Asexual love has a right to Valentine’s Day too! Grace Singh, who runs Indian Aces for asexual couples writes. Come Valentine’s Day and there’s a barrage of inescapable mushy messages and romantic imagery one must put up with everywhere, from malls to restaurants to the email inbox. But did you ever notice there’s a pattern to all of this? For example, what’s the image that comes to your mind immediately as I say the word ‘couple’? If it was not an attractive girl laughing with a tall handsome guy in beautiful sunlight on a park bench, you deserve a cookie.
Our understanding of ‘love’ itself is vastly heteronormative. A typical, ideal, or worse, ‘normal’ love story goes the exact same way for a majority of the population. A girl and a guy meet/see each other (online or offline). They feel attracted to each other and at least one of them decides to pursue it based on their attraction. They fall in love, eventually marry each other, and have children. This is the happy ending. In such a scenario, the love story typically commences with physical attraction between the guy and the girl, followed by romantic attraction and love. The culmination of romance is typically expected to be sex and the culmination of love, the marriage, with their children being the ‘pyar ki nishani’.
A lot of this mindset has to do with pop culture, where we see a man ‘falling in love’ with a woman at the first glance, and deciding to pursue her relentlessly based on it. Movie songs show the ‘hero’ serenading the ‘love of his life’ by extensively praising her appearance, writing poetry on the beauty of her hair, eyes, lips, and arms, and professing what her physical appearance does to him and his ‘heart’. He will then describe the manifestations of his sexual attraction to her in no subtle terms. Exhibit A: “Ye kaali kaali aankhein, ye gore gore gaal, dekha jo tujhe janam, hua hai bura haal.” Exhibit B: “ladki beautiful kar gayi chull”. You get the picture, right?
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