Day three - Romance and relationships

I Keep Saying This Is The Last Post "This is a post about ace erasure and about the way in which platonic relationships are marginalized." Includes such quotable moments as

'We’re not dating, we’re just friends!' Just friends. As if a nonromantic, nonsexual relationship can’t be as emotionally intimate and fulfilling and sustaining as a romantic/sexual one can.

Recommended reading.

My Shepard is Asexual, and That's Okay
Using the Mass Effect game to talk about how sex and romance impacts games like it and Dragon Age but also lays out the basics of how the author experiences asexuality and romantic attraction ("like a hands-off Jack Harkness"):

1. I don't believe you have to have sex with someone just because you're totally and utterly in love with them.
2. I don't believe intimacy needs to involve sex.
3. In fact, I don't believe in having sex at all.
4. There is tremendous social pressure against making the previous statements.

All of which makes me feel:
And I've never even played Mass Effect!


The term zucchini is sometimes used to describe a non-sexual life partner and this article discusses the word a little My Thoughts on the Word “Zucchini”;
"Half the fun of “zucchini” as terminology (and “squash,” and other puns) is that it’s totally silly. It doesn’t take itself seriously. It’s slangy and fun and absurd and colloquial. It makes no sense when you think about it. And that works, because there actually aren’t words in the English language that do make sense when you think about them for the kinds of relationships we’re discussing–everything either gets subsumed under the devaluation that gets attached to words like “friend” or has been taken to refer to romantic relationships. “Zucchini” isn’t entirely meant to take itself seriously in the first place."
However the author points out that serious or silly, "words like “zucchini” and “squash” have given me vocabulary to talk about my dreams and my hopes and my current relationships so much more effectively than I could otherwise" and that "words shape our thoughts. If no word exists in a language to describe a thing, it’s almost impossible to discuss that concept, at least not without convoluted circumlocutions. Lack of words becomes a way to silence minority viewpoints."
In the UK we call those vegetables courgettes, so zucchini has practically zero connotations, and it's such a fun word to use :D
Even when we look at fiction, we have the term "bromance" for heterosexual men with close relationships, including those with slash subtext. But we don't have recognised terms for this between women or a man and a woman. "Zucchini" might be a bit too much for some of these relationships but it might work for others. I've also seen it used for Sherlock/Watson where the BBC version seems (despite Moffat's objections) to suggest an asexual Sherlock and a heterosexual Watson living as a couple in all senses of the word barring sex.