When you ask me what I mean by ‘aromantic,’ you have your arm around me.

I think very hard about how to answer. I think about when I tried to tell JJ. I never got past telling her that I didn’t want to get married or live with a partner. That I couldn’t imagine ever elevating my relationship with a partner above my friendships.

She’d sniffed: “That’s not queer though, that’s just commitment-phobia.”

(She’s living with someone now. They have cats. They seem to be happy. I’m glad.)

I think about when I tried to tell my therapist. I’d told her that I can’t deal with the hopes of ‘forever’ and ‘everything’ that people put on intimate relationships. That I hate the phrase “just friends” – my friendships are the biggest things in my heart.

She’d looked a bit perplexed. “Isn’t that just… a healthy approach to romance, rather than not experiencing romance?”

I’m sure she was trying to help.

I think about when I tried to tell Josh. I’d said that people talk as if they build partner-love and friend-love out of different kinds of stuff. But all my loves – for the ex on the other side of the world I still chat with now and again; for the friends I’d list as family if I could; for the lover I spend a filthy weekend with once a month or so – are all made from the same building blocks. The difference is in how we decide to build together, and it’s not some magical stuff that comes from a different place.

He’d thought for a long time and asked, “Isn’t that… just how love works?”

And maybe it is. Maybe ‘all’ I’m doing is refusing – a little more conspicuously than most – to fit the way I love into a mould that has ‘constructed under colonialism’ stamped on the bottom. Maybe nobody feels romantic love exactly the way they’re ‘supposed’ to. Maybe this is a difference of degree, not of kind.

I just have to ask you to trust me when I tell you that none of these explanations is really it. Please trust me when I tell you that I feel, right in the core of me, that the way I love is against the flow of things. Please trust me when I tell you that I’ve never seen my way of loving celebrated in film or play or poem. Please trust me when I tell you I have spent my life feeling broken, insufficient, unworthy. Please trust me when I tell you that to speak my love to another person – yes, even you – means translating it into a language that’s not in my heart. Please trust me when I tell you that I am lonely. Please trust me when I tell you that I’m afraid of never finding a place to fit, afraid that I really am a ‘cold-hearted bitch’ after all, afraid that liking and trusting and honouring and fucking you will never be enough for you because the romance isn’t there.

After I tell you what I mean by ‘aromantic,’ you have your arms around me.