Finding Out You’re Demiromantic in Your Late Thirties

I knew of the aromantic side of queerness by my late twenties. But at 37, I finally have a term for my proclivity and wonder why we don’t discuss the aro spectrum more.

Hi, I’m Rachel. I’m an alternative woman from The Bronx now residing in LA, a crazy toad lady and now a monitor lizard mom, and I’m officially out as one of the A’s in LGBTQIA+.

I came of age at the turn of millennium. “Gay” was a common insult thrown around among my peers and transphobia was par for course.

You were also expected to have lots of sex because that’s what Cool Edgy Younglings do, but if you were a girl you were also shamed for having too much sex with [arbitrarily] too many people.

Even in subcultural circles, this shit happened. I found the punk and metal scenes were shockingly sex-negative and slut-shaming at points. Oh, the memories of guys at thrash shows saying “You did that with my friend, so why not ME?” Because transitive property is for eighth grade algebra class, not sex, you dumbass.

Proclivity just wasn’t something that was discussed. Even among the queer people I hung around with at the time, those talks and difficulties with self-discovery were usually based on sexual orientation or gender presentation.

I don’t even remember asexuality (ace) ever really being discussed in media or social settings, unless it was to gawk at someone like my sister who didn’t want to date or have sex whatsoever after a certain point. Let alone that sexual and romantic proclivities were separate concepts with with their own spectrums, or that there was a romantic equivalent at all.

No, I just spent a greater part of my youth being told I was sad and broken for loving casual sex instead of pining for a boyfriend. That I should want more than just being some guy’s one-night stand.

But here we are. I finally have a word for people like me, and suddenly things make sense! So if you’re wondering if you’re also on the aromantic (aro) spectrum, here’s my batshit crazy life journey because I’m an ADHDer and I must tell my own experience to show I relate to you. Let my decades of parsing speed up yours.

Like many things, it started with a random ramble on Discord where I found myself asking why I kept falling into this negative feedback loop.

The loop: I keep thinking about the guy I was hoping for a reconnection with when I got to LA. Then about how it fit into a greater pattern of catching feelings being such a rare occurrence for me, but why did it always have to happen with men who adored me at first then suddenly refused to factor me into their lives significantly?

Would this aspect of my life ever change? I’m starting to think it won’t. Repeat cycle.

I don’t say this out of defeatism or self-pity, but rather to liberate. Because nowadays, you’ve got fuckboys, stashing, orbiting, ghosting, breadcrumbing, and all these other terms that would give a linguistics PhD a goddamn stroke.

With the help of therapy and friends, I figured out I gravitated to emotionally unavailable men as a result of abusive family members constantly being up my ass, and surveillance trauma from poisonous school and work environments. A man who subsequently didn’t check in much appealed to me way back when. Not anymore, though. Especially not in an era where you damn well know he’s glued to his phone like most people and could make that space but chooses not to.

So there’s part of the code cracked so I can hopefully prevent this from happening again, though that’s no guarantee. But this feeling persisted that there was more to it than that. What exactly, I didn’t know: horrifically cursed luck in this area of life? The universe trolling me? But I knew there was more beneath the surface.

When I broke the ice with this man after my relocation to LA, he gave me the runaround about being busy with work then the next message dropped the bomb he was also taken.

So I made like a tree and got the fuck out of there. I have less desire to be a side piece than I do to pivot to video if Twitter implodes, which would be none. I may have Russian heritage but I’m not the Russian army: I don’t make move on occupied territory. Still, I figured, “Hey, I made an earnest effort to reconnect. Can’t say I’ll spend my life wondering what could’ve been if I hadn’t said anything.”

Despite taking the L here, why our incredibly brief time together still keep cropping up in my mind as time marched on? Depending on who you ask, that’s utter psychosis or an emotional connection that didn’t get to come to fruition.

I’m a pretty cynical MF. I straight up denied I felt that rare connection with him. He’d cross my mind, but I dismissed it as gradually going insane from the isolation and trauma of watching bodies pile up in my neighborhood like an Eli Roth movie. People got short memories of how hard The Bronx was hit by the first COVID wave, but I remember the ice cream trucks parked outside the neighborhood funeral home. Taking a wrong turn on a walk and running like hell from that ass-end entrance to Montefiore off Zerega like I entered a battle zone in a video game.

A lot of people replayed happy memories to get through the tedium, fear, loneliness, and loss. With numbing terror governing the present, the comfort of the past lent better headspace than anxiety about the future. These lovingly tattered mental VHS tapes got us through a hellish time in which every level of government failed us and the last thing anyone wanted was more time on Zoom.

But despite being back out in the world post-vax and ceasing contact shortly after this failed reconnaissance mission, he still kept crossing my mind. To no avail, I tried to be open to meeting other men through the career I love, hardcore shows, the reptile hobby, and the intensely stupid shit that just happens to to me on a regular basis. No dice. Moreover, why had this one imprinted so firmly?

I mean, I don’t think about my failed relationship several years after it ended. Or the only other man I ever got really hung up about, from earlier in my life. I don’t think about other men I dated or had sex with, whether we had fun together or it went horribly wrong.

Those guys just never came up at random or when I felt lonely in the sexual or romantic sense. Even though in many cases, we conversed and had sex far more often and over a longer timeframe compared to the man of my mental VHS tape. Not to mention were usually on the same turf in the punk and hardcore scenes, it meant we often saw one another at shows unless he wasn’t local. Yet they did not have nearly the same impact.

This mental VHS tape is stuck in the VCR and won’t come out no matter how often I hit that eject button. Jammed a chopstick in there but to no avail. I even tried superimposing a BetaMax and LaserDisc over it several times, but his tape just overpowers them no matter how fuzzy the picture on this two-ton CRT gets. (I probably alienated every reader under 25 with these references, but you kids have YouTube now. Look this shit up.)

But hey, we had the kind of sex that only exists in fan fiction. That’s hard to forget that when you have a sex drive higher than your average Congressman. We also met in an astronomically ridiculous fashion! Most of all, I genuinely had fun with him and he was an absolute joy to be around. But I assumed it was just a one-time thing and that was it.

He proceeded to orbit my social feed the entirety of the Trump administration without ever saying anything. I finally reciprocated but a reunion doesn’t happen because it can’t. Honestly, I really just wanted to see if we’d…actually date. See if we’d be viable. And if we weren’t, we’d just catch up on years gone by, exchange war stories like we did that night, then fuck like rabbits on cocaine and enjoy it for what it is before we go back to our lives.

Time passes and even the orbiting ceases. I focus on other things in life, all of which are pretty major: a month back east and in Ireland, a publishing contract, the tubal ligation I fought 16 years to get that involved a trek to the Bay Area and a couple days in the ICU, then welcoming my amazing and adorable monitor lizard into my life.

Yet the world constantly sends me little reminders of him, as I cross off one dream after another that I fulfilled after I made it to LA.

Goddamn it.

If you haven’t seen Steins;Gate or played the original visual novel, you won’t get this reference so I’d recommend quickly consulting the wiki. But that is EXACTLY what this feels like: Okabe tries to change the outcome of the future by repeatedly time-leaping, but no matter what he does or where he goes, Mayuri always dies. He’s trapped in this hellish cycle where he repeats this horrific loop ad nauseum. Okabe tries to reset the divergence meter and go back to how things were, but no matter what worldline he ends up in, he can’t save Mayuri.

While my situation constantly revisits a genuinely wonderful memory instead, it’s the same idea. I don’t have anything going on dating-wise and don’t feel pressed about it because of the joy in socializing my baby lizard, entering LAHC after a lifetime of NYHC, and game dev. Figured I should be open to meeting other men, let life do its thing. I ended up on a different worldline than the one because I left for a better life. Which I still got.

But after a male friend made me uncomfortable then he turned out to be a predator, and a guy in the reptile hobby used me to emotionally jerk off because his wife doesn’t want him bringing giant lizards home…it left me mentally drained and wondering what even is this life.

No wonder my brain keeps replaying this worn-out VHS tape.

When I intuited it went deeper than this pattern the star of said VHS tape is part of, my first instinct was to look to trauma of the past. Shit like my relationship with my father growing up. The conflicting messages I got about relationships, love, and sex.

But it was expressing my desire to end this feedback loop in a Discord server one night that finally unearthed what I am: demiromantic.

I’m a cishet woman, albeit a very red-blooded one who DOES have this desire for a true romantic partner. How could I be on the aspec spectrum of the queer world?

It was the rarity aspect that should’ve tipped me off.

As the Discord swelled, I said that what I’m going through is a special sort of hell. You have this genuine desire for romance, but you experience that connection so rarely.

My antipathy towards dating apps makes more sense now. What I know from being in a tech-adjacent field aside, ditto for coming of age in the Web 1.0 era, I don’t want to swipe away entire days having these dates that feel like job interviews. To me, the whole idea felt like monetizing the act of throwing spaghetti at the wall to see if it sticks. I can’t suss out if I’ll even enjoy this person’s company while stuck in traffic for an hour on the Cross Bronx, let alone see us as a real couple that is out in the world together and splits bills like responsible adults.

Demiromantics need that rare emotional connection to want an actual relationship. We put the person before the actual concept. A lot of alloromantics (opposite of aro, for unfamiliar readers) tend to want the concept so bad, that they ultimately settle. And I don’t mean that as in “I dreamt of a Ford model but chose the cute girl next door”. The concept of a romantic partner is wanted so bad — someone to take home to your parents during the holidays, pick you up from the dentist after your wisdom teeth are removed, regularly cuddle and have sex with — that they just say “Fine, you’ll do!” because society gives us so much negative messaging about singlehood, especially long-term singlehood.

Although this rarity aspect doesn’t necessarily apply to sex. You can be both demiromantic and demisexual, or just one of these things.

The EIC of this very publication wrote this great piece detailing his experience as my complete inverse — a demisexual man who dates women. I think that patriarchy hurts demisexuals in different manners, in that someone in the Discord that night said a demisexual woman they’re close friends with has faced challenges in this hellscape dating world because men keep trying to violate her boundaries. Demisexual men get read as being aloof and uninterested, or not man enough.

Finding out there’s a word for someone like me was a goddamn REVELATION.

Because I had crushes I acted on and ones I didn’t. Men who approached me at punk shows, on Twitter, or through work. Sometimes they resulted in sex or bobs and bits of courtship that just never went anywhere, I could enjoy it for what it was but sometimes I’d feel sad there was just nothing more. There’d be that guy I’d see around at shows who I always thought was cute, but didn’t feel this irresistible force the way I felt with the man of the aforementioned VHS tape. Guys who came up to me on the other side of 30 after we’d seen each other around the scene since we were teenagers, finally shooting their shot.

That desire for a boyfriend (and eventually husband) was absolutely there, but why did I just not feel a damn thing for these guys shooting their shot but when I pined for a guy, I often couldn’t have him yet my brain just went harder than an Arch Enemy anthem?

I have no shame about my body count, and refuse to let puritanical and patriarchal asswipes shame me. But I can count on one hand how many men in my adult life interested me as potential boyfriends, and it stops at the bird.

I didn’t want a relationship most of my twenties. It was pretty rare I really got hung up about anyone.

I just thought that your late teens and twenties were all about having fun and experimenting. I also observed how miserable my own parents’ and grandparents’ marriages were and knew I didn’t want that for myself: I had to perform the right way with an abusive mother to get my needs met, the thought of more performance sounded exhausting. I also didn’t want to treat having a husband as a business transaction, or that it was just something I did “because it’s what you do” or a faulty insurance policy against loneliness.

I was also convinced that being made to feel like shit about not being able to get a boyfriend was just a scam so I couldn’t focus on things like having a punk band, starting my own business, and fighting for my bodily autonomy.

This was further complicated by growing up in such a hostile environment where I spent my entire childhood and teens constantly being told how ugly and worthless I was. Suddenly, I’m a free woman at 18 in NYC’s massive subcultural enclave where the punk, hardcore, metal, and goth scenes run side by side. I’m at shows and hitting the streets constantly. This time, boys and men are ceaselessly in my face about how hot I am. I subsequently acted a lot like my monitor lizard does when she gets grasshoppers: hopped on them because it was fun, exhilarating, and just there.

But deep down, I wanted a guy who’d sweep me off my feet and be at all my shows, and I’d be at his if he also had a band. Where we’d have our good jobs with the City then get that dream co-op downtown, or that house in Brooklyn full of toads and cats with room for all the band gear. We’d live in childfree bliss and I’d stay with the City long enough to get my pension then pivot to indie games.

A dead dream on all counts. One I grieved for years. I left the homeland because I was crushed under grief, for what I actually lost and this simple dream I just described.

But I wore my intimacy issues like armor and was afraid to be romantic, dating back to supression that began in childhood.

I distinctly recall this boy in my second grade class who I thought was cute. He was also one of the few kids in that hellhole who was just genuinely nice to everyone, me included. At home, I was playing with gluesticks and my mother’s weird stockpile of memo pads because this is what parents did to occupy their kids before iPads and Pinterest boards from super-moms that make them hate themselves.

There was a heart-shaped memo pad so I grabbed one and wrote his name in it, attaching it to the decoupage of memo pad snowflakes, frogs, and random shapes. My mother checked on me, looked at what I was making, then she suddenly shook her head and yanked the offending berry-pink paper heart off my hunk of cardboard with the same force as when she’d frantically tear a produce bag from the roll at the supermarket.

“We don’t put boys’ names in hearts.”

As an adult who came out as a child abuse survivor 15 years prior to the publication of this piece, I know what a vile abusive bitch she was and what the hell could SHE possibly know about love? It’s so galling when I look back!

But my seven-year-old self internalized that having crushes was wrong. Yet so much media was focused on crushes, love, sex, and dating. Even stuff for kids!

It made it all the more confusing when I was 14 and on one of my mother’s outlet store pilgrimages where she said to me, “That cashier was really giving you the eye.” He was not, and I think he actually heard her. I wanted the floor to open up into a flaming abyss, like if a Tesla hit a guard rail one level below, and just take me into its fiery embrace.

There was pride in her voice. Yet if a boy called our house asking for me, I think the FBI used less stringent protocols for fugitives. Funny given that it was usually for some irksome group project or a reminder to return that Iced Earth CD I borrowed. (Fuck, didn’t one or two of them wind up being outed as fascists come the 2020s?)

My mother went back and forth with how it was a good thing if boys were showing interest in me, but would lash out and blame being boy-crazy for my shitty academic performance. No, that was just undiagnosed ADHD that was exacerbated by the constant distress of horrendous home and school environments.

It felt like I had this cruel parody of a family and I made it my life’s mission to be the diametric opposite of them. I wanted to give and receive the unconditional love I felt with my grandparents, and boldly and passionately give and receive love and sex with the right man if he was indeed waiting for me out there.

I hadn’t considered the aro spectrum when I parsed that I want a romantic relationship for its own merits, not to make up for the familial love I starved for.

Still, it didn’t help that my formative years weren’t exactly abundant with real-life examples of healthy, loving relationships. Throw in the tiresome brand of “I hate my wife” Boomer comedy that was prolific when I was growing up. Girlfriends and wives were presented as these overbearing nags, that “ball and chain” he’s stuck with instead of pursuing this cadre of 20-year-old supermodels with low expectations, and I didn’t see the point of getting into a relationship if this guy is just going to hate me and complain about me to his co-workers all day and his bros all night.

The turn of the millennium was a uniquely misogynistic era and a horrible time to be a highly sexual young woman who hadn’t figured herself out yet. But we’ve gotten better at recognizing that women can be complex humans just like men. You can both listen to Cannibal Corpse and like Hello Kitty.

Still, it felt like I had some kind of duty to fulfill as a scene icon of the time, that if I exuded any romantic vulnerability then it meant I was ceding power to them. The power to have my own emotions and happiness. And the last thing I wanted was to be referred to as so-and-so’s girlfriend or wife instead of my own person: it was downright loathsome when The Distillers were in their heyday, a well-known band in their own right, yet were constantly referred to as Tim Armstrong’s wife’s band.

Here I’d internalized that I’m not supposed to have romantic feelings, that it’s a sign of weakness. I’m supposed to be above it. I’m this tough broad in NYHC, I’m the one IN the goddamn band, not a coatrack (old punks will get this one).

In therapy, I parsed it out that I just wasn’t allowed to be romantic for the first 25 years or so of my life. Which is shitty and shouldn’t have happened. Plenty of subcultural folk fall in love, I witnessed it. But the men I wanted that with wouldn’t or couldn’t reciprocate, and I felt nothing with the men who were down bad to make me their girlfriend.

That was what finally cracked the code on determining I’m demiromantic.

I kept replaying that mental VHS tape of that wonderful night at that convention because it was the last time I truly felt something. I really wanted to feel it again with him — not just any random guy who wants a warm body in his bed who will also listen to his problems.

I’m in too many niches that normie-dominated dating discussions don’t cover: elder punk, childfree, reptile and amphibian keeper, staunchly self-employed. I’m also a fat alternative woman pushing 40, which opens up whole other discourse and whether straight men see someone like that as worthy of commitment. But both the heart and the clit know what they want. I found someone who stoked both, and it’s such a rare occurrence that that’s why the world keeps cruelly sending me reminders of him even though he’s with someone else and rightfully not speaking to me as a result.

There’s people whose bodies, lives, and finances are far from what society considers ideal but they still find love. Most dating articles right here on Medium are total bullshit and mostly dedicated to tearing women down for being too picky, too slutty, or how dare you have some confidence because you matched with 20 men on the latest surveillance nightmare Silicon Valley just shoved onto us.

But ultimately, romantic attraction just happens so rarely and arbitrarily in my case. And then when it has, it never turned into a real and functional relationship with mutual love, respect, support, and that jazz.

Demiromanticism isn’t one size fits all, that’s why it’s on the spectrum rather than strictly putting you at 100% aro where you do feel zero romantic attraction.

I’m allowed to be romantic now. I have my shit together and am more secure in myself at 37 than my so-called prime, to diss the manosphere chuds.

But I need a man who makes me feel something. I can’t force that connection: the gentleman of the VHS tape? It happened in one day, a day I did NOT fucking expect when I got on that plane after we spoke online in a purely professional context. I was not thinking about him in a sexual or romantic manner whatsoever when I geared up for the month-long business trip out west that ended up changing my life.

The other connection from much farther back in my life was a spark after just one show, then seeing each other around for years.

Yes, that’s how arbitrary it is!

I need to feel some kind of bond with him as a sex partner or a friend first. Maybe some other totally unexpected connection that often starts out utterly platonic, like we meet through reptile Insta because it’s hard to find care tips for the species of monitor I have.

Being demiromantic doesn’t mean you’ll hold back, either. If anything, I’d say that we’d love more fiercely than alloromantics who are content to just swipe for a new partner like they’re ordering light bulbs on Amazon.

I’m out now. I’m a demiromantic, I feel relieved knowing there’s a name for other people like me and we exist, and I hope my story of cracking the code helps you.

I just want to feel like I did when that VHS tape was recorded, except we’re constantly making new ones.