aro identity), primearo (primarily aro identity), or some even smaller proposals I recall less. i honestly prefer "just aromantic", but I folks refuse to listen to that as anything but some new way of saying aroace, and emphasize their assumption of asexuality. all that said, non-SAM aromanticism is a community that I belonged to before those ever came around, and neither other term really feels like a totally accurate description either.

and - truth be told, it's not like most straight people use the SAM when calling themselves heterosexual either. in their case, they probably mean heteroromantic and heterosexual, but they come from the opposing experience of the normal. whereas non-SAM aro folks are just... inherently not the norm, either in the broader culture, or in the a-spec communities. we're hard to understand, and so we're easier to just... ignore, set aside for later, and worse - not try to accept.

for some folks, there is a distinct sense of "i am aromantic and allosexual and those are separate identities that intersect and create a unique experience." and that's great! but honestly, my sexuality is a complex mess that i don't bother to label anyways. all that matters to me is that i'm aromantic, and whatever is happening, that's the core of it all. i'm aro. the rest is sprinkled into that.

I think our system broadly came to the conclusion that we were neither "totally" aroace nor alloaro, and there really... wasn't a comfortable label between that. there is, for example, aromid (or acemid, or amid), but that implied a... more stable "middle ground" than our experiences. for the most part, being aromantic was the important part for us - and that we do not label ourselves as asexual. the ace community just... never fit us. maybe it's better now, but we don't particularly have an attachment to it. we decided we didn't solely fit into allo or ace, and kinda eliminated that from the framework of identities we looked at.

note, I think plurality played a role in our personal identification of a term for the collective system as well. we all have slightly different ways of defining ourselves, and at some point, we threw in the towel around how to present our identity when acting as a singlet (since lets be real... people are not good with plurality IRL). all we knew was: we're aro, that's important to us, and we want something that there's a hope of a chance to say in non-aro communities and be understood.

when we were looking, it was around a period where a few aro blogs were talking about similar "I'm not aroace or alloaro or aromid/acemid/amid" experiences. the main ones we recall were primearo, archaro, and "just aro". prime aro was founded on the idea of aromanticism as the "primary" identity, but that felt a little too... rigid of a word for us. it wasn't bad, and it fit, but it was like wearing clothes that had an itchy tag, you know? archaro had a similar experience - the phrasing coming from the aro label "overarching" the rest of the experience. It sounded better to us as a label, but not as a way of explaining it. we were... just... aromantic and screw the rest.

one other thing we'd considered: aroqueer. we still are pretty fond of it as a microlabel, but it's in the sense of something we wear in a locket around our throat more than the way we present ourselves. we're queer in an aromantic way. our overall experience of queerness is so inseparable from aromanticism that it feels like a lie if there's a space and people call us aromantic and queer. and of course, aromanticism is queer, but we mean the "specific" label of being queer as an identity. I don't think we find this comfortable to explore as a term in broader queer spaces, but among aro folks, we do use the term. for us, we consider it part of being "just aro".

(sidenote: enough folks asked us about similar labels for such an experience with other identities than queer that we coined "oriented aro" as a broader label for folks, link in our pinned post)

it's wild to me how hard it is to find adult fiction that isn't romance. like, i'm not even asking for aro people. i'm just asking that romance isn't a defined part of the story!