An Excerpt From Cindy Mundahl’s Reclamation: An Asexual and Aromantic Journey to Wholeness

A question that had pulled at me since I was a young adult still gnawed at my heart, its insistence that I address it growing louder as I worked through my sexuality. Was I meant to partner?

I often fawned over romantic comedies and how easily the characters found love and happiness, believing it should be that easy for me too. Dramas that portrayed romantic love as the union of two soulmates destined to find each other left me feeling as though it was only a matter of time before it happened to me. When Francesca said goodbye to her soulmate Robert in The Bridges of Madison County, she knew that they could never recreate the love they shared over a few short days in her small town if they entered the real world as a couple. My heart broke along with hers when they said goodbye knowing they would never see each other again.

I couldn’t help but feel manipulated by these movies for helping me cast aside my own experiences of love in favor of one that was romanticized. I couldn’t shake the notion that great romantic love might exist for me yet.

As the years passed and I remained without a partner, holding on to this belief kept me locked in shame. I had always viewed romantic love as the great missing piece to my life, but never voiced that belief to anyone for fear of appearing a failure. My belief that romantic love was to be coveted persisted even though I had several examples from my own life of friends and family who were miserable in their romantic relationships. I didn’t trust myself enough to defy what millions of people seemed to know instinctively, that as adults we were meant to fall in love, partner, and then create a family based on that love.

Even though I publicly professed my belief in self-love as the greatest form of love, I didn’t fully believe myself. I was still chasing a sense of belonging, and I would receive it when I became part of a couple and fell in love. I longed to stand among the people in my life and tell them, truthfully, that I had a partner. I dreamed of using the word partner casually in conversation as everyone else did; my partner and I went to the farmers’ market this weekend, or my partner and I stayed in and cuddled on the couch watching movies. I couldn’t envision myself doing any of these things with a partner; I just wanted to be able to say that I did and feel like everyone else.

Over time, I realized I wanted to use the word partner more than I wanted a partner. I had always had a close friend in my life who functioned as my constant companion, the keeper of my secrets, and the sharer of emotional intimacy. I was reminded of Brian’s description of his roommate and closest friend, how he used the term queerplatonic, and how it made more sense to me to be in a relationship based on emotional intimacy than one rooted in sexual and romantic attraction. My lived experience told me that romantic love wasn’t the pinnacle of human love, but because I never saw anyone living in a queerplatonic relationship, I couldn’t trust that it was true for me. Romantic relationships didn’t feel natural to me. I didn’t experience romantic attraction any more than I experienced sexual attraction, and my asexuality and aromanticism felt linked. I wasn’t flawed after all.

When I read an anthology of essays written by aromantic people, I could see myself and have language for this nebulous part of me that lacked representation. Another core part of my identity was shrouded in secrecy and invisibility. The stories of people happily existing in relationships that were based in aromanticism showed me a path to self-acceptance. I had constructed my life according to my truth after all, but I was so caged by shame that I failed to see it. I was never meant to fit into the rigid mold of romantic and sexual love that the world presumes is our destiny. My desires lay outside these predefined ways of being, and in accepting that about myself, I released years of self-doubt and shame for being unable to couple and for never having been in love.

I could now see through the flaws in our culture’s ascendance of romantic love. I had reframed my shame into joyful acceptance. My burning question felt answered. I didn’t need a partner to be fulfilled and happy; in fact, having one would likely squelch my spirit and make us both miserable. Home for me existed in the family I had already created, one that centered love, just not in the way it was prescribed to me. I did know deep and meaningful loves and would no longer allow cultural norms and rigid beliefs to diminish my experiences of them.

Aromanticism helped me understand why the world had always felt disorganized to me, especially the way relationships are placed in an artificial hierarchy with romantic love unquestioningly at the top. I knew from personal experience this wasn’t true. My relationships with Becky, Jenny, and Angela were deep and loving in ways that many romantic relationships weren’t, yet they were relegated to the “just friends” category. The depth of my relationship with Jill transcends any that I have ever known, yet no language exists for it in our culture. She is my person, the one I first reach out to in times of joy and crisis, my calm and stability, and my spiritual companion. In leaving non-romantic, nonsexual relationships such as ours without language, we banish them to inferiority, an act that desecrates all forms of loving relationships. By placing unrealistic expectations on romantic relationships and downgrading other forms of love, we all lose access to the celebration of the wide array of human love.

I wanted to live my asexuality and aromanticism out loud so that others who may not know of these orientations may find representation for how they experience the world and offer others a new perspective on the limitations of hierarchical love.

The singular formulas presented to us for defining family—how many people are required, what a partnership is, what constitutes intimacy; it all felt off to me. I chiseled away at the labels that were forced on me at birth—heterosexual, female, romantic, allosexual—and the rules I lived by crumbled. Whether I should partner was never the question I needed to ask myself. I would have been better served by asking what forms of love were natural and meaningful to me. In assigning identities to people at birth, we rob them of the agency to know themselves.

I could see forms of love that worked for me: my love for nature, my friends and family, my community and myself, all expressions of love that were just as deep and meaningful as romantic love, and in some cases more so. For me love existed in the desire to foster mutual spiritual growth, and I was determined to live according to my own definition of love from now on.

Underneath the realization of difference I had on my aunt’s porch and in the dorm hallway in college were the deeper truths of how I experienced community and relationships that didn’t match those presented to me by our culture. I wanted relationships founded in emotional intimacy and deep listening, not rooted in sex, romanticism, or patriarchal standards. I wanted a family that wasn’t organized around gender roles or having the prescribed number of parents, but one created from a foundation of self-defined love, respect, and a deep commitment to our continued growth as individuals and as a family. These ways of being in the world felt revolutionary, and I could see my differences, which once shoved me to the edge of society and locked in alienation, as gifts.