#i am not saying that nobody should have qprs; please don't read it as that

[contagious-watermelon]

there's something to be said for the fact that it's so much easier to accept yourself as asexual than as aromantic. when you realize you might be asexual, you have to contend with a giant shrinking of your dating pool, and the realization that you won't be able to have kids the way people want you to. but you — or, I at sixteen — can take comfort in the knowledge that you'll still be able to find love — that thing which we've been told since practically birth that will be the purpose of our life, basically. get a nuclear family, have kids, fall in love. people who are single spend their whole time complaining about it, wishing they had a partner. someone dying alone is the worst thing that can happen to a person. if you're not dating someone, you're alone.

and the alloace (or someone who thinks they are, at least) clings as tightly as they can to the insistence that we can still love — because to deny that would be to doom yourself to forever be alone, unable to find a place in our society. the reason i think that so many aroace people realize their asexuality before their aromanticism is because of exactly this, that asexuality can still be somewhat (with much effort) slotted in to romantic society. aromanticism cannot, and every aro person has to contend with that when they discover their sexuality. (at least, i did.)

a lot of people in the aro community are trying to do the same as the ace community has, to hang onto "we can still love" with the skin of their teeth. to insist that it's still possible to aro people to date — for that way they'll have some way of still fitting in. this, in my opinion, is why qprs have so proliferated throughout the aro community specifically; so much so that being aro, you're assumed to want a qpr as much as an alloromantic person would want a romantic partner. it's a fear of reckoning with what your place your sexuality puts you in wrt society, of facing the fact that you will be forever alone. because, if you spend your whole life being told that a bachelor, a spinster, a crazy cat lady is the worst thing that could happen to you, when you realize you're not going to ever fall in love? you don't want to accept that perhaps they were wrong, that perhaps you can live a completely fulfilling life without having to replace romance with anything at all, be it friendship or a qpr or anything else.