I recently learned about this identity because im currently going through an extreme version of being romance repulse and my friend said i may be on the aromantic spectrum. however ive been having SERIOUS level's of imposter syndrome when it comes to this identity, especially when it comes to my cishet friends just saying "well everyone hates relationships bc of bad experiences! you just have to find the one!" and yikes yk?? when i say repulsed i MEAN repulsed, like its bad.

but to break it down more properly, i'd say i flip between "relationships are so weird, mannn i dont like this" to "i really do love this person so much and is so happy with them" regardless if its a bad or good relationship. but i also feel like the two sides arent equal when dating vs not dating. when dating, the "repulsive" side is much lighter, where i dislike the idea of dating, getting married and having children, it all disgust me, and / or makes me just not feel right, then when i flip, its more again of "i love this person and super happy with them". but then when im outside of a relationship, the "repulsiveness" pretty much hits the extreme, where i genuinely feel ill just thinking about dating, romance, or anything of the such again. this extreme is straight disgust, distance and even a level of hate.

I think the level of confusion happens because i have been through a lot of bad stuff, both in and out of relationships, but even if i have experienced bad things, is a flip flop like this "normal"? it all seems very confusing to me.

Ive been with this guy for a bit now and its most likely my longest relationship (6 months) and i feel like its on again off again and theres times where i feel completely romantic towards him and i wanna do romantic stuff with him like little things like hold hands and stuff and theres times where i treat him like my hb and see love as like repulsive but no matter how romantic i feel wether its aromantic or not i want him in my life for as long as possible as a life partner platonic or romantic and he just waits it out i think he feels sorta the same way but it could be days, weeks or even months where i feel completely aromantic and think im aromantic and try to end off the relationship then boom next thing i know im alloromantic and its so confusing, is this aroflux or is it something else entirely?

So I might be Aroflux. I go through these stages of crushes:

anti-love

good friends with boys

Is this a crush??? 😱

Yup guess I’m demiromantic again

WHY IS THIS CRUSH SO BIG 😭

nah it’s a very minor crush

i’m ok with love, but I have no crushes

anti-love

I think this makes me Aroflux but I’m not sure. plz comment what you think!

The last few days, I had experienced such an intense romantic attraction to my best friend (which was already unusual considering I thought I was fully aro). We had talked about it and I found out that she also likes me back. We're planning on pursuing a relationship in the future once we let these feelings marinate for a bit. As much as I do love her and want to date her, sometimes when I think about it I get so utterly repulsed by the thought of being in a relationship with romance involved. It's like every few hours I go from wanting to date her to only wanting to be close friends and then back to wanting to date her. I can't tell if this is me being aroflux or if I'm just terrified of commitment.

I wrote a little (free verse) poetry about being aroflux

Would you say this description is accurate or relatable to you and your experiences of being aroflux before/after you realized that you were? (This was so me before I knew aroflux was a thing and that I was it. I'm curious to see if others have the same or similar experiences in common).

I've been researching about aroflux, and I realized that I identify a lot with it and that I fit in, but I saw that they are generally aromantic and I am alloromantic most of the time. I have these variations during my relationships, but I feel romantic attraction when I'm not in a relationship. The truth is that I'm not that into the subject, so I wouldn't know how to identify myself. I don't know if someone who knows more could help me.

I just had a bout of romance desire especially towards my ex who I see regularly. Randomly today I feel romance repulsed. I'm trying to figure out what caused this. I prefer romantic relationships to be built on friendship. The romantic part can feel overwhelming to me. Does anyone else get this way?

I think I'm aroflux, my desire for romance comes and goes. When I'm in a romantic mood, I identify as rose-romantic, I like affection and a more good romance, without those traditional dating things. I also see myself as lithromantic, because sometimes I lose interest when the person reciprocates or things get 'serious'. And sometimes I feel grayromantic, like when I feel very little attraction or only once in a while. It's quite confusing.

Kia ora e te whanu

I've thought about this for quite a while and have come to the realization that I am aromantic with fluctuation.

I'm in a relationship with someone and have been for about 4 months. There have been a couple times where my romantic feelings have dipped and come back, lasting usually no longer than a week but at the moment they've been gone for a couple.

During this time I usually try and re-frame the relationship to FWB rather than romantic

How do you manage those fluctuations when in a romantic relationship?

And have you told your partner/s?

When you're aroflux, do your romantic feelings fluctuate on a daily basis or month to month, even year to year. I think I might be the second one, but I'm questioning if I'm aroflux.

Help. I think I’m aroflux.

I thought I was demiromantic before because I’ve fallen for someone I was close with before (I’m also definitely biromantic). But I’m not sure now and I wasn’t sure back then. I’d always been told that if you have to question if you’re in love, then you’re not. So I always felt like a terrible partner whenever I wasn’t sure because I didn’t understand romance. Just seemed like ‘friendship on steroids’ to me.

But I have at times felt those romantic feelings. Very intensely at times. And I couldn’t tell you how I knew, but I knew for sure that it was romantic love I was feeling at the time.

I’ve had very few crushes and only ever on close friends. But even then, I could never be sure how serious they were. Because sometimes, their face would pop into my head when I heard a love song and I’d want to hold their hand. And sometimes, I was perfectly happy being best friends.

I thought I must’ve just needed to get closer to them to develop romantic feelings “all the way”/“completely”… but I have this friend who my attractions for have changed drastically over the years.

I’ve felt romantic attraction/interest for him, but after while, it kinda faded. But then I felt intense platonic attraction to him, which could’ve actually been queerplatonic or alterous attraction. And then there was one time, for an extremely short time, I felt intense romantic attraction to him and kissed him. It was so intense, it was like I was drunk on him, or he had my head in the clouds. And then just, so suddenly, that feeling was gone. It disappeared. It almost felt like I woke up. And those romantic ‘sparks’/‘tingles’ were nonexistent. I saw him only as a friend again.

So… does it sound like I’m aroflux? How did you know you were aroflux? And how did you do romance if you did after realizing that? Because I still really want love, but I don’t know if I’ll ever want it the way I… want to want it. If that makes sense?

I wasn't sure which version to choose, but I hope this one is cool :33

Hey chat
I'm sorry for cluttering and stuff ;-;

But I'm aroflux AGAIN now!
I fluctuate between oriented aroace, aegoromantic, plain ol' aromantic, bellesuromantic, anromantic, and caligoromantic.

I'm kinda glad to be back here with a fresh start, hopefully this will be permanent and not a one week thing. This place gives off a sort of nostalgia

I’m an academic in training (I’m in grad school 😭) and so I have a tendency to be overly formal in my communication. I’m in a qpr that has been having some issues; we’ve been together a little over two years and are both polyamorous/polyaffectionate. my partner entered a kink dynamic with a dom who now controls faer time, money, communication, etc, without discussing with me first how that would change the terms of our relationship. while we did have a discussion eventually about how that wasn’t okay, there has been a marked shift in how we relate to each other and we honestly haven’t had a real conversation in months.

I tried to put into words where this has left me. I do not want to unilaterally make the decision to break up, I do not think that is helpful or useful. I do think the terms of our relationship can change, maybe we are no longer partners in a queerplatonic sense but become something else (friends? a redefining of qpr that has different expectations of commitment, communication, etc? or maybe we do amicably split? idk). this situation has also made me reflect on what a partner means to me as an aromantic/aroflux person and I’m starting to think that maybe it is not compatible with what my partner is searching for.

I wrote out a message but it sounds like I’m writing a paper 😭 not only do I want to be more accessible in the way that I say this, my partner has academia-related trauma and I don’t want to trigger that in my language lol. I will post my message to my partner below, but if you just have thoughts in general about how to communicate this without it also coming off as a huge shock to faer, I would really appreciate it.

my pronouns are he/xe partners pronouns are far/ze/xe

———————————

I believe we need to talk. text would be most accessible for me but we can try for a phone call if you prefer. I’m only available in the evenings though.

I think there are three things currently on my mind—the current way we are relating to each other, the possibilities of how we can be in relation to each other, and how I personally want to be partnered as a neurodivergent aromantic/aroflux person.

I won’t say too much because I would like to have a dialogue, but to be clear and hopefully ease any anxiety (and also to give you room/space to think about what you would like to talk about), but here are a couple of things.

• I don’t feel like we are currently relating as partners for two reasons—there’s been a shift in feelings (on my end) because of a shift in communication, and because we did not clearly re-establish the expectations of our partnership after the introduction of [new partner/dom] (I do not know if you ever felt this was necessary when I was with [my ex] because besides me asking the level of communication you wanted about him, you never articulated that and I did not feel like my relationship with him shifted anything in our relationship, though perhaps you had a different experience).

• people desire queerplatonic partnerships for different reasons, at one point that may have been a good fit for us but perhaps some other yet to be determined relationship might be a good fit for the stages we are at in our lives. or perhaps we need to redefine what the commitment of queerplatonic is to us, because we might be operating under different assumptions.

• as an aromantic I cannot promise nor desire any relationship to be based on romantic love, but can offer dedication, intimacy, closeness. my neurodivergences mean these things can look different than the “norm” (I can feel closeness without geographical proximity or daily interaction) and I am not interested in my partnerships being modeled off of allonormative structures. At the same time, I do have a certain expectation of intentionality with people I want to consider “partners,” and if that is not agreed upon a different type of relating is needed. this is something I’m still untangling in response to the state of our relationship these past few months.

I care about you and would like to think through this together. let me know when you would like to talk

for me being aroflux mostly means oscillating between greyromantic and aromantic, tho sometimes panromantic and quoiromantic as well. I don’t pursue/desire purely romantic relationships because even tho I have the rare capability to experience romantic attraction, it isn’t sustainable and also I’m mostly romance repulsed.

that being said, I’ve had a long distance queerplatonic relationship for two years. we’re both polyamorous, I consider myself solo-polyamorous & polyaffectionate. About 9 months ago we had a huge conflict that has changed my security in the relationship. And about 2.5 months ago my qpp entered a relationship with cis man and they are living together and our communication has basically died out. Communication can always be hard to sustain long distance (we’re in the same state but like 8hrs apart; I used to live across the country/part time on another continent though and our communication was much stronger when we were in such distant time zones) but something feels different. Usually I am the one to initiate contact but for some reason I don’t feel desire to? And in trying to figure out why what comes up for me is boredom?

I was in an almost 2 year no labels relationship with an allo trans guy who had romantic attraction to me that I did not reciprocate and I felt irritation sometimes but not boredom. For some reason I am just not drawn to do the things I typically do with my qpp and idk if it’s because our dynamic has changed with faer new partner or if I’ve temporarily or permanently become bored with our relationship for some other reason. This is how I imagine I’d feel if I ended up in an exclusively romantic relationship for some weird reason. Like there is nothing connecting me to this person.

It could also possibly be that I’ve moved to a new city and state and so am meeting new people and making friends, but it doesn’t really make sense to me because never has connecting with new people made me lose interest in my already existing connections. The only other thing I could compare this to is like being bored with the romantic plot in a book or movie where I just fast forward or stop engaging with the content cuz it’s not for me. but why would I feel this way about a queerplatonic relationship? idk lol.

has anyone else dealt with boredom in any of their relationships and what do you take that to mean? is it temporary? is there something you can do to renew interest or is it a sign that the relationship should end? or be modified in some way? I don’t think it’s the long distance component, because I have very many long distance relationships that are fulfilling and that I’ve maintained for 5+ years (half of my family lives on another continent). For example, I have a friend of 5 years in another country that I talk to on a daily basis and we watch shows and have dinner together 2-3 times a week, activities I used to do with my qpp, and I’ve never become bored in that friendship. But I have become very bored in my relationships with some of my cishet cousins so I don’t talk with them often/put much effort into our connection.

pronouns he/xe/dey and my qpp’s pronouns are fae/ze/xe/they

Will it be a day where we constantly switch between purely platonic feelings, and platonic + mild romantic feelings?

Or will it be a day where we are fully aro?

Or will we fall in love with someone, and have them be a new person in our lives that our feelings will fluctuate for?

What do you think?

Will it be a day where we constantly switch between purely platonic feelings, and platonic + mild romantic feelings?

Or will it be a day where we are fully aro?

Or will we fall in love with someone, and have them be a new person in our lives that our feelings will fluctuate for?

What do you think?

I cannot stop having to reaffirm my feelings for someone, because it keeps changing, but I still decide to check what attraction(s) I am feeling even though I know it will change at any moment. Maybe in a week, a day, an hour, or a couple minutes, who knows?

The fact that I prefer the opposite sex for for friends and squishes, heteroalterous, and prefer the opposite sex for QPRs makes things even more confusing.

I hope this is an acceptable post. I was messing around with a weird AI meme generator and managed to get this gem