_Hi Page, _
I really appreciated your article “ There *Are* Asexual Polyamorous People, You Know.” It made perfect sense to me because being asexual and being aromantic are very different things. Now it’d be weird if you said there were polyamorous people who were aromantic. That’s not a thing, is it?
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Great question! Okay, for readers who might not be familiar, a person who is aromantic is basically a person who experiences little to no romantic attraction. But that’s the basic textbook definition — and it already includes a little wiggle room. For starters, having a l__ittle romantic attraction is not the same as having no romantic attraction whatsoever.
Further, there’s a lot of gray area as to what “romantic” even means. It’s something else that’s hard to pin down.
Finally, just like there are some asexual people who still have sex (for a variety of reasons), there are aromantic people who have romantic relationships anyway.
And I’ve personally known a few aromantic polyamorous people in my day. They were rare, not terribly common (I found that asexual/demisexual/graysexual folks were waaaaay more common).
I’ve really only spoken to one of them about her identity and how it squares with polyamory. We weren’t terribly close (more had mutual friends in common so ended up at the same places), but it did come up one time when a bunch of us were in a group setting.
In her own specific case, she essentially preferred to have friends with benefits (FWB). That was her ideal connection. Being part of the polyamorous community really suited her because she found that she not only did she like having multiple FWB at once, her FWB also treated her better and far more respectfully than the randos she’d been experiencing out in the wilds of hookup culture. Last I knew her, she was living with her one of her FWB and the FWB’s other partner. And she was quite happy.
This is just one person that I knew. Like anything, there are tons of ways that it can make sense — even if it sounds a little unusual at first glance.
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