As I've posted before, I have a lot of stories going on in my head during most waking moments, essentially with the same character who acts as my stunt double for those adventures. I've been pondering for many years now why I, a consummate aromantic asexual, invests any mental energy at all into over-the-top romantic stories. Not Harlequin romances, mind you. Those are porn for chicks. My romantic stories have hugging and kissing and long (LONG!) talks between my stunt double Mara and her courter, and, for lack of a better term, acknowledgments that she and her courter (now-husband, in the stories) have sex, but having never experienced or watched it, I don't know how to picture it. So my inner stories include "And then they have sex" gloss-overs, and then flop around with how Mara deals with being pregnant. Because her background is always traumatic, it's fodder for much angst. Trust me!
In my case a pregnancy would be a medical miracle, because the configuration of my down-there parts could be a star player for documentaries about congenital abnormalities. That, and having no desire whatsoever to be a parent, is a long way of saying that a pregnancy would cause me a lot of angst, too. On the plus side, some lucky adoptive parents would get a womb-fresh kid.
Back to the pondering. I've finally realized after all this time what's at the core of all this fantasizing: I am incapable of romantic love, but wish I were. Maybe it's the simplicity of it that's made it so elusive. This may seem like a contradiction of a previous post about marriage that I've since deleted, where I explained ad nauseum that it wouldn't work for me, but it's not. Being an aromantic asexual is what I am, and that won't change. But that doesn't mean it's what I would've picked for myself, given a choice. It comes down to a desire to not be so outside of human experience all the time. I spend most of my life being a good (great?) actress who can pretend to be human, without directly experiencing a lot of it.
Consider another person's athletic fantasies. That person fantasizes about having unmatched athletic skill, winning every competition, "pwning" every opponent, taking every top award, all with effortless ease. That person knows s/he could never accomplish these things, but fantasizes, anyway. Most people wouldn't tsk-tsk that sort of thing. That's the point of fantasies. I happen to maintain that my Lottery Winner fantasy IS a possibility, though, so I'll keep buying tickets. That said...
Because I cannot experience romantic love, I came up with a person who could, and think up romantic stories for her in different historical periods and/or genres. I also have to include an impossibly romantic man as her paramour, because like me, Mara starts out as completely passive, and sometimes even hostile to, romantic leanings. Gradually she gets better, which is the point of all of my Mara stories. As we know, this sort of approach (passivity/hostility) doesn't work in the real world. It goes without saying that I'm proof of that. Well, the real world outside of arranged marriages, I guess. Then other people do the footwork for you (Note: I do not live in a culture that arranges marriages). As mentioned above, my asexual part does come into play when imagining sex for my stories. I only imagine that sex has occurred for Mara and her husband so I can work out the consequences of her pregnancy/ies. I'm uninterested in the details. Also, I keep specifying "husband" because I'm one of those weird Victorian/Puritan holdout types who thinks people should wait before marriage.
Ergo, even if, by some miracle, my heart grew three times its size and allowed me to experience some smidgen of serotonin due to the presence of a man, regardless of where that led, I'd still have no interest in intercourse, except for the talking kind.
Speaking of pregnancy, I always imagine Mara as being a great mom, because - you guessed it - I have zero interest in being a mom, but... ssssssssssort of... wish I did. More like wishing that I didn't dislike children so much, because that helps with being a part of human society.
That's all I got for now!
