People Who Are Aromantic (Aro): Are They Targets of Bigotry?

Some people feel free to mock aromantics or write them out of existence

Photo by Kimberly Mears on Unsplash

Asexual (Ace) and aromantic (Aro). Those concepts were barely recognizable to anyone just a decade or so ago. Now, both ideas are making their way into our cultural conversations. Asexuality got more attention, more quickly. By 2017, enough scientific research and theorizing on asexuality had been published to support a review article. It dispelled early doubts, and concluded that asexuality is a sexual orientation and not, as some skeptics had suggested, a sexual dysfunction. Three years later, in 2020, Angela Chen published her important book, ACE: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex.

I hope aromanticism will soon get more attention, too. This week, February 21 through February 27, is Aromantic Spectrum Awareness Week, and I have been writing about the topic. At my Living Single blog at Psychology Today, I wrote about compulsory heterosexuality, compulsory sexuality, compulsory romanticism, and compulsory coupling, including basic definitions. I also discussed whether people who are single at heart are more likely to be asexual or aromantic and less likely to be heterosexual, drawing from the answers from more than 8,000 people to my Single at Heart quiz. Here, I…