Aline realizes they are a-romantic, and decides to become a parent on their own.
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In this episode, Aline realizes they are a-romantic, which brings another big revelation — they don’t want to wait for a romantic partner to start a family. Aline explores different kinds of families and co-parenting options, only to realize that romance plays a role in almost all of them. With this in mind, Aline decides they’ll become a parent on their own.
This episode features excerpts from Brut’s story “What is a platonic life partnership?” and from the podcast Call Your Girlfriend.
Aline: I remember being in high school and dreaming of having a kid. At night, I’d imagine becoming a teen mom.
I’d come up with very elaborate scenarios about how it was going to happen. I imagined that a family I met in Africa would give me their baby–I know how terrible this sounds, but it was peak Angelina Jolie adopting kids! Or maybe a sick friend could give me custody of her kid.
Sometimes I’d dream I’d get pregnant. But I found it hard to imagine how this–me having sex I mean–would come to be.
I wondered if my parents would be ok with that, and if me and the baby would fit in my bedroom.
I daydreamed that if I had a kid later in life, I would raise them with friends on a hippy farm, or wander the world with my baby, like the family in The Wild Thornberrys.
In all these scenarios, I rarely had a romantic partner. I guess my subconscious knew I was made to be single. It just took me more than 15 years to fully realize and accept that, and I have my asexuality to thank for it.
THEME SONG–FREED FROM DESIRE
As far as I can remember, I’ve assumed that I would fall in love eventually. Everybody does. But I never did.
For a long time, it was pissing me off that I wasn’t falling in love. It felt like a failure and an injustice. Why couldn’t I have that happiness?
Discovering asexuality slowly changed the way I looked at romance. As I learned to accept my asexuality, I learned to accept all the ways that I was different, including never falling in love. I learned to stop seeing this as an injustice, and came to see it as a part of who I am.
Discovering asexuality also led me to a realization about love.
When I was a kid I learned that romantic love was hard to define–“You’ll know when you feel it." There was one sign though–whether or not you wanted to kiss that someone.
The more I knew about asexuality, the more I accepted that I would never feel this urge to kiss anyone. So how could I know when something was friendship, and when it was love?
Angela Chen, the journalist and asexuality expert we’ve heard in previous episodes, is asexual and biromantic, meaning she’s romantically attracted to both men and women.
She’s currently in a romantic relationship and knows that she’s in love with her partner:
Angela: I really think a lot of people say I know when I see it, and I think that's the case for me.
Aline: But she doesn’t know why she or anyone else knows.
Angela: So with my partner, I love them a lot. I care about them a lot. I would happily spend the rest of my life with them. But at the same time, you know, I have friends that I love as well, and I can think of friends that we probably could be, I feel like we could be living together for the rest of time, and I'd be pretty happy, too. So I think there is, there is a difference. I'm not saying there's no difference. So I think it's a very, very hard to actually point out what that difference is
Aline: So I asked my friends what romantic love was to them. They told me that it’s being in a state of exhilaration. It’s missing the person every time they’re away. It’s a certain tenderness. It’s sharing and planning a life together.
I couldn’t see how that was different from friendship. I couldn’t understand it in my body. Angela reassured me. It’s not that easy, and it may not be as “natural” as everyone says.
Angela: I'm not sure exactly if the difference is because of the feeling inside or if it's because of the ways that we are taught to treat romantic partners and friends differently, because there are different expectations for romantic partners, socially and personally than there are for friends. And I think that over time and with all the messages we've absorbed, then that will necessarily affect how we feel. The outside will affect the inside.
Aline: I started to realize that the way you can love your friend is not so different from the way you can love your partner, and there was no reason it should be seen as less important.
And that helped me understand that I actually had enough love in my life. That the only thing stopping me from being fully happy was my frustration, my unfruitful quest for “the one," This breakthrough allowed me to accept something else, something that was too scary before. I am aromantic.
[Voiceover: An aromantic, or aro for short, is a person who experiences little or no romantic attraction to others. People identifying as aromantic can also experience romance in a way otherwise disconnected from normative societal expectations.]
Aline: In its early days, the ace community noticed that some asexual people were attracted romantically to others, and some weren’t.
They argued sexual and romantic attractions were two different things. Sometimes they aligned and sometimes they didn’t. You could be ace and homoromantic, just like you could be heterosexual and aromantic.
When I entered my thirties, I decided I wanted to focus my energy on friendships, to build the friendships I needed if I were to be single for life. Having good friends I’d see once a month wasn’t enough anymore. I wanted friends who would be part of my everyday life, who I could make a part of my life plans like April and Renee. After over 10 years of being friends, they moved in together.
April and Renee: We’re platonic life partners.
April: We’re not lovers.
Renee: And we’re not just roommates. And essentially what we are is best friends with a commitment similar to marriage.
April: So what this means is we are domestic and financial partners. We co-parent our cat together, we live together, and we’re currently looking into any options for us to be legally recognized as each other’s first of kin. Our next step is to get a joint credit card together and hopefully down the line a bigger apartment.
Aline: As platonic life partners, they get a lot of questions. Society seems to think that romantic love is always greater than platonic love, but that’s just not their experience. Their relationship may not be the norm, but that doesn’t mean their connection is any less meaningful.
April: Our friendship outlasted every single one of our romantic relationships and we were never really interested in marriage in the traditional sense. So we decided not to wait around for like, some hypothetical “one” because we already had such a fulfilling and empowering partnership between the both of us.
Renee: We just think that your life partner doesn’t also have to be your lover.
April: Yeah. And in our case, it just so happened to be a friend.
Aline: More and more people want to make a friendship official, in the same way they’d make a romance official. They want to tell the whole world that their platonic partner is a priority in their life, and that they’re committed to nurture and protect that relationship.
April and Renee call their relationship a platonic life partnership, or PLP. They’re not alone–on TikTok, there are accounts focused on PLP lifestyles with huge followings. In queer circles, especially in the ace and aro communities, people also call them queer platonic relationships or QPR.
When I was a teenager, I was jealous of people who had a best friend. But if I’m being honest, I’ve never wanted to be linked to just one person. To build my life around one particular relationship. I have always loved to have many friendships, all different, and it actually works well for me.
I like that some of my friendships are casual, and others are more intimate. I like that some are rooted in the day-to-day and others are less frequent. I don’t think I want more friends either. I just want to take my friendships more seriously. I want to cherish them and treat them with the same care as people do with their romantic relationships. I want to build my life around them, to have them shape my life instead of being one small part of it.
It’s what Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman call “Big Friendships." They coined this term in their book Big Friendship: How We Keep Each Other Close based on their experiences attending couples therapy to mend their friendship. In the podcast they host together, Call Your Girlfriend, they explained.
Ann Friedman: When we sat down to think about writing this book and about why friendship is not really given the respect and attention and investment that some other relationships are in our society we realized that part of it is a problem of definition, that these terms for really big and important and life-shaping friendships are kind of the same for friendships that last just a couple years or a really intense youthful bond that you have that isn't really sustained or, God, in some cases even just a person you barely know on the Internet is labeled friend.
Aminatou Sow: Words like best friend or BFF don't capture the adult emotional work we've put into this relationship. We now call it a big friendship because it's one of the most affirming and most complicated relationships that a human life can hold.
Aline: A few years ago, I found someone that I wanted to build a big friendship with. Her name is Arièle. She’s a fellow feminist journalist. For the first time, I found myself expressing clearly my desire to build a friendship and to take care of it. I felt vulnerable, but also strong.
After that experience, I started to be more intentional in my friendships. Saying how I feel and sharing what I hope and expect from a relationship. I’m increasingly convinced that nurturing a relationship, whether friendly or romantic, comes down to taking a leap of faith and being vulnerable. You have to say what doesn’t work, but also what works for you. Show your appreciation. Offer gifts. Pay compliments. Say I love you.
How we envision this relationship shift will look different from person to person. For some people, it’s just a change in their everyday actions. Others hope for a change in legislation so that their friends are recognized more like family. They can be authorized to visit them in a hospital, make medical decisions for them, and inherit their property, just like married people do.
And of course they want the other big thing that is hard to do when you’re not in a committed romantic relationship–have kids.
David Jay, our trailblazer ace activist, is one example of someone redefining what family can look like, showing others the varying ways you can be a partner and a parent.
David Jay: Yeah, I've always known that I wanted kids. There was a real question about how I was going to do it. Like, how was I going to make this happen. If I could, I really wanted to raise kids with other people–being a single parent is really hard. I had at that point started to form really close aromantic relations with couples and became really interested in that as a way to raise kids, but kind of didn't know the way.
Aline: Maybe because he’s aro, David takes his friendships very seriously, and he loves talking about where they’re headed.
David Jay: Those conversations wound up being really powerful and bringing me a lot closer to people. And as I kind of escalated like that with couples, I began paying attention to, like who would I want to have kids with? Like who in my life is kind of a possibility for this? And I also began to just talk about it more, like I talked about the fact that I wanted kids. I talked about the fact that I wanted kids, possibly in community with people, and there was one couple in particular, Avery and Zeke, who were both really powerful entrepreneurs, both really intelligent scientists. Our communication style was really similar. So we got along really, really well.
Aline: One day, when David was visiting them, the romantic couple told him:
David Jay: We've really been talking about forming a family. We want people in our lives to be–play an important role, and we want you to play a role most of all. And we don't know what it looks like to kind of invite you in, but we want to talk about it.
Aline: Today, David, Avery and Zeke have a 5 year old, Tavie. The four of them live in a house they bought together in Oakland, and split domestic tasks and costs.
David Jay: Every week we have a meeting where we sit down and kind of carve up the week, say okay, who's going to be on morning? Who's going to be on bed time? Who's going to be on bath time? Who's going to cook dinner? And we try to divide that evenly. We divide finances evenly. So most of our expenses come out of a shared family account. And every month we kind of look at how much we've spent, divide that by three and then each put in that much money.
Aline: Tavie is far from being the first kid with three parents. As long as there have been divorces and remarriages, there’ve been three-parent families. And before that, and still now, many parents get help from relatives and friends in their parenting tasks, especially with the rising cost of childcare.
But Tavie is part of the first generation of kids to be born in an intentional three-parent family recognized by law. California, where they live, is one of the first states to allow this. But it’s still not possible in most states to have three legal parents. And the same is true in France. If I had a child with a couple, we wouldn’t all legally be their parents.
In the spring of 2019, when I realized that I was looking at strollers in the street, I started talking to my friends about wanting to co-parent. Especially those who could be a match. One showed interest: Léandre.
He’s the best friend of a close friend of mine. I’ve known him for 10 years or so. We share the same values, and had fun together. And I liked that someone that I trusted trusted him.
He knew a lot about co-parenting too–he’s lived it. He was raised by a gay father and a lesbian mother. And he had such a good experience being raised by people who were not romantically involved, that he wanted to do the same with his own child.
So, in early 2020, we sat at a Chinese restaurant. We talked about our values in life, about our plans for the future, about religion and money. We agreed on the big things. For the more specific questions, we looked at a co-parenting plan checklist and decided–screw that. We didn’t see how we could decide in advance on public schools vs private schools, or on being tough versus being lenient. It would depend on what was best for our hypothetical kid. What mattered most was that we both wanted to give our kid agency and an opportunity to let them voice their wants and needs.
We also agreed that we wanted an equitable commitment. For us, that meant living near each other, splitting our time with our kid–roughly half and half–and dividing the expenses according to our means. We began the process, checked our fertility, tested for STDs, and we were a go.
I bought ovulation tests and when the time came, I called him. It was in the early days of COVID and the city was in a total lockdown. We weren’t supposed to leave our homes, but that didn’t stop us.
Léandre came to my place, with some snacks and baby Tylenol. I left him in my room, and 20 minutes later, he came out with a glass full of sperm. That’s when the Tylenol came in handy. We took the syringe out of the box and filled it with his sperm. Then I went into my room. And bing bam boom.
In American pop culture we’ve seen this turkey baster method so many times. Using a turkey baster is played off as a normal and viable option. But what Léandre and I were doing was technically illegal.
Handling “genetic material” is forbidden by French law, but as far as I know, no one has ever been prosecuted. We tried this for three ovulation cycles. Two to three times per cycle. And then, one day, Léandre told me he met someone.
He didn’t know for sure if that person was the one, but being with him made Léandre realize something: he’d rather have a kid with a romantic partner. Our plan was off.
I guess you could say that a romantic relationship had been prioritized over a platonic relationship once again. Someone else might have been disappointed, but not me. I wasn’t out of options just yet.
But the one option I was most interested in was also … illegal.
OUTRO MUSIC
Producer: Free From Desire is an original podcast by Paradiso Media. Written and narrated by Aline Laurent Mayard. Produced by Suzanne Colin and by me, Yael Even Or with additional production support from Morgan Jaffe and Molly O’Keefe.
Executive producers are Emi Norris, Lorenzo Benedetti, Louis Daboussy, Benoit Dunaigre. Sound design, editing, and mix by Théo Albaric. Additional editing by Yael Even Or and Morgan Jaffe.
Studio recordings by Marin Grizeaud and Théo Albaric. Production assistants are Lucine Dorso, Brendan Galbreath, and Sofia Martins. Editing Intern is Bryson Brooks.
Original music by: D.L.I.D. Our Theme song is Freed from Desire by GALA. Cover Art by Super Feat.
This episode features excerpts from Brut’s story "What is Platonic Life Partnership" and from the podcast Call Your Girlfriend.