In my experience, the older I’ve gotten as an aro person the more comfortable I’ve gotten with my identity but also the more isolating it’s gotten. Many friendships just kind of fall away over time even when people aren’t in relationships, because many people just don’t prioritize them as much in general. I’ve found myself somewhat by accident in a romantic relationship that I enjoy (it was a 1 in a million kind of thing), and didn’t even realize how much social and physical interaction I was going without until it suddenly was there again. At the same time though it’s still isolating among people in relationships (double dates are bizarre for one…) that I don’t measure my partner against other potential partners, I measure him against how okay I was with being alone, which was very other than the isolation; if we were to separate for whatever reason I’d be upset to lose this relationship in particular but in the big picture totally fine just going back to flying solo.

Basically I’ve just learned to accept as an aro that I’m on a really different wavelength from all the allo people in my life and to try not to put too much blame on individual allo people for the way amatonormativity screws us all over.

I left Texas for Washington over 10 years ago now partly because even then it was known as a trans haven in the community - it has plenty of its own problems (especially cost of living and the continued effects of redlining) but I’ve only rarely felt unsafe here and the parts of my physical and legal transition that I’ve done here have been relatively straightforward and uncomplicated even navigating insurance. I’ve also not had many outright discrimination issues with employers, if anything I deal with more tokenism issues. I don’t dislike Texas entirely and even miss some of my family and some things about it, but getting to live my life fully is worth the trade off; that’s a determination everyone needs to make for themselves though!