Tu B'Av Reflections: What Is Love?

Baby, don't hurt me, don't hurt me, no more. (Y'all know I had to do it.)

We've just passed the Jewish holiday of Tu B'Av, often referred to as the Jewish Valentine's Day. However, unlike Valentine's Day, many people celebrate Tu B'Av as being about all kinds of love, not just romantic love. So I thought I'd take a moment to talk about the shapes love takes and what it means to love outside of a romantic context.

The ancient Greeks differentiated six specific types of love. There was agape, or love for the world at large; eros, or sexual love; philia, or affectionate love between equals; storge, or familial love; philautia, or self-love; and ludus, or playful love - the kind of love felt in your game night friend group or when flirting. Some sources include a seventh: pragma, or deep and enduring love - the kind of love where you can see someone after years apart and feel as if no time has passed. I've always felt strongly that we should go back to using these kinds of terms - after all, I'm autistic and I love categories and subcategories and subsubcategories, and also I love words. But in the past year, this has come back to the forefront of my mind as I've struggled to identify what love looks like for me.

I realized this year that I'm aromantic and not as fully asexual as I'd thought. It turns out I do experience sexual attraction - albeit nebulously and infrequently - but that I only experience romantic attraction rarely, if ever. I've known for a while that I was some flavor of aromantic for a while, but in the last month, I've come to realize that I'm not at all sure I've ever experienced romantic attraction. Every "crush" I've had, even in my long-term relationships, has been about companionship, not romance. While I do enjoy romantic behavior (dates, romantic gestures, all that good stuff), I've discovered that, as with asexuality, you can enjoy the action without experiencing the attraction.

Finding this out about myself has also made me examine my past and present relationships. There are quite a few people I can confidently say I love, but what does that mean in my supposedly romantic relationships? Why did I think I was experiencing romantic attraction when I wasn't, and why did I think I wasn't experiencing sexual attraction when I was?

That last question, at least, has an easy answer. Despite years of explaining to people that attraction and libido are separate, it never occurred to me that I might just not have much of a libido. That's not to say that I'm not at least gray ace, but it's not, if you'll pardon the pun, as black-and-white as I'd thought.

What I thought was romantic attraction has been intense, but it's also been highly focused on knowing someone better and spending more time with them. I never fantasized about boomboxes and candlelit dinners; instead, I imagined vulnerable, philosophical conversations and quietly sharing space. And because we live in a heavily amatonormative society, I assumed that this was romantic attraction. Where would I get information to the contrary, when romantic relationships are so often depicted as the only ones in which those things are permitted? It took until I started dating more casually to figure out that it was more complicated than that.

Within my supposedly romantic relationships, it's been a bit of a range. My long-term partner Lav (it/its), who is also on the ace spectrum, reacted very predictably and quietly - the gist was that it supported me and that if I needed anything to change, it assumed I would tell it. A man I was seeing when I fully realized that I'm aro, on the other hand, immediately made it about himself, demanded to know whether I was romantically attracted to other people, and implied that I had somehow tricked him by not having realized this sooner. (We did not continue seeing each other.)

I also spent some time thinking on the people I've had the deepest crushes on, looking for the commonalities and trying to determine where, exactly, the attraction lay. I quickly realized that I was drawn to certain qualities - a propensity for mischief, a love of creative arts, an intellectual spirit - and that when I found someone with those qualities, I inevitably wanted to get to know them better and spend more time with them. Nine years ago, when I was first coming out, I played with the term "quoiromantic", meaning that a person has a hard time distinguishing between platonic and romantic attraction or otherwise is unsure of their romantic attraction. I stopped using the term after a while, but it turns out that I was spot on, in a way: I couldn't distinguish between the two because I was only experiencing one.

The relief of the realization was interrupted by a new question: how, then, could I categorize the people I'd thought I'd had romantic feelings for? There might not have been romance, but there was definitely something that had made those relationships feel more intense than my other friendships. Thinking it through, I can see now that many of those "crushes" were simply the joy of knowing kindred spirits, combined with my loneliness as an autistic kid with intense interests and limited social skills. They weren't romantic, they just felt new and big because I so badly needed people.

There were still two relationships I couldn't quite categorize: my best friend in college, and my best friend now. In both relationships, I've described the feeling as being platonically in love with someone, but that still didn't feel quite accurate. Thankfully (and characteristically), I found the answer in a fantasy novel.

In the Throne of Glass series by Sarah J. Maas (I know I'm basic, don't @ me), she introduces the concept of a carranam, someone with whom you are divinely linked in a way that enables you to essentially touch souls and share your essence. I'd read the books a million times before, of course, but on my most recent reread, I noticed the phrase "anam cara" in the acknowledgements, and I realized that the term carranam had come from somewhere. And indeed, "anam cara" is a Gaelic phrase meaning "soul friend", a phrase that struck a deep chord for me. Oh, I realized, that's what they are to me.

Anam cara (the plural is the same as the singular) can be romantic, but there's no romantic implication in the term; it's like saying "soulmate" without any of the subtext of romance and monogamy. And that was the missing piece for me - these two people, and a couple of others throughout my life (including Lav!), have been my anam cara, my soul friends.

I don't know if I can adequately express what it felt like to figure out that there is a term for what I'm experiencing. Any queer person can recognize that feeling, as can a lot of disabled and mentally ill people. For those who haven't had this kind of identity-shifting moment, it's like putting a frustrating puzzle piece into its place, but in some deep, intrinsic part of yourself.

All of which brings me back to Tu B'Av and love and what it means. I don't need to tell most of my audience that love isn't just romantic - you already know that - but I think more of us need to be able to name that soul-deep love in a way that doesn't have any implications or subtext. The final epiphany was that the concept I really needed was that love can just be love, in its truest and most distilled form, without conditions or expectations. Our amatonormative society has built up the phrase "I love you" to a point where people feel like they can only say it to a romantic partner, but it's not true. Love, to play into a cliché, is love.

Tu B'Av is over, but the love is still there. So take a moment today to give your friends, your partners, your family, and your anam cara some love.