#SORRY i just have a lot of ANDREW IS ARO thoughts bouncing around my head

[livingasaghost]

i think one reason why so many people fail to understand andrew and neil's relationship is because people don't know what it is to be aspec. and obviously the aspec umbrella is wide and varied and no one size fits all, but at the heart of their relationship, neil is demisexual. and i fully believe andrew is some form of aromantic. and obviously their shared history of trauma (of all kinds) colors their relationship and their sexualities and actions. but aspec people (and the people in relationships with those aspec people) develop such different relationships than allo people. they care differently, and it's often the care that becomes most important, rather than (just) the attraction. like yes, i choose you because i see you because i am interested in you because i don't quite understand you but i want to, i need to, and i am committed to sticking around regardless of whether we are a legal partnership or not.

people argue all the time that andreil would grow to say i love you some day, that they'd eventually heal enough to get married, but that isn't healing. that's ignoring a vital part of each of them. not only are they both still learning what love is, but love is not what their relationship is built around. they did not ~FaLl In LoVE~ they built a partnership around taking care of the other person. sure they were attracted to each other in their own ways, but andrew doesn't look at neil like he's his happily ever after romance. neil is the person who wants andrew to live, who wants andrew to be happy, who wants andrew to know that he has value even when he's not a good person. and andrew is the person who wants neil to be safe, who wants neil to be happy, who wants neil to know that he has value even when he isn't playing exy. their "romance" comes from holding each other up, from calling each other on their shit, from being a safe space when the world has proven it is anything but. neil is the one who almost starts to imagine some kind of long-term partnership in such conventional terms and andrew is so unconcerned with what that partnership looks like...he just knows the two of them will continue holding each other up as long as they can. and sure they'll have sex and sleep in the same bed and get cats together and all that "romantic" shit, but it's more than romance. it's a life. it's security. it's a chance to rewrite the trauma of their pasts.

and yeah to an outsider all that is romantic, sure. but i don't think andrew and neil see it like that. their relationships is all facts and truths. they feel safest in these absolutes, in the trust they are building together, in the shared language they are crafting between tentative touches and long stares. but to label it something as banal as ~romance~ undersells just what's happening to them. they don't need to say i love you because they know that all of these pieces that make up their shared life together say that for them, and they wouldn't know what to do with those words anyway. their "love" is not the same as other people's anyway. they don't need to get married because anniversaries and dates and marriages minimize just how long forever is, and they are already joined together by the understanding they share.

if the two of them got married or started "dating" it would send the wrong message to people who will never understand. neil isn't andrew's ~boyfriend~ he's the man who convinced him that life can interesting enough to stick around for. andrew isn't neil's ~lover~ he's the man who refused to let him run away from the life he always wanted. it's not romantic, it's survival. it's selflessness. it's learning how to care for yourself by caring for someone else and letting them care for you.