Aromantic

Aromantic describes someone who feels little or no romantic attraction to other people. It is tracked separately from sexual orientation, because the two do not always point the same way and for many people they clearly do not.

That separation is the useful part. Someone can be aromantic and allosexual, wanting sex without wanting romance. Someone can be asexual and deeply romantic. Writing the two halves together, as in aromantic bisexual, says more in two words than most orientation labels manage on their own.

Aro is the short form, and the aro spectrum runs the same way the ace one does, with greyromantic and demiromantic in between.

What aromantic people most often describe is not an absence but a mismatch: the feelings are there, and they are friendship, admiration, attachment, wanting someone's company constantly. What is missing is the specific thing everyone else seems to mean by falling in love, and the assumption that it is the highest form of connection available.

Queerplatonic relationships come up frequently in aro communities for that reason. They are committed partnerships that are not romantic, and they exist because the available words made no room for them.

Aromantic does not mean unloving

The word is often read as a report of coldness, or of having been hurt badly enough to stop trying. Neither is what it says. Aromantic people form deep attachments, keep lifelong friendships, raise children and build households.

What they are describing is the absence of one particular category of feeling, in a culture that treats that category as the point of a life. The misreading comes from that assumption rather than from anything in the word.

Saying it well