Reading My Allosexual Half-Doppelgänger’s Memoir

I just read the memoir of someone who is almost the same age as me. That made it easy for me to compare their personal chronology with my own.

No, I won’t tell you whose memoir it is, mainly to avoid putting some of my personal information out in public.

Some parallels in our lives make for eerie echoes. She moved to another continent at about the same time I did. She started a blog around the same time I started this one (early 2012). She had been reluctant to learn how to drive as a teenager while all their peers were eager to get their licenses. I had to drive as a teenager anyway and pushed myself through it, but she’d evaded it until well into her twenties by choosing to live in places where she could get by with just walking and public transit. Meanwhile, when my life circumstances allowed it, I avoided driving a vehicle for over a decade by also choosing to live in places where I didn’t need a car.

And yet, in some ways, we’re the total opposite.

The part of the memoir I find the hardest to relate to is her constant need for a boyfriend. Pretty much as soon as she’s mature enough to consent to sex, she’s attaching herself to boys, and never spending more than a few months single. Getting a new boyfriend is her habitual response to dealing with her struggles.

I have to be vague to avoid revealing which memoir I’m talking about, so I’ll just say she continues to pursue dating in some truly extraordinary circumstances that shocks even the allosexual/alloromantic people around her. She pursues sex in situations where many allosexuals would regard it as a bad idea. Ironically, that more than anything else convinces me she is really allo and not just trying to have sex to fit in with social norms. She regrets dating someone when, in retrospect, she wished she’d been single so she could’ve better sorted herself out. She pursues men more to soothe herself than out of interest in who they are and supporting their aspirations. Does that cause problems in her relationships? You bet. I respect how honest she is about this personal flaw.

Here I am, an aromantic asexual who has never had a ‘significant other’ gaping at this. It hits harder because of the ways I resemble this woman.

It’s like reading about a parallel universe where I was an allo.

I’d like to think that I wouldn’t have used my boyfriends primarily to plaster over my problems and shore up my self-esteem, but who knows?

Rather than making me wish I were allo, this memoir makes me feel so grateful that singlehood comes to me so easily. Though there are some very sweet romantic moments in this memoir, those don’t seem to be worth the writer’s dependence on her romantic-sexual partners to prop up her sense of self-worth.

I hope that, in the time after the memoir concludes, she kept herself intentionally single for a few years and learned how to be an adult without validation from a romantic partner.