aroacepagans:

aroarolibrary:

aroacepagans:

Some aros, mostly due to neurodivergency, can only form acquantances, and not close friendships or any other close platonic bond. This is always how i’ve heard it described. I don’t want the aro community to fall into the amatonormative relatonship heirarchy model where we value qpps above friendships, OR we see them as the only form we can experience a pull or desire to form committed platonic relationships. However, i have seen various people use aplatonic to mean ‘does not want a qpr’

In a self labelling sense, just as i have seen ‘nonamorous’ to describe not wanting a romo relationship. Sorry for the long message on anon! Deleted my tumblr but check ur blog almost daily lol

My understanding is that the term aplatonic was actually coined because people centered qpp’s so much in the aro community. Like the point of the word was to say “hey, not all aro’s feel this kind of attraction” so I don’t think defining it as such is really centering qpp’s at all, it’s intended to do the opposite.

There are lots of other words for people who don’t feel other kinds of attraction, asensual or a-alterous are both good examples of this. People do tend to conflate platonic and queerplatonic attraction and I think the term “aplatonic” frequently gets used for both (which is unhelpful but what can you do) so there is some confusion there, and I don’t think it’s necessarily incorrect for people with either experience to id as aplatonic, even if we should probably have two different words for these things.

That said, even with this confusion I don’t think “doesn’t have/ want friends” is a good definition. Any way you slice it this identity is about what kinds of attraction you feel, and definitions that don’t specify that are unhelpful. I would also say that not all strong platonic relationships are friendships or qpps. There are many different kinds of strong platonic relationships and that definition doesn’t promote any understanding of this.  Additionally, there are still plenty of folks who id as aplatonic because they don’t experience queer platonic attraction in particular, but might still have other close relationships and that definition, as stated in my first post, excludes those people.

Part of the issue is that people are using the same word to mean two different things. There’s never going to be a good all-encompassing definition of aplatonic because that word is used to describe two very different experiences. But ether way I think we can agree that parroting exclusionist misunderstandings about what aplatonic means is not a great thing to be doing. 

A couple of notes:

1) aplatonic was not coined due to QPRs. It was specifically coined in response to the emphasis on friendships within aromantic spaces.

2) nonamorous was the original word for not experiencing ‘queerplatonic attraction’.

3) it is very important to remember that it has it origins within abuse victims and is heavily used by nd aros.

It seems like there’s a lot of different ideas about its coinage spread around (just based on how many contradictory corrections I got on it) so thank you for pulling up that link!

As @greed-the-dorkalicious mentioned “nonamorous” isn’t a great term for this because “amorous” is frequently used to refer to romantic love so the phrase itself isn’t comprehensive and lot of people don’t like it. I think that’s why some people may have started using “aplatonic” instead ( just based on a quick Google search it looks like the definition I gave is definitely one being used by a lot of people even if it’s not correct). So idk an alternative term would probably be good.

Ya and I, sadly, played a HUGE part in that miss-definition in 2015 which is something I have spent years and years trying to rectify.

The definition people tend to use is “Aplatonic is simply a descriptor used by some aro people to explain that they do not experience squishes nor desire to be in qpps/qprs”

The bolder part is the issue because it is completely my fault it exists simply because I was an idiot and, when making an info graphic on aplatonic, I worded things in a way to make it seem that the bold part was what I was saying when, instead, what I was saying was “because of being aplatonic a lot of aplatonic aros don’t want QPRs.” Not that aplatonic is a word to describe not wanting QPRs.

You need to understand that I was one of the first group of aromantics on tumblr using this word, my aplatonic tag is full of the history of this term, and the misuse of aplatonic as being used to simply mean ‘not wanting QPRs’ is something that I consider to be my own personal failing and that I am constantly trying to rectify.