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Romantic orientation


michaeld

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(Strictly speaking not a question about asexuality, but it seems to fit Asexual Q&A better than any other forum; please feel free to move if I'm wrong about this.)

I've been wondering for a while about the origin of the terms heteromantic, homoromantic, biromantic, panromantic and aromantic - and the obvious variations thereof. Did they originate on AVEN or in one of the other online asexual communities, such as LJ or Apositive? Or do they pre-date the internet movement completely?

I have this recollection of, just after joining AVEN, someone referring to an AVEN thread where these words were originally invented. But I can't find it since then. I could have misremembered; maybe the thread being referred to just described rather than invented the terms. When I asked about this on the chat a while ago, someone said the terms went back to the 60s or 70s but they couldn't remember a reference.

Any ideas?

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Herr Joseph von Löthing

They evolved from their respective sexual sexual orientations I guess. It's the most logical way of doing it.

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They evolved from their respective sexual sexual orientations I guess. It's the most logical way of doing it.

Right, of course. The analogy between the romantic terms and their sexual counterparts is absolutely clear. What I was wondering though was where and by whom the romantic terms were first used.

After posting this it occurred to me that a good way of researching this would to use the Search function on AVEN but only searching up to about 2004 or so.

So I did this, searching for "heteromantic", "heteroromantic", "hetero-romantic", "homoromantic", "homo-romantic", "biromantic", "bi-romantic", "aromantic", "panromantic", "pan-romantic" (aagh, stupid variations!) Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a sensible way of searching for "a-romantic" since the search includes hits without the essential hyphen. I'm not sure too many people use that spelling anyhow.

The earliest hits I found were a couple of uses of the term "biromantic" in August 2002 by a user called Madame_Sosotris.

http://www.asexuality.org/en/index.php?/topic/87-should-proly-introduce-meself/

http://www.asexuality.org/en/index.php?/topic/9-asexuality-and-queerness/

Next in 2003 a user called "JKReagan99" used the term "homo-romantic" a couple of times.

http://www.asexuality.org/en/index.php?/topic/1592-really-weird-coincidence/

http://www.asexuality.org/en/index.php?/topic/1704-a-dialogue-on-the-redefinition-of-sexuality/

There are quite a few more references in 2004. So it seems the terms were not in common usage at the inception of AVEN. I'm guessing they entered into the general AVEN vocabulary in around 2004-5, though that'll require more research.

The following thread "Relationship definitions" from 2005 also looks like it may be important since it's the first AFAICT that goes through the romantic orientations systematically. In fact this could have been the thread I was originally thinking of. Note also the following quote from "Forbidden Fury", presumably from an earlier thread.

Why not have totally different catagories of asexual, sexual, and romantic, aromantic, and then heterosexual, bisexual, homosexual, pansexual or homoromantic, heteroromantic, etc?

http://www.asexuality.org/en/index.php?/topic/9433-relationship-definitions/

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The term homoromantic predates anything to do with the asexuality movemetn; it was used to describe strong friendships between hetro-sexual males.

Cool. Do you have a reference for that?

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Herr Joseph von Löthing

They evolved from their respective sexual sexual orientations I guess. It's the most logical way of doing it.

Right, of course. The analogy between the romantic terms and their sexual counterparts is absolutely clear. What I was wondering though was where and by whom the romantic terms were first used.

Derp, the windex fumes were getting to my head, my bad.

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Pretzelboy (aka mandrewliter) once mentioned its origin to me. This is what he said:

The term "aromantic" was first proposed on Haven for the Human Ameoba as a joke (it was followed by "LOL") on April 26, 2002. Another person a few days later thought it was a good (and amusing) term. I'm not entirely clear on when the FAQ's were written, but I think they were written about a month before that.

Maybe you could ask him for more details.

I also know there is a parallel concept in the LGBT community called affectional orientation.

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I cannot tell you their origin, but just for some time frame, to my recollection they have been widely in use as long as I have been on AVEN, so that places their origins at least prior to late 2004.

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I can personally date them to being fairly well-established in early 2004 at least. I remember them being used on the Gaia thread where I learned about asexuality (the people running the thread were AVENites and linked me to AVEN), and that would have been about February or March 2004. I specifically remember reading the phrase "aromantic asexual" and thinking that resonated with me.

I do remember that the forums used "affectional orientation" a lot more when I was newer to AVEN rather than "romantic orientation," which I see a lot more often now. If the LGBT community had "affectional orientation" as a parallel concept, I think it's likely that early asexuals familiar with the LGBT community simply borrowed the term for asexual-specific discussions. Since we have so very many people with mismatched affectional and sexual orientations (in fact, that would probably be a majority of asexual people), it seems likely that the terms would have become embedded in the board's popular usage. But all of this is speculation, not history.

I would second Siggy's recommendation of asking pretzelboy/mandrewliter about their origin, since he seems to have done the most exhaustive research into the history of asexuality that I know of.

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Thanks all. I'll message mandrewliter in case he has anything further to add.

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Lord Happy Toast

I haven't done really thorough research on this subject, but I do have a few comments.

First, it is clear that the concept was discussed on Haven for the Human Amoeba before the AVEN forums were started at the end of May 2002. One of the main reasons I havent' done too in depth research is simply that HHA was an email group and reading through everything is extremely time consuming. Just to give you an idea, people on it talk about having been away for a week or two and it taking a few hours to get caught up on everything. That's one reason that the AVEN forums were a much better format for what asexuals needed to talk about.

That said, if you join HHA, you can do searches on it, which are useful for finding early uses of various terms. If you do this, it is important to get creative in what you look for.

The first romantic orientation based term I was able to find was "hetero-asexual" which was the title of post dated November 19, 2001. (HHA was founded in 2000, but discussion really didn't get going until July 2001 and then took off in August 2001.)

Besides this bit of asexual trivia, I suspect that a number of people came up with similar concepts on their own prior to finding out about asexual. For instance, I once stumbled across an advice column from 1999 where an asexual woman considered herself "heteroplatonic." (Here's an AVEN thread about it.)

Before HHA, there was this article called "my life as an amoeba" that people could comment on. Google the title of the article, and you'll find a version of it on asexualove.net, which has a link that has gone dead. Copy the link and follow it on Internet Archive to read the comments. However, my brief searching (I haven't read it in full, at least not recently) didn't give my any romantic orientation terms that preceded the HHA use.

I hope this helps answer your question. If anyone feels really motivated and wants to follow up on the sources I've mentioned, I'd love to hear what you find.

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