Ramadan and Me – I need some Perspective

Recovered from Facebook Notes. Posted on June 28, 2014, i.e., Ramadan from 10 years ago, back when the fasts were ~18 hours long. It was quite a different experience now, and I’m glad I wrote this, because it is worth remembering the struggles I had faced during that part of life.

Happy Ramadan! (Or Ramadan Mubarak or Ramadan Kareem if you prefer it that way).

I’m actually feeling kind of miserable about it. And I need to talk about it. I just wanted to share my thoughts with those of you who I figured might have some perspective that could help me feel better.

So if you’d take some time to read through this and share your thoughts, I would really appreciate it. I was trying to keep it short, hence the numbered list. Please feel free to write to me privately if you don’t want to comment on this note.

Here are all the thoughts bugging me now:  

1. I am extremely unproductive during Ramadan.

2. I feel dizzy from hunger the whole day and then I feel dizzy from food after Iftar (regardless of how much I eat, and I don’t over-eat. Usually.)

3. When I’m hungry at work, I can’t focus on anything, I’m extremely irritable, and I feel like crying at every little thing.  

4. Maybe I could out an email at work saying, “Hi everyone, I might be fasting for Ramadan. Please forgive me if my work is sloppy; and if I get irritable or overly emotional, don’t take it personally.”  

5. Did I mention I feel like shit and can’t focus on work if I don’t get 8 hours of sleep every night?  

6. I just got a car! I’m excited but also nervous about driving. But I don’t want to spend another whole month not driving to work especially since I just got a car. “I’m too scared to drive when I’m hungry and dizzy.” That sounds so lame. But it’s true; I haven’t drove in a whole year, and even then I’ve only drove a handful of times.

7. On most days I feel too tired after work to make myself dinner. If I do try to cook anything that takes a little bit of effort, it ends up taking too long, and I end up crying because I’m so hungry.

8. My only option is eating frozen meals? Or PBnJ? Or Chinese food or Domino’s pizza which are the only walking-distance food places from where I live? But Jimmy Johns delivers, I guess.

9. There’s also the fact that these are the longest Ramadan hours ever since I was born.

10. All of that being said, you know the worst part? I’m not even worried about making all 30 fasts. I’ve never made all 30. But I’m afraid this time I can’t even make 2. Last year, I barely made 5 or 6 I think.

11. Yeah, last year was my worst. I got sick pretty early on, possibly due to dehydration. And the times that I did fast, I spent my time sprawled in bed or in a couch. That’s why I’m doubting myself this time.

12. I can’t get sick again. I can’t imagine being sick all by myself in Willow Grove.  

13. And this is also when I recall all the times I managed to fast continuously through difficult circumstances without getting sick… If I could do it then, why can’t I now?

14. Well, back in Dhaka, of course it’s different when everyone is fasting as well. That can give you the motivation to fast even on days when we ran around in the sun.  

15. When I’ve fasted here in the US during my Penn pre-orientation (during which they wanted to constantly feed us) and during my summer internship, I think part of my motivation came from my very public show of steadfastness, people admiring my grit, and people trying to delay dinner and making sure I got food at Iftar. It also felt really good to expose all these people to Ramadan.

16. Then again, I stopped fasting when we went to that Conference at the end of the summer internship. I felt a little guilty about that. (but I might have been on my period too? Can’t remember.) But then there was the inevitable question, “so how come you’re not fasting today?”. “Errr…I didn’t feel upto it?”

At this point, I feel like I should explain: my concerns over Ramadan do not have that much of a religious basis. I don’t feel like I have to fast because I am a Muslim and because fasting is fard. Hey, praying 5 times a day is fard, and I average 0-1 times a day, if we’re making an optimistic estimate. Like I said, I’ve never felt compelled to complete all my 30 fasts and I’ve been very content with my 15-20 fasts per Ramadan my whole life. But at the same time, I hate how this time might end up becoming just like last year or even worse. I want to keep fast because Ramadan has been an important part of my life growing up, and I want to hold on to it. I have always enjoyed how it has challenged me, but now I feel like it’s too much of a challenge. And also it’s incredibly fun and rewarding when you face the challenge with a bunch of other people, but now I don’t have that either.

During Ramadan, on days I am not fasting, I do want to make a sincere effort to eat very little and completely avoid snacks. I haven’t been entirely successful. But I’ve felt extremely mad at the lack of support I got on this issue. From Muslims. Especially in Dhaka, too. “Well if you’re not fasting, then let me feeeeeeeed you!!” I mean, am I not allowed to try to experience Ramadan without actually fasting? Oh and a lot of people also imply that I am hypocritical and/or wishy-washy for trying to “kind of fast but not really”. It’s All or Nothing Yo!

Okay, venting done, I am hoping for some feedback. I am not looking for advice on what I should do? I am looking for some perspective on am I justified in my concerns, or are these meaningful concerns of someone who has been privileged all their lives? Am I weak, whether physically or mentally for thinking I can’t do it? Ramadan aside, I have been worrying about this lately. I feel like everyone else at work runs on much fewer hours of sleep and they can keep working long hours without food.

I think what it is really is that Ramadan is the time when I miss home the most and I feel the most alone. I’m not making excuses for why I can’t fast. I’m saying that I miss Ramadan. I miss celebrating Ramadan.

Of Kalyani and Challenged Children

Recovered from Facebook Notes, posted Sep 17, 2008, written probably in 2004.

Kalyani is a school that works under the Bangladesh Protibondhi Foundation (BPF). It is basically a school for ‘challenged’ children.

I won’t say ‘disabled’ children or ‘handicapped’ children; not even ‘abnormal’ children, because after all, no one can define the word ‘normal’. They are human beings, and we know that no two human beings are alike. Everyone has their own share of abilities and disabilities; so why should we single out these children just because their disabilities are not seen in most people? It’s not what you cannot do that makes a person, it’s what you can do; and these children can do a lot of things.

Most challenged children are born with brain damage. One or more areas of their brain do not function; hence they have problems in speaking, movement, etc. At Kalyani, these children are given stimuli to help them overcome these problems. Some children are autistic. No one knows what causes autism. Autistic children have no visible defects, except that they do not communicate with the outside world. All the doors and windows of their brain seem to be closed, which may open momentarily to pick up something and then close again. These children are completely wrapped up in their own world.

At Kalyani there are ‘Down babies’ as well. They suffer from Down’s syndrome, which means their cells contain one extra chromosome. This causes their intelligence level to be low. Nevertheless, they show diligence in certain aspects, e.g. repetitive jobs, singing, drawing, etc. Students from Kalyani have amazing achievements. I have seen beautiful paintings there, which were done by an ex-student. The paintings look like professionals did them. Kalyani is also making a banner for the next Commonwealth Games. The students are doing excellent paintings and embroidery on the banner. They also make tie-dyed cloth and block-printed saris. They need just a little help and guidance from their teachers. The school Kalyani does not want to seclude these children. It wants them to join the mainstream. It is up to us to accept them as one of us and not keep them cut off from the world.

St Martin’s Island

Recovered from Facebook Notes, posted Sep 17, 2008, written even before that about a memory from roughly 4 years before that. Reading it again, I can see my writing back then was influenced by all the Enid Blyton I read as a child.

We were at Cox’s Bazaar on an extremely rare family vacation, for just 3 days, but I wasn’t too sure that I’d enjoy it. The beach was too crowded to have fun in and hundreds of picnickers had parked their buses on this field and each bus was loudly playing different types of music, and the combination was extremely unpleasant to listen to.

Then the vacation plan changed. We would be spending the remaining 2 days at St. Martin’s Island. There was a package programme that would take us there on a steamer called Keari Sindabad. It was a 2-hour ride from Teknaf, across River Naf and then the Bay of Bengal.

It’s not easy to get tired looking out of the steamers, whether it’s the water you’re looking at, or the green hills of Teknaf, or the misty outlines of mountains in Myanmar.

After getting down from the steamer we had to cross this flimsy dangerous-looking wooden bridge, but it was kinda’ fun, actually. We made our way across the sand and got to this place with a lot of shops and a lot of rickshaw-vans were waiting on a cement path to take the passengers to a hotel. We rode through the village, which wasn’t any different from any other village, except it has way too many coconut trees.

The Hotel Obokash wasn’t any luxury hotel, but it was without inconveniences. The best part was it looked right into the sea-beach.

I’ve never been to a rocky beach before, and I found this one too fantastic for words. The whole beach was strewn with rocks, some of them surrounded with little pools of water. I kept mostly to the line of rocks that ran into the sea. You have to be really careful or the rock may give way under your feet and you’ll fall into the water and get a few bruises from other rocks. I went and stood on a rock sticking above the water and felt the waves hitting against my feet. The view was amazing. Far out in the sea, the white-topped waves were racing with each other over the bright aqua water. It doesn’t sound that great when expressed in words, but it honestly is an amazing sight, especially because I got the sideward view of the waves’ race. I mean, the waves weren’t coming towards me; they were going towards another beach on my right.

From the hotel you could see the lake. It really isn’t a lake, it’s more like a pool, but it’s totally cut off from the sea. But I heard that when the tide comes, water from the sea flows into the lake. The lake continues into a river. Well, if you look up the common features all rivers have, then this cannot be classified as one; but it looks just like any meandering river, and beside the river are vegetable farms.

Just in front of the hotel is this restaurant that had really good fish, and just outside it were a few circular sheds made with hay and it had huge tables for the whole party to eat in.

That afternoon, I walked miles and miles down the beach, collecting shells, which are found in abundance. It becomes like a habit, once you start, you can’t stop picking them up. The tide was coming and the sea was getting louder. The sun soon disappeared behind the clouds, and I had so wanted to see it “go down into the sea”. It was way after sunset when I got to the hotel, then my father told us his plan.

He had heard from somewhere that turtles come up every night to lay eggs on the beach. Now, that’s a fib. They come up only once in a while, but my dad didn’t know that. He was determined to go down the beach to a place where these people collected the eggs to protect them from the dogs. Our local juvenile guide Alam would be taking us there.

A night walk on the beach had its appeal. To get to the beach, you have to go straight from the hotel and climb a hillock and then straight down into the sand. As I got “straight down into the sand”, I got a shock. The world suddenly got all dark. You couldn’t see a thing. The bad news was we had a really small flashlight with us that was nearly out of batteries. Anyway, that was a totally different experience for me; it was so – unreal. Imagine yourself walking down the beach, the sand sifting through your sandals, the wind cutting into your face. You can’t see a thing – except the stars. And the stars are closer than ever. They don’t seem like stars, they seem like a myriad of lanterns in the sky. On one side are the dark outlines of coconut trees, and on the other side, the deafening roaring and splashing of the sea. Oh, and you have to be careful not to step on any crabs, or fall down a hole in the sand. It seemed as if we had wandered away from time and from our world. You have to BE there to know what it’s like. It seems as if you are someplace where nothing is impossible.

When we got to the place where turtle eggs are bred, we got to know the turtles weren’t likely to lay eggs that day. Oh well, what does it matter? I was still too dazed from the walk. But we got to know a lot about the turtles and the island. The island is built on the rocks, and if the local people continue breaking away rocks for building purposes, the island would be in big trouble. People are also illegally breaking away coral from the sea and that would cause ecological imbalance.

Anyway, after we climbed over the hillock, we were back to reality and we enjoyed a meal of lobster and fish barbecue in one of the hay sheds.

I slept right beside the window. We had to wake up early for we’d be visiting the coral island. I pulled aside the curtains and saw that the beach was gone. The sea was so much nearer and it was so – blue. I changed my mind; the sea is definitely better during high tide. True, the rocky beach is really cool, but during high tide it’s so much more beautiful. I went up to the rooftop to get a good look. Then I saw the small channel through which the seawater flowed into the lake.

The coral island (probal dweep) is called Chhera Dweep (although the sign read Chira Dweep), because it is connected to the main island by a line of rocks that get submerged during high tide; as if the coral island gets “torn” from the main island. The coral island wasn’t such an amazing place, except that this was a far rockier beach and we got to collect coral. No, we didn’t break them from the reef; these were swept ashore by the waves.

Anyway, the ride to the island rocked. Seriously. We went there in a steamboat and the boat bobbed up and down, up and down. If you stand on the bow, you’ll have to hold on (or face the consequences) and it’s kinda’ like those ‘thrilling rides’ in theme parks.

The view was great. In the distance you could see the green trees, surrounded by a yellow expanse that was the beach, surrounded by black rocks, surrounded by the clear aqua and sapphire water. You could only faintly see the corals from above the water surface.

When we got back, the Keari Sindabad had arrived with a new batch of tourists. We had only enough time to pack up and have lunch. And so the time came to leave, back to the boring old hotel in Cox’s Bazaar, but the thought of going home the next day cheered me up. I enjoyed every minute of my being in St. Martin’s Island. I left behind nothing there, but took with me some cuts and bruises from the rocks and some unforgettable memories.

The A Level Life in Mastermind

Recovered from Facebook Notes, posted Sep 18, 2008, written even before that

A-Levels – a completely new journey altogether – in the alien world of Mastermind! It’s been quite a while since we started this life and we have become totally used to it, but trust me, that took quite a while!

The biggest “new experience” was the immense number of students. You probably won’t find a single person who knows everybody in his/her batch, let alone in the school, which used to be the case in many schools. On the very first day, break had been a tremendous shock – to see students pouring down from various doorways into the vast sea of unknown faces. But this “vast sea” is made up of quite a variety of students. Starting from the prim goody-two-shoes, properly dressed with proper shoes and proper sweaters (in winter), to the more rebellious students with hair spiked up with gel, lots of make-up and jewellery. There are any number of piercings around – nose piercings, multiple ear piercings, even eyebrow piercings! We have the extremely trend conscious people, always careful to dress and accessorise fashionably, some never seen without the eyeliner. And we have an equally large number of “good students”, whose only purpose in life is to study and be the first to finish the sum in maths classes. We have such exceptionally high scorers in exams that even the average high scorers don’t stand the chance of getting the tuition waver for six months if you get a position in the exams. Then there are also the “clowns” who would disrupt classes and annoy teachers by constantly asking stupid or irrelevant questions (and its actually fun to see the teachers pick on them), and more “Johnny Bravos” who would flirt with almost anyone. The best thing is, it’s really easy to fit in here. It’s not long before you’re one of the mass in the sea of people and everything falls into place the first week.

Another difference most of us faced in here in Mastermind was no more fixed classrooms. Not that we’ve always had classes in a single room back in school, but few of us have had to change rooms for every single class and attend classes in a wide range of rooms. The A-level classes take place on the ground and first floors. On the first day, we were so lost when looking for classrooms, and climbing narrow staircases and spiral stairways and crossing the steel plank joining one part of the building to another in the first floor. We are still discovering new routes throughout the place. Each room is interesting in its own way. Even in the most boring classes, you can keep yourself entertained by reading the graffiti on the desks. Not an inch of any desk seems to have been spared. All sorts of stuff are written on these and you can actually have “conversations” with “unknown” people from different section or batch. If you leave any interesting message on a desk, somebody is sure to comment on it or add to it, and you can reply back!

With fewer subjects for A levels, there are more free periods. Free periods in this place can be spent whatever way you want – gossiping in the girls’ room, playing, studying in the library or simply roaming around the place, during which you’re sure to be questioned “Are you free?” The school has definitely paid attention to providing sports facilities for cricket, basketball, table-tennis and even carom and chess.

As to academic differences – the studies are of course getting more difficult – but let’s not go into that. An interesting difference in academics would be lab classes. There being no practicals in the O Levels, this is a completely new experience for many of us. In the Physics lab, despite the fact the questions contain the words ‘the apparatus has already been set up for you’, it never really is. It’s a real pain to deal with the clamp stand, masses and strings. Sometimes metre rules won’t balance on tipsy pivots, and we would literally start praying that it would for once, do so. And of course, if favourable readings are not obtained, one can always “manipulate” figures here and there. But that happens more in the Chemistry lab. During the O Levels we were told of the deadly, disastrous, dangerous acids and alkalis. We were taught the terrible effects it would have on our skin and tissues, and we had made up our minds to be extremely careful and cautious during practicals. Here, at first, it was quite funny to see students shriek if a mere drop of alkali or acid fell on their hands, but now we all realised that nothing happens even if a lot of this super-diluted chemicals come in contact with your skin. But don’t be careless – you’d still get plenty of acid burns or hot-test-tube burns!

Mastermind is full of ECA clubs, all completely student-run. The students are in charge of everything, so there’s a lot more responsibility involved. It’s all up to the students how they’d organize an event or a community service project – the hard part though is getting the approval and permission of Neera Miss.

Is it Mastermind, or is it just us, but we all have changed. Even the most serious of students are seen bunking, coming to school late, or trying to slip away quietly by hoodwinking the admins. The thing about Mastermind is, you have to get involved to really enjoy it here and there are plenty of opportunities here for that. It’s gonna be just two years – this A level life, so we should just have fun while we can before we have to really “grow up”.

Written by: Tushmit Mehruba Hasan, Amreen Rahman, Mahia Khan, Sahel Muhammad Fardeen Fayez, XI B

Ode to Colorado Apartments

I have been so incredibly lucky to have lived in this apartment for the past two years. Never thought I could live in the middle of a city and yet have an apartment by the woods and the middle of the river. Never thought I would live in a place where I would wake up to the chittering of birds or go to bed listen to the hooting of owls or the howling of coyotes. Also never thought I would be woken up every morning by the sounds of UT rowing team practicing on the river at the crack of dawn. The wind always rattled the windows, so did the helicopters flying overhead. I could hear every bird and every squirrel on the rooftop. I could hear all the music my neighbors played, although fortunately that was it from them. I could hear music from people chilling on the river or from concerts on the other side of the river. During ACL, the entire complex would be vibrating from the beats.

Living on the forest line also meant I was visited by raccoons running around outside my door at night. And I was overrun with cockroaches and ants. Fortunately, growing up in Dhaka, this didn’t bother me too much. Because at the end of the day, I have loved having lived here. I moved here when I couldn’t bear living in the middle of a concrete jungle during the Covid lockdown anymore. Having natural sunlight, being able to look out into the woods (and during the winter, at the river) really improved my mental health. This is the first apartment that I will dearly miss.

I moved out last week and will soon be moving into a new place in a new state. Here’s to a new beginning!

Facebook: Why did your friend on the job market (or in some other time crunch) disappear?

Why did your friend on the job market (or in some other time crunch) disappear?

Or, why I will not be hanging out with you the next few months

As much fun as hanging out and chilling can be, when people are in a major time crunch like I am right now, they find it very difficult to hang out with friends who want to chill. You might wonder, “But can’t you take out just a few hours from the day?” Yes. Yes, we can. But be honest, do your hangouts last only a few hours or typically last a lot longer? This post is meant for those folks whose hangouts last a lot longer. We can take time out only when we are doing structured activities that have a definitive start and stop time. We cannot hang out if it will go on till whenever and maybe folks will stay up all night. We cannot go on events if, when it’s over, everyone decides we want to hang out some more. We cannot party like we can take the next day to relax and recover from it. We need to be firing on too many cylinders at all times. This gets harder for people like me who don’t have their own mode of transportation and thus can’t control when they can come and go to these hangouts. We are in a rushed state of mind, and if we come to hang out with you when we are feeling rushed, all we will do is ruin the chill mood. And when we expect to be in a prolonged time crunch, we find that hanging out with you ends up being a time sink in which we lose a lot of precious time. Even though hanging out will be tons of fun. That’s why we prefer to hang out with only other people who are also in similar time crunch. Because we need to be around people who have the same mindset of time as a precious resource. This is in no way to throw shade at you for having the free time to chill. We wish we could go back to that too. But we can’t right now. Because we (well, at least I) signed up for this time crunch.

How can you support your friend who is in such a time crunch?

You can check in on them from time to time. You can plan a structured activity with them that respects their time. With a definitive start and stop time. But please bear in mind you have no obligation to do this. Someone else’s mental health should never come before your own. But please understand that your friend did not disappear because they stopped caring about you. Your friend just cannot afford to join in the fun right now. They need a different kind of support right now that you are perhaps not able to provide. And that is FINE. Hopefully they can find the support they need right now (and boy do they need it!) from another source. But you should at least try to understand, otherwise, this is how resentments start to build. As long as you understand and respect their time crunch, things will be fine. Your friend will see you again when they get to the other side.

[Permission to share granted. Copy/paste the text and cite me.]

[P.S. I wrote in the second person because it felt too awkward to write it all about myself and I am fairly confident that a lot of people will relate to my sentiments; but I know a lot of people might not. So apologies to those people whose view point I misrepresented.]

Romantic vs Platonic is Very Complicated

People tend to classify non-familial love as either romantic of platonic (the terms for which are derived from the medieval concept of Romance and the philosopher Plato respectively).

The Wikipedia page for platonic love describes it as “a type of love that is not sexual” – which would imply that romantic love is sexual in nature. However, as we asexuals know, this is not true. And this is probably why the distinction between romantic and platonic can be so confusing for us.

However, the Wikipedia page for romantic love defines it as “an emotional feeling of love for, or a strong attraction towards, another person, and the courtship behaviors undertaken by an individual to express those overall feelings and resultant emotions.” It does not refer to sex.

This begs the question of whether platonic love would be better defined as “a type of love that is not sexual or romantic.” The trouble is it is hard to define what exactly is romantic. And it becomes difficult to define as we examine all the variations in the asexual and aromantic spectrums.

Even for asexuals, it is difficult to delineate where romantic attraction ends and sexual attraction begins. For example, if your attraction results in a desire to kiss someone but not sleep with them, it seems pretty safe to classify that under romantic rather than sexual attraction; but when you start moving beyond a kiss to more intimate forms of contact and stop short of intercourse, where do you draw the line? In an attempt to tease that apart, we have come up with terms for several kinds of attraction, such as aesthetic attraction, sensual attraction, physical attraction, etc. Some of these terms overlap with or are subsets of other terms; but I digress.

Allosexuals might define romantic love as one that involves a desire for all kinds of physical contact starting from holding hands all the way to intercourse; and the aforementioned “courtship behaviors” are undertaken to achieve these kinds of physical contact. Asexuals might distinguish between romantic and sexual love and where they draw the line might vary from person to person. So then, does platonic love mean love without the desire for any kind of physical contact? That’s not true either. Most people like to hug their friends and I have cuddled with several friends and our cuddling was never viewed as romantic.

I’ve had close friendship sin which hugging and cuddling and holding hands is par for the course, and other close friendships where such behavior is uncomfortable. It depends on the chemistry. None of those friendships are romantic, and none of those friendships are more or less close depending on the type of behavior involved. However, it just does not feel right to lump all of these relationships into the same “platonic” category.

If we are sticking with Wikipedia, let’s look at the Wikipedia page for romantic friendship. The definition is: “a very close but typically non-sexual relationship between friends, often involving a degree of physical closeness beyond that which is common in contemporary Western societies. It may include, for example, holding hands, cuddling, hugging, kissing, giving massages, or sharing a bed, without sexual intercourse or other sexual expression.”

This definition doesn’t sit right with me. If two asexuals are in a relationship and their relationship can be described like the above, then do we call their relationship a “romantic friendship” rather than a “romantic relationship”? My best guess is that, given the term is typically used in a historical context and also typically involves same-gender relationships, it is called a friendship simply because it is not marriage. After all, historically, romantic relationships always revolved around marriage: the only kinds of romantic relationships seem to have been marriages, extramarital affairs, or pre-marital relations that sadly did not result in marriage.

However, it still seems that a romantic friendship is different from a platonic one; and the difference seems to be largely based on physical closeness.

This leads me to the term aromantic. While it is easy for me to understand what it means to be asexual, I struggle a little bit more to understand what it means to be aromantic. Many aromantic folks have explained that people sometimes assume they can’t feel love at all. But they do feel love and they do desire connection with others, just in a different way.

This is when the “platonic” term seems insufficient. Aromantic folks might experience platonic love, but like I described above, this term seems to clump too many different kinds of feelings together. This is why there is an attempt to come up with more terms, such as queerplatonic relationships and alterous relationships. These are not well-defined mutually exclusive terms, however. (Other wiki pages for the above here and here)

But the difficulty still remains in understanding what people mean when they say they are aromantic. Sure, they do not experience romantic attraction, but what exactly constitutes romantic attraction? Is it that aromantics do not want any form of physical intimacy or do they also not want some forms of emotional intimacy? I raise this question because the difference between sexual versus romantic versus platonic all seem to boil down to differences in physical closeness.

Yet, there are other components to romance. Here is an excerpt from the page on romantic attraction on the Aromantic Wiki: “This attraction may involve fantasizing about or being drawn to sharing a romantic relationship or romantic overtures with a specific person. However, the specifics will vary by individual, and the line between romantic and nonromantic may be slightly different for everyone. Commonly, romantic attraction may involve limerence, strong emotions, anxious feelings, and a desire for reciprocation.”

I don’t know if aromantics do not, in general, experience limerence, strong emotions, anxious feelings, and a desire for reciprocation. Because if that were true, how do they experience a “squish” which is an aromantic term for a platonic crush. At the end of the day, just like it is hard to draw the line between sexual and romantic intimacy, it’s just as hard to draw that line between romantic and platonic intimacy.

I know emotions such as limerence and a desire for reciprocation can apply to both sexual and romantic relationships. But what I’m wondering is whether these feelings form the boundary between romantic and platonic; or does physical intimacy form that boundary. It’s probably a combination of both.

Here is a frustrating quote (taken from the book Ace) from CJ Chasin who identifies as aromantic: “Romantic attraction, much like sexual attraction, is something that you know it when you feel it or you don’t. There isn’t going to be a checklist. There isn’t going to be a set of necessary or sufficient conditions because once you get into classifying kinds of relationships, there are just going to be blurry boundaries and that’s okay. That’s the landscape.”

Alas, I still don’t have a way to distinguish my close friendships that involve varying degrees of emotional or physical intimacy. While I wait for more terminology to show up, I’ll just have to file them under “alterous” – the gray area between romantic and platonic.

Romantic vs. … Limerent?

It’s time for me to ponder the question of Romantic vs. Platonic once again now that I have discovered the concept of limerence. To explain what limerence is, I will link to this blog post and proceed without any further explanation of the term.

I belonged in the camp that thought this is how romantic love, or at least the early stages of it, feels like. I was not aware that there are a whole bunch of people out there who do not experience romantic love in this way. Thus, my understanding of what is romantic was a little narrow.

In Part 2, I had tried to distinguish between a crush and a squish. Now I’m wondering if the distinction would be more accurate if I called them limerent crushes and non-limerent crushes.

A “squish” is essentially defined as a platonic crush by the asexual community, but this gets hard to pin down, because as I explained in Part 1, the distinction between romantic and platonic is very fuzzy and varies wildly from individual to individual. You can’t firmly place activities like sex, kissing, hand-holding, cuddling, etc. into one category over the other because you will always find people who will say “It’s romantic when I do it with Person X but not when I do it with Person Y.” You can’t firmly place feelings (like obsession, infatuation, or even limerence) into one camp or the other. (Angela Chen gave examples of “platonic” infatuations in her book to illustrate how difficult it is to separate these two terms.)

The reason I am introducing limerence into this discussion is because it is now shedding some light on my confusion regarding my not-quite-romantic and not-quite-platonic crushes. I couldn’t place them. Now I understand that at least some of them were non-limerent romantic crushes.

To put it another way, while all of these crushes have involved giddy excitement, some of these crushes have been accompanied by a longing and an aching and others haven’t. It’s those limerent crushes that have had me worried about my sanity and the non-limerent ones were ones where I could just enjoy the ride. I enjoyed my feelings for them when I was around them without obsessing over them when I wasn’t and not caring too much about whether they returned my feelings.

In some ways, it seems like if I could be interested in someone in a non-limerent way, that would be the way to go: maybe it would set the groundwork for an actual healthy relationship. Here is the problem though: I’ve never found myself motivated to desire a relationship unless limerence was involved.

The way I see it, there is no difference between a romantic relationship and a partnership. I know a lot of people have relationships without commitment, but without that commitment a relationship would mean nothing to me. Heck, even in my close friendships there is a kind of tacit commitment, which, if breached, would change the close nature of the friendship. To make the kind of a commitment to someone for a partnership, I have to be ready to upend my life for that person. Until I’m ready to upend my life for you, I can’t be in a partnership with you.

I love my family and friends dearly, but I am not about to upend my life for any of them (except, I suppose, for extreme circumstances). So even if I could come to love someone romantically in a non-limerent way, I cannot foresee myself being ready to upend my life for them. It would be a huge bother for me to have that constraint when it comes time for me to find an academic job (for which flexibility is key). It seems too big an ask to have to get to know their entire family and (if they are from a different culture) their entire culture. I also don’t believe my recently-discovered demisexual nature will be turned on without the presence of limerence. In short, I see no reason to have a relationship without limerence making me want it and making me want to fight for it.

I wish to continue to have close friendships, which do not involve the level of commitment I just described; but without that level of commitment, it cannot be a partnership.

It’s not that I have 0% wish for romance. It’s just that… I’d want to be with someone who makes me feel loved, protected, and cared for. Someone who feels lucky to be with me. Someone who feels pain at the idea of not being able to spend their lives with me. Someone whose heart warms and soars when I express how happy I am to be with them. Someone to whom I am incredibly important; important enough that they are ready to fight the obstacles getting in the way of being together. In other words, I’d want to be with someone who is limerent for me. I don’t want to have a romantic relationship if that is not how I feel about the other person and that is not how the other person feels about me. (And when I talk about limerence here, I am not saying it has to be the extreme version where you are so lovesick whence you can’t function anymore.)

I understand this isn’t exactly a feasible thing to want. At the end of the day, I’m chasing a fantasy. When I strip away the fantasy, there’s not much desire left for romance.

I also can’t, like, try to make it happen. I don’t want to be intimate with anyone who doesn’t already feel this way about me. I am actively repulsed by the idea of someone wanting to be intimate with me because they feel lust or desire for me. Fortunately, I don’t have much reason to fear this. But what I do actively try to avoid is someone who might come to a rational conclusion that I am an appropriate partner and try to cultivate intimacy with me. I am also repulsed by this idea, although not as much. I also don’t like the idea of being the conduit for someone to relive their carnal urges, although I am willing to do this for someone who does feel about me the way I described. I am willing to do SO MUCH for that person. But I think it is highly unlikely that this person exists.

There are parallels between this situation and the situation with my job. I went through an existential crisis when I had to think about a career. I had paid a little too much heed to the “find your passion” dialogue and envisioned a fantasy world in which I would love my job, feel a sense of euphoria doing it, and it would bring me purpose, fulfillment, and ultimate happiness. But I could only achieve this if I chose right and the fear of choosing wrong was paralyzing. I managed to end up with a job that I enjoyed well enough for a while; I certainly enjoyed the pay and the benefits; and when my learning curve plateaued, I knew it was time to move on. Then began my long graduate school journey and while my time in graduate school has been difficult, I am glad to say I have never looked back. I came to realize, I didn’t need to find “passion” as college students are constantly told to do, I just needed to find something I liked well enough that I wanted to keep doing it despite the challenges.

When it comes to finding a life partner, I did somewhat fall into the same trap of envisioning a fantasy world in which my partner and I would feel a unbreakable emotional connection, we would understand each other completely, and we would prioritize each other fully. I have been aware that this is largely a fantasy. I know there are some people who find wonderful partners such as this, just as there are some people who discover their vocational calling and go on to have happy fulfilling lives. But most of us are not that lucky. I have understood this for a while now. The difference was that I have not been able to adopt the same mindset as I did about work when it comes to relationships. I can’t just go with a relationship, enjoy it for what it is for however long it lasts, and then move on. I had a stepping stone job before I found the right career path. I can’t stand the idea of having stepping stone relationships until I find my life partner. I also went into academia not knowing if this was going to be my future, and I did not fully commit to it until many years down the line. I do not want to go into a relationship with this mindset.

I had been desiring something akin to limerence with respect to my career. I was able to overcome that. Similarly, I feel like I can’t have a romantic relationship or a marriage without limerence, and I don’t know that I will be able to overcome this one.

To be continued … ?

Reading the Quran Again after Learning to Submit

After all these years, I can make this confession. My journey away from religion began with my first attempts to read the Quran. I had high expectations. I had expected a highly intellectual text that would give me incredible knowledge and blow my mind. Instead, I found passage after boastful passage about how awesome and powerful God is; and passage after passage of carrot-and-stick language: you will be handsomely rewarded if you follow the Quran and severely punished if you do not.

This kind of language was wholly incongruent with my concept of God. I understood God to be a Higher Power who inspires us to be a force for good in the world. But the language in the Quran sounded like it was coming from a petty, vengeful, and manipulative source. The language felt oppressive. If I do not follow the teachings of Islam, I will be severely punished and burned in the fires of Hell. I did not appreciate being threatened in this way. In fact, I was insulted. Did God really have to bribe me in order to be good? Did God really think I need to be threatened with Hell in order to listen? I would rather go to Hell than be cower before such oppression.

You might be thinking that my thoughts are blasphemous. If you are fearing that I will be severely punished for even having such thoughts, then you are lending more credence to this above impression I formed in my late teens.

On the other hand, you might be thinking that I was young and did not have the maturity to be able to process the text of the Quran. That perhaps I had a childish reaction to it. This very well may be. After all, the Quran is not a straightforward text. It is not even straightforward prose. Scholars are still debating interpretations of passages and the meaning of certain words. My approach to trying to read the Quran so literally was possibly not a wise one.

As a result of this reaction, while I did not turn into an atheist, I could no longer find the same motivation to practice religion. I did not wish to force myself to go through the motions out of fear of Hellfire. However, I remained spiritual. I believed in a Power greater than myself. But I did not think of this Higher Power in human terms: as someone I should fear or as someone who would punish me. I did not think that this Higher Power possessed human emotions and would feel anger if I disobeyed and satisfied if I obeyed. I thought of this Higher Power as the source of my conscience and my judgement. I vowed to live according to my conscience and my judgement and not by rules that don’t make sense to me. I gradually developed my own belief system.

Ten years after my first attempt at trying to read the Quran, I tried to read it again. This time I was motivated by a conversation with a person who had an impact on how I viewed my faith. He asked if I had read the Quran and that was a difficult question to answer because of what I have described above. He told me that reading the Quran literally or line by line will not offer any perspective. It is important to view it holistically. He told me that the word “islam” means submission and that the Quran is all about submitting and surrendering to a higher power. (I would later encounter these concepts again in my further reading.)

Approaching the Quran from the perspective of Submission proved to be quite revolutionary for me. I’m not saying that it all makes sense now and I am no longer bothered by the carrot and stick language. I am still made very uncomfortable by that language. But I can view it from a different perspective.

As I read passage after passage about the evils of Disbelievers, I realized that Disbelievers did not Submit. I had assumed, based on my modern context, that the Disbelievers were atheists or followers of other Faiths. (I am not sure if the concept of atheism existed at that time and whether the Quran addresses atheism.) I had a hard time understanding why God was so angry at them for having a different belief system. But I read more and saw the anger directed at idol worshippers, it dawned on me that idol worshippers’ belief system did not encourage spiritual surrender.

Many idol-worshipping cultures have tried to ensure outcomes by making “offerings” of money, food, virgins, human life, and so on and so forth, but they did not embrace the idea that some things were truly out of their control. They were perpetuating a huge scam when they were trying to buy control over their lives, rather than surrendering to that over which they can have no control. To truly Submit is to acknowledge and accept that certain things are beyond our control, but having faith and proceeding forward anyways, and when things go wrong, learning to come to terms with it and keep moving forward.

This is my current interpretation of the passages in which God expresses anger at Disbelievers. I still do not understand why the language appears to be so uncharitable. It makes sense to me that people had every reason to be resistant to this idea. After all, many modern Muslims are still resistant to this idea. In my personal life I know many who have swapped out these tangible offerings with prayers. They seem to have this idea that they can leverage prayer to convince God to change God’s plan. I have heard of a few people who have lost their faith when their prayers were not answered, and when they were advised to accept that maybe God knew best, they struggled with that idea. People who grew up with the Quran struggle to understand the concept of Submission. So is God constantly angry at these people the same way God was angry at those Disbelievers?

I don’t have the answers, and perhaps I never will. I probably will never fully understand the concept of the Quran. Somehow I am the opposite of most people around me. I find it very easy to understand the complex concept of Submission, but I cannot understand the relatively simple concept of Heaven and Hell. Perhaps I don’t understand it because of the lack of complexity. It is as simple as legends and folklore and does not require any level of spirituality to understand. In a very similar way, I don’t understand the concept of jinns or the concept of Shaitan. Perhaps someday I will if my mind can expand enough; perhaps I never will. Either way, it’s alright. I accept that I may never understand, and that does not stop me from Submitting; in fact, this is a part of my Surrender.

What I Learned from my Heartbreak: I Don’t Want a Romantic Relationship

I promise this sounds a lot more extreme than I intended it to be. I don’t have anything against romantic relationships and I even think they can be wonderful kinds of relationships to have. I am not even saying I will reject any and all romantic relationships that are offered to me (although chances of such offers are slim, in my opinion). But I know with even greater certainty than before that I will not seek them out.

Much of this has to do with my extreme ideal view of romantic relationships, as opposed to a practical view. Romantic relationships serve specific purposes. Typically they are between two people who are interested in each other; they want to build a strong connection, enjoy a healthy sexual relationship, help each other out with life, integrate with each other’s families (to an extent) and then maybe have a family together. But no relationship is perfect because not all these purposes are met properly.

People start dating for all sorts of reasons. Perhaps they feel alone. Perhaps they really want to get married so they try to find people who might be a good fit for them. Or perhaps they want to get married because they want to have children. Perhaps they are motivated by physical needs. Perhaps society has conditioned them to think that they are not complete without a romantic partner. Perhaps they are afraid of being alone. Perhaps they need a partner to look after them.

For me, I had thought that if I ever formed a deep emotional connection with someone who understood me well, someone whom I felt I could trust completely, someone who made me feel safe, I would definitely want to be in a romantic relationship. That part has actually remained unchanged. I also never spent any energy trying to seek out such a relationship because this seems like a futile search. I have always been open to meeting people and socializing with them, but what I mean by not seeking out is that I haven’t liked to isolate one person and try to assess whether I can form a deep emotional connection with them. OK, I have spoken to “prospects” under pressure from my family, but you can’t really interview people to figure out what kind of emotional connection you might potentially have. For that you need organic interactions over the course of life.

My culture doesn’t put much weight on this emotional connection nonsense. From their perspective, marriage is as necessary as a career – for logistical reasons and for procreation reasons. They go about finding marriage partners much in the same way people find jobs – screening and interviewing candidates. And there even is a form of professionalism expected – for example, you have to behave a certain way when you are married, and especially around your in-laws. None of that sounds appealing to me. I’m looking for comfort. I will already have a job at work, I don’t want one at home too. I will already have to put up a professional face at work, I don’t want to at home too. Living with anyone with whom I’m not in emotional sync can be a major chore, and I don’t want to do that. But going through the marriage market is not a way to find that emotional connection.

If we look to the dating market, I don’t really know what the purpose of dating is. I am not in need to companionship or sex, so those are not motivating factors. I like to meet and hang out with people, but I have no wish to get “involved” with them. While I do wish to have a family someday, if I end up starting to date, I will just end up back on the marriage market, where I am evaluating candidates for practical purposes.

There is a thought that if you meet enough people you will hopefully find somebody with whom you do share an emotional connection. The trouble with this is that I don’t think this will work (at least for me) if I meet someone with the intention of assessing the strength of our emotional connection. It takes time to build an emotional connection and you can’t predict how long it takes. If I date with an objective, I will get impatient about assessing the progress of achieving that objective. And there are no good measures I can use to assess that objective.

When I have formed emotional connections with people, they have been under conditions in which I wasn’t actively trying to form an emotional connection. Starting to date with the hopes of eventually forming an emotional connection, to me, is the same as trying to form an emotional connection.

Then there is the fact that romantic relationships do function more like jobs and careers rather than family. If one relationship doesn’t work out, you are expected to go find another.

If a parent dies, no one expects us to go find another. But to be fair, sometimes when a child dies, society can expect you to have another.

If two people are not a good “fit” with each other, they break up. If we are not a good fit with our families, yes, sometimes we get estranged from them, but those are only under extreme circumstances.

I don’t like the idea of making a commitment to anyone unless I am already at the point where I can think of them as family. Once I make a commitment, whether it is to be a girlfriend or a wife, I would want this to be something I see through to the very end. I have no interest in “let’s be together and see how it goes” – I just don’t see the appeal to that. Nor do I like my culture’s way of doing it (“let’s get married and pray to God that it works out”).

I would like to think it is possible for two people to get close without being in a romantic relationship. And then build on that strong connection to decide whether to make a commitment to each other or not. But I don’t think most of the world works this way and all if this model once existed, we are moving away from it. I am not interested in moving along with it. And that’s why I say I am not interested in having a romantic relationship.