Ace Dad Advice: My friends keep choosing their romantic relationships over our friendships. Help!

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Z writes:

How do I cope with my friends continually choosing/valuing romantic relationships over the platonic ones I have with them? I’m struggling to love my ace identity when the world keeps reminding me I’m viewed as “less than.”

Hey Z,

First, let’s talk about why most allo folks treat their romantic and platonic relationships so differently. There’s this social script called the relationship elevator, and it teaches us that the most worthwhile relationships follow an escalating pattern from platonic connection to deep, monogamous emotional and sexual commitment. Only those kind of relationships deserve top priority, because they’re the relationships that are the most real, most important and most fulfilling. If a relationship isn’t putting us on the escalator to the top floor, then it’s demanded of us that we deprioritize it.

The relationship escalator forces us to put up or shut up when it comes to the people we connect with. We either provide what’s demanded of a relationship on the escalator, or we learn our place behind the people who can and do.

For ace and aro folks, the relationship escalator is a massive headache. For us, the kind of relationship the escalator demands is often either not the kind of relationship we want or not the kind we are able to provide. So we can form powerful bonds with our friends, only to see those bonds dismissed and devalued as soon as the friends find folks to ride the escalator with.

One way to deal with this is to confront the problem head-on. Talk to your friends about the way these changes in your friendship feel for you. No one ever questions the relationship escalator, so most people assume we’re all fine with its collateral damage. Expressing the way the deprioritization of your friendship impacts you could elicit some changes in their behavior. Is this guaranteed to work? No, unfortunately. You may not overcome the escalator entirely, you might work with them to strike a better balance for you all.

It’s also important for you to place a strong wall of defense between how you feel about your own asexuality and the negative friendship repercussions of the relationship escalator. Does it suck when our friends ditch us for time with their partners? Absolutely. Does it suck when our emotional commitment and support to our friends goes unreciprocated or unvalued simply because we’re not “dating?” Sure. But none of that is a reflection of the truth of you. None of that is revealing anything deficient or broken in you.

We can’t control the behavior of others, but we can control (or work on) what happens inside us. We have to develop strategies to counteract that voice that says, “See, you’re not good enough.” Because that voice is wrong. It’s never the truth. What’s wrong and broken are the cultural constructs that have decided some relationship types are intrinsically more valuable than others, that some people are intrinsically more valuable than others.

Allow yourself to experience the negative feelings that surround this — disappointment, sadness, loneliness, maybe anger and resentment — but don’t let those feelings become the story of who you are. You are more than their rejection. Hold on to that.

And this leads me to a slightly broader thought, too. Queerness of all kinds, any deviation from a cisgender, heterosexual existence, requires us to enter an adversarial relationship with the world. We are always fighting: fighting to be seen, fighting to be respected, fighting to stay free of harm, to love the way we want, to use our bodies the way we want, to simply exist in our bodies the way we choose. And even when we are granted some level of peace — more equal laws, tolerance from our communities, acceptance from our circles — that peace is almost always conditional. It can be taken away in a second, so even when we aren’t fighting, we still have to be on guard for the moment the fight returns to us.

We can let the pressure of that compress us into smaller, duller versions of ourselves. Or we can use the pressure as fuel to burn more brightly in the world. I think it’s one of the great alchemies of queerness, transforming what tries to break us into what makes us fabulous.

We might never reach a point where friendships are universally treated as equally worth prioritization as romantic relationships (even though we know they can be and are), but that shouldn’t stop us from shining as though they are, as though our version of the world was right and fulfilling and beautiful.

It is right and fulfilling and beautiful. it’s something you already know, since you’ve learned to love yourself as ace. Refuse to let anyone take that knowledge away from you.