Aromantic Spectrum Awareness Week Series
by Laura Pohl
I’ve always loved reading love stories.
There was nothing like opening a book to find a sweeping romance on its pages, love stories like I’d never seen before. Love stories that defied everything, society, family, even death. They were stories that made me fiercely believe in this powerful, unknown force. Stories that were impossible.
I never even stopped to consider that it’s what love always meant for me: something impossible.
It took me a while to understand my place while I was still in high school. Every single person was having high school girlfriend/boyfriend dramas. Everyone wanted someone to fall in love with. I did, too, because that’s what I read about. That’s what I knew.
Every love story I’d ever loved kept coming back to haunt me. I looked around as people fell in and out of love, and at the same time, I looked around me and felt nothing. I thought that people were cute, here and there, but there was nothing beyond that. Nothing of the shaky knees, nothing of that wild heartbeat, nothing of seeing someone and forgetting how to speak. Nothing at all.
After a while, I got used to it. I didn’t have a name for it, just thought it was somehow a part of me that had come out broken or malfunctioning. I didn’t really stop reading romances, but I realized that was something I wasn’t going to have. Maybe I didn’t have the right to one, maybe we were all born to a type of story and mine just wasn’t about romantic love.
The stories I wrote were a little different.
When I started writing them, I didn’t want them to be just about romances. I loved romances a lot, but that was all I got to read—every single YA I picked up there was another love story staring at me from the pages. Girl meets boy, boy meets girl. Sometimes there was the happy variation of girl meets girl, boy meets boy. Those were the exceptions which I devoured because they had something new and fresh about them.
They still weren’t my stories, not exactly.
I first heard the word aromantic while I was in university.
By then I’d figured out a couple more things about myself. I’d gotten used to identifying as bisexual, because I definitely felt some type of attraction to people of all genders. I just couldn’t place that attraction yet. I’d heard of asexual first, but that label didn’t exactly fit me. Aromantic, though, was like opening up a door to my house I knew all along, and finding all those childhood memories that I’d somehow left behind.
It’s not a word that’s used a lot. Half of the time, I don’t think I have it entirely figured out either. But mostly, it fits. It feels right.
When I started writing The Last 8, I knew what I wanted to write. For the first time, I wanted to write about someone like me. Someone who survived the end of the world and wasn’t worried about their significant other. Just someone trying to survive on their own. I wanted to write a story about friendship and family and surviving, and have none of these things be a romantic love story.
Clover, the main character in The Last 8, is aromantic, like me. She’s my type of story.
There were a lot of things that changed in the drafting process while I was still learning how to write and what to keep. I polished and revised this story many times, but one thing never changed—Clover wasn’t interested in a romance. She had a boyfriend, who she broke up with because she just didn’t feel the same way about him as he did. She wasn’t in love with him, never was.
I got questioned about it. I even had an offer from a publisher for the manuscript, with one condition—that I ended up changing the end so Clover “learned to love again”.
Those were their words. Learn to love again, as if there was something wrong if she didn’t love on their terms.
The most fascinating thing to me is that I can’t see The Last 8 as anything but a love story. It’s about one girl learning to love herself, to love her friends. It’s about the love I’ve always experienced—the love of friendship, of people bonding without romance, people willing to go anywhere for each other.
Clover loves, in her terms. In my own terms.
Love isn’t just romance. We can’t keep reading romance and thinking that’s all there is. Love takes many different forms, and we should be able to read about all of them, to write them freely and without worry. Love shouldn’t be restrained to a bond between two people and being strictly romantic. I don’t want to write books that are just about kissing. I want to write much more than that.
I still love reading love stories. But I like mine a little different—maybe they’re about a significant other. But maybe they are about family. Maybe they are about friends. Maybe they are more than just romance.
Maybe they are just about being able to love yourself.
In the end, they’re all still love stories.
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THE LAST 8
A HIGH-STAKES SURVIVAL STORY ABOUT EIGHT TEENAGERS WHO OUTLIVE AN ALIEN ATTACK—PERFECT FOR FANS OF THE 5TH WAVE
Clover Martinez has always been a survivor, which is the only reason she isn’t among the dead when aliens invade and destroy Earth as she knows it.
When Clover hears an inexplicable radio message, she’s shocked to learn there are other survivors—and that they’re all at the former Area 51. When she arrives, she’s greeted by a band of misfits who call themselves The Last Teenagers on Earth.
Only they aren’t the ragtag group of heroes Clover was expecting. The group seems more interested in hiding than fighting back, and Clover starts to wonder if she was better off alone. But then she finds a hidden spaceship, and she doesn’t know what to believe… or who to trust.
PRE-ORDER: AMAZON | INDIEBOUND
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Laura Pohl is a YA writer and the author of THE LAST 8 (Sourcebooks, 2019). She likes writing messages in caps lock, quoting Hamilton and obsessing about Star Wars. When not taking pictures of her dog, she can be found curled up with a fantasy or science-fiction book. A Brazilian at heart and soul, she makes her home in São Paulo.
