A Truth Individually Acknowledged

By Miranda Jensen

Photo by Bernd 📷 Dittrich on Unsplash

There are some truths we dare to call ubiquitous. According to modernity, birth and death bookend lives marked by heartbreak and love. Romance is a truth universally acknowledged, if you will. But, forgive me, Austenites: I beg to differ. Or rather: I’m begging the world to understand my difference. At least it feels like a desperate plea, a lone wolf’s howl to a blood moon Cupid-red, for that which the world immortalizes in anatomically inaccurate hearts, diamond rings, and master locks on bridges—in other words, love—perplexes me.

Of course, I love. I love deeply, thoroughly, and at times, ruinously. It’s simple to adore friends and family; it’s instinctive to care. But for a partner? In the absence of pining, crushes, and, well, desire, I would prefer not to. There are names for this affliction—or is it a conviction? The asexual/aromantic (ace/aro) spectrum encompasses those who feel little to no sexual or romantic attraction to others.

Shades of greige, with a splash of purple or green, adorn the ace/aro plight with flags, a corporate seal of LGBTQ+ approval. I’d prefer we embrace the “Ace” branding, rather than caricature our sexualities as colorless while the gays in the Castro wave rainbows. Two years I lived down the street from San Francisco’s proud gayborhood, and only twice did I trek to the utopia of flailing, flaccid dicks. If the Castro is our capital, I certainly don’t hold citizenship.

Indeed, I fail to belong in most spaces—the prude who devours romance fiction; the spinster who adores Valentine’s Day; the virgin who flirts perpetually but never successfully. I preen at such contradictions, especially when depicted in such cheeky rhetoric. Yet, as much as I identify with solitude, my identity can be terribly lonely.

That’s why I didn’t accept it at first.

******

I sit at a cocktail bar in my favorite city, half-listening to a Spaniard mansplain the most romantic language in the world. One language of many that I, in fact, speak. Only I couldn’t say such a thing—that would require speaking, a skill he doesn’t wish me to possess. We split the bill and the bartender sends me a secret smile. My date walks me to the bus stop and I evade his touch, and later, his texts with a simple: No, thank you. It’s not simple of course, since he doesn’t understand the word. 

He doesn’t understand me. 

******

With our inescapable human condition—love and lust—comes a calendar of expectations: Boyfriend, Engagement, Wedding, Pregnancy, and the optional but empirically endorsed Divorce. My ace/aro existence introduces a new temporality, one incomprehensible to all but fellow non-romantics. Without the usual chapters to chart my life’s course, I dwell in the limbo of prefaces, appendices, or, god forbid, footnotes. My story is so unusual it cannot be told traditionally.

A late bloomer, they call me. Slow to touch, slow to trust, slow to love. But I’ve a knack for picking friends from crowds in minutes. Holding hands is one of my favorite pastimes. I’m unabashedly sincere with strangers and familiars alike, especially along nudist lines. So surely, temperate caution may not be prescribed as this undiagnosed madness. Everyone else might be waiting for something, for someone, but I’m certainly not. 

Though I did at one time. 

******

I stumble home after another date that sure as hell didn’t feel like one. “Am I not kissable?” I interrogate my friends, slumping onto the couch. 

“Absolutely you are,” one responds without hesitation. “Here, I’ll prove it.”

A scuffle, a shriek, and a shove later, my friends pass me a bottle of cheap wine and we analyze my entire night, picking apart my date’s body language while watching the sunset with Thai take-out. “Well, do you want to be kissed? Maybe you’re not sending out…the vibe, you know?”

I don’t know. And for the first time, I wonder if kissing is a requirement. 

******

At times, it feels as though my difference eclipses my existence. The romantic feats of my friends—hard launches on Instagram, wedding invitations in the mail, sonograms across the fridge—delight and disturb me. How can I be so unlike those I cherish the most?

Perhaps years of confronting my reflection in tights and leotards desensitized the libido quacks essentialize within us. The ghost of teenage insecurities haunts me still, just as my bruised, streaked pointe shoes still dangle off the walls of my childhood bedroom. Maybe I do not desire others because I cannot desire myself.

Perhaps it was a decade of chronic nausea, an ache so ubiquitous I carved a life around the chasm of invisible disease. Live with a beast in your belly long enough, you won’t let anyone come near. Sometimes that monster rakes a claw down my stomach, awakening a feeling I’d almost forgotten. Ironic, that. My horrid memory clutches vividly onto nights sobbing amid gut madness; I could not remember life without it, and now I remember it all too well. Nausea, for me, is nostalgic. The microbiome of my identity—quietly suffering. Maybe I reject sex, even the casual kind, because I miss that old companion.

Perhaps hours beneath the spotlight—wearing paint, fabric, and expressions I painstakingly crafted for each character, kissing fellow players I may or may not care to touch—have cleaved my consciousness. Maybe I don’t know myself intimately, so I may not know another.

Perhaps endless hours reading and rereading fiction made the romantic words—kiss, forever, love—incomprehensible or, alternatively, so comprehensive that they became a curse. Maybe I spent so long imagining, reality became a disappointment.

It’s amusing, my own speculations. 

Because, really, does it matter?

******

She’s a good friend, with a belly laugh that makes you smile. I got the role she wanted, but she’s been gracious, demanding that we attend the cast party arm-in-arm. We do, but not before she leans forward in her dorm room and says, “I like you.” When I demur kindly, she shakes her head with a tsk. “The others were right, they insisted you were straight.” I leave the label, the rejection, at that, even though the wolf inside bares its teeth, swiping its paw against the floor. What exactly I’m snarling at, I figure out later. 

How I loathe being misunderstood.

******

I’m a sucker for a slow burn. Enemies to lovers, especially. Pride & Prejudice, with its incomprehensible class antagonisms and dramatic proposals, captivated me at first skim and still charms me five deep reads later. Like Lizzy, I did not label my sensibilities at once: “I was in the middle before I knew that I had begun.” Yet when I peered at the pool full of rippling moonlight and saw my ineffable, colorful/less reflection, I squeezed my eyes shut.

Single is much more comprehensible than uninterested. The status quo is much more comfortable than difference, at least in appearance. But in the boozy freedom of twenty-one, I toyed with the ribbons of queerness, braiding them into casual conversations. I accepted my romantic indifference—I stopped trying and started being.

Then, as Darcy’s letter rocked Elizabeth’s world, I found a beloved, unloving pen pal. She too prefers not to. She too understands. 

Will I, finally, be understood?

******

I returned to Pride & Prejudice this year. Initially, it was like revisiting Benihana as an adult, finally understanding the jokes, the knife work, and the underpaid, smiling chefs as what they are: a carefully curated spectacle. Austen’s brisk endings with marriage plots once enchanted me, but somehow, the enchantment had broken, giving way to an optimist’s critical scrutiny.

Was that the point? I asked myself, curled in bed with my well-loved copy. Did Austen want us to question the sudden “appearance” of happily ever after between Darcy and Elizabeth, quite the contrast to the author’s circumstances and the era’s aristocratic expectations? 

Regardless of Jane Austen’s authorial intentions, I welcome my challenge. I challenge the inevitability of romance, the sexual essence of intimacy, and the finish line of marriage.

Through not-quite-love letters and rambling voice messages to my pen pal, I contend with these epiphanies. I reimagine my past, reinterpret my future, and often she relates, sometimes, she doesn’t. The power of the epistolary, I learn, is not in understanding, but in listening. There is great relief in being heard. 

In the absence of tactile, matrimonial, and maternal commitment, I howl in my own love language, autonomous and affectionate. The hex code of my love may not fit on the color wheel, but that does not make it untrue. True love isn’t dates and kisses and consummations, it’s neither universal nor unbelievable—it’s individual. For as Austen wrote: “I am only resolved to act in that manner, which will, in my own opinion, constitute my happiness, without reference to you, or to any person so wholly unconnected with me.”