Aromantic Awareness Week approaches

BY BRYN FAWN Opinions Editor & PR Chair

Valentine’s Day has recently come and gone. Many events were held leading up to and on the holiday, such as card making, making chocolate covered strawberries and Create-A-Creature. While couples had their dates and friends had Galentine’s, there is a minority of people who feel excluded from the holiday entirely.

According to WebMD: “Aromantic people have little or no romantic attraction to others. They may or may not feel sexual attraction. An aromantic person can fall into one of two groups: aromantic sexual people or aromantic asexual people.”

Aromanticism is also a spectrum, akin to asexuality. Their identities often are “yin and yang” of each other. For example, the “aro version” of demisexual would be demiromantic. Any sexuality can be used as a romantic attraction, and so attraction is split in half. This concept has been named the Split Attraction Model, (SAM).

Aromantic is often confused for asexual, and while both communities have much in common and find camaraderie, they are not the same. In fact, there is a second layer to attraction forgotten often as well: romantic attraction. SAM best demonstrates this phenomenon: an individual can be bisexual — sexually attracted to both or more sexes — but heteroromantic — romantically attracted solely to the opposite sex. Besides those in the aromantic and asexual community, SAM is not common knowledge.

What’s also not common knowledge is that Aromantic Awareness Week follows after Valentine’s Day each year. This year, the week of awareness takes place from Feb. 19 to 25.

Aromantic Spectrum Awareness Week, the organization, has an informational page on their website titled “Aro 101” at arospecweek.org. The webpage showcases FAQs, social media sites and other resources for anyone interested in aromanticism.

Roscoe Duquette is a senior art major. They identify as aromantic “or at least on the spectrum of aromantic” and bisexual. Duquette shared that they are not heavily involved in the LGBT community and were unaware of the LGBT resources on campus; such as the LGBTQ+ Resource Committee and the LGBTQ+ Peer Support group.

Duquette feels aromanticism is often overlooked when it comes to attraction and queer identities.

“Most of the time I see it discussed it’s usually with asexuality, which made me take a long time to realize that I am aro[mantic],” Duquette said.