What We Can Learn About Friendship From the Asexual Community
At a family wedding, writer Sarah Costello showed up with a familiar face as her plus-one: her friend Miranda. Having already been to several family holidays as her guest, Costello’s cousins couldn’t help but ask, “Is she your girlfriend?”
“No,” Costello laughed. “It’s just Miranda.” It wasn’t that she couldn’t find a date to bring to the wedding; she didn’t want one.
Asexual people (or “aces”) like Costello experience little to no sexual attraction to anyone of any gender. Being asexual doesn’t necessarily mean you don’t want a romantic relationship, since romantic and sexual attraction are different, and many aces like myself do date and get married. But for some, especially aromantic asexuals (or “aroaces”), the idea of romantic relationships is off the table. Friendships, however, remain vital—and those relationships often become just as significant and fulfilling as a romantic one might.
“Just because you don’t have a partner doesn’t mean you don’t have a support system,” explains Costello, who co-authored Sounds Fake But Okay: An Asexual and Aromantic Perspective on Love, Relationships, Sex, and Pretty Much Anything Else along with Kayla Kaszyca. She knows she can count on her many friends for anything a romantic partner could provide. One weekend, when she worried that staying home would take a toll on her mental health, she posted a Close Friends Instagram story looking for someone to invite her out; her friend immediately DMed her, assuring her she didn’t need to be alone.
Cody Daigle-Orians, author of I Am Ace: Advice on Living Your Best Asexual Life, loves that their close and dedicated friendships allow them to be their authentic self without the kind of pressure that exists in romantic relationships. “My friendships are the places I get to be myself without the baggage of my asexuality,” they say. “My asexuality—and in particular the way I’ve struggled to embrace and embody my asexuality—is always in the room in [romantic] relationships.” But with their close friend Alex, Daigle-Orians could be a version of themselves that wasn’t brushing up against society’s expectations. “I could just be a book nerd with my friend.” Platonic relationships, they add, “can provide and accomplish all of the same things in terms of networks of support that romantic and sexual relationships can. I think we just culturally don’t believe that they can.”
We in the asexual community are no strangers to going against cultural norms. As a married biromantic ace, my relationship might not look like others’ marriages outside the asexual community, but I’m glad I have the opportunity to form relationships in a way that works for me. Daigle-Orians thinks this might be the reason why making space for deep, platonic bonds comes naturally to a lot of aces. “Asexual folks live in a world that does not imagine us,” they explain. “All of the social constructions that exist around relationships and love don’t imagine asexual people exist. So we are forced as asexual people to go into the world and create the world that does imagine us.” Daigle-Orians, for example, has created their own polyamorous family unit consisting of two romantic partners and a committed, platonic relationship.
For aroaces who don’t want to form romantic partnerships, friendships are a necessity—and thus they are treated as such. Growing up, Ann Zhao, a YA novelist whose book Dear Wendy explores a friendship between two aroace characters, assumed she’d get married and have children. Once she realized her life was going to look different than she’d imagined, she began turning to her friends for the support she was looking for. She has one set of friends who she can go to for thoughts on politics and world news, and a different group for brainstorming new book ideas. And of course, there are the friends she can tell anything to. “Because I don’t have any other kind of relationships to model off of, this is all I’ve got,” says Zhao. “So I’ve gotten good at getting the maximum amount of fulfillment I can out of my friendships.”
Even as a married ace, I rely on my friendships for anything from a lengthy voice note rant to a date to a comedy show. My friends take up the same amount of significance in my life as my partner, whether I’m in a relationship or not. But when aces start talking about our friendships as equally important as romantic partners, it can be tough to be taken seriously. “I think culturally, we have an idea that friendship is something that kids do,” Daigle-Orians says. “Friendship is something that is temporary.”
The author of this story, Erin Hug (center), with her friends Angel (left) and Shelly (right).
Sydney Langford, whose YA novel The Loudest Silence also features aroace friendship, agrees: “Besides family, [romance is] the only sort of love that is considered important.” But it doesn’t matter if you’re asexual or not; prioritizing romantic relationships in this manner can have a negative impact on anybody. “It’s a pretty hopeless and very limited checkbox to give people [that it’s] all or nothing,” notes Rhaina Cohen, author of The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life with Friendship at the Center. “You either find your romantic partner and your life is complete, or you don’t, and then you’re lonely for the rest of your life.”
Langford adds, “I wish that people respected and viewed platonic connections in the same light as other forms of love. I think that placing those on equal footing is really important, because friends are often in your life longer than romantic connections.”
Wrestling with the idea of prioritizing romantic partners is something that’s pretty common in the asexual community, says Angela Chen, author of the book Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex. “I think the ace community, in many ways, has been forced to reckon with these questions for a long time,” she says. “We’re at a cultural moment when more and more people are recognizing the follies of focusing too much on romantic partnerships. People are really starting to think about moving friendship more to the center of our lives, as opposed to the margins.” I’ve noticed it too; in talking with people outside of the ace community, I’ve seen how my friends pride themselves in their platonic relationships and even feel empowered by our community. My friend Cindy once told me that seeing the ways ace people put thought into their friendships and normalize moving away from a relationship hierarchy shows her that it’s possible in her own life. “I think we can all learn a lot from it,” she says.
Being thoughtful about how you treat your friendships doesn’t have to be reserved for committed partnerships. “In romantic relationships,” Chen says, “You’re encouraged to ask, ‘Where are we going? How are we feeling?’ [But] you’re really not encouraged to do that with someone that you’ve met in a context that’s not explicitly romantic.” Why not ask that of your friends? Chen wonders. “Anything that borrows from romantic relationships and applies those tools and seriousness to friendship can be really interesting.”
Cohen encourages people to ask for what they want in a friendship. “What [you’re] communicating is: ‘I really care about you. And I would love to be as involved in your life and vice versa, as you would make space for.’”
One way the ace community centers friendship in their lives is through queerplatonic relationships, like the one Daigle-Orians formed with their partner Dan; it’s of equal importance to Daigle-Orians’ romantic relationships, but without the romantic connection. “We share thoughts about the future,” they say. “I don’t have a romantic or sexual relationship with Dan, but he exists in that space in a similar way, and we’re making all the same practical life decisions.” Dan was heavily involved in the family’s decision to move to Ohio, for instance, and plays an equal role taking care of their dog.
Queerplatonic relationships are “not half-platonic, half-romantic, but they’re relationships that blur the line between romantic relationships and platonic relationships,” explains Chen. It’s “a committed relationship based in friendship and platonic feelings. And then you can add romance to that, but you don’t have to,” adds Kaszyca, Costello’s co-author of Sounds Fake But Okay. The way this type of relationship differs from a friendship is more like how you might view a partnership, she emphasizes. Together, you would make big life decisions and become a unit, unlike a friendship, which might not feel quite as formal. There are many examples of committed platonic partners who choose to live together or even raise children together.
But that’s not to say that every aroace person chooses just one committed, platonic relationship in place of a romantic partner. “You can have a community of people,” says Chen. “It doesn’t have to be a hierarchy; you can be in a web of close friendships, instead of basically taking expectations you would put on a romantic partner and putting it on a platonic partner.” Daigle-Orians adds: “We get to imagine maybe relationships that move beyond two people. Like intentional families or networks of people.”
Being a part of the ace community has certainly made me more intentional in my friendships. Although I don’t live in the same country as my good friend Christine anymore, I plan for Saturday morning phone calls to maintain our bond. Having been close with my best friend Angel since college, it would be easy to take our friendship for granted, but I try to show her how important she still is in my life. I help her film audition tapes, text her whenever I’ve said something awkward, and invite her when I’m buying Broadway tickets. Even though she’s also married, we know how to carve out significant space for each other. The ace community has helped me learn how to show up in a friendship.
Writer Erin Hug with her friend Christine.
Whether or not someone is on the asexual spectrum, “it’s just important for anybody to know that they can get the support and fulfillment they need from people without the romantic undertones of it,” says Zhao. Before I was married, I used to fall into the trap of wishing I had a romantic partner, but if I had known how the ace community values friendships, I would have snapped out of it.
“This imagining that we’re able to do as asexual people is the same kind of imagining that straight folks, gay folks, pan folks, bi folks can also do to free themselves from the restrictive ways that they are expected to be in relationships,” Daigle-Orians says. It also helps alleviate some of the shame for people who don’t feel like they’re meeting society’s expectations, Costello adds.
“Just seeing I will be okay, I can still find joy in other ways, I can find nourishing relationships anyway…” Chen echoes, “I think that is powerful no matter how you identify.”
Erin Hug is a writer and video editor/producer. She was a Telefilm Canada New Voices Award recipient for writing, and is working on an asexual coming-of-age memoir. In her free time, you can find her performing improv or storytelling onstage.
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