What Asexual & Aromantic folks Teach Us About Belonging
I have lost count of how many sermons I have heard about marriage over the years. Most were well-intentioned. Many contained wisdom worth hearing. Yet they often shared the same assumption: that a meaningful life naturally moves toward romance, marriage, and family. The assumption was rarely stated outright because it did not need to be. It was simply woven into the way the story was told.
The more I have listened to asexual and aromantic Christians, the more I have realized how much that assumption shapes both church and culture. I want to be careful here because I am not speaking from personal experience. What I have heard, however, is that many ace and aro Christians find themselves in an unusual position. Churches often organize community around couples and families. Pride spaces can sometimes organize belonging around romantic and sexual attraction. In both cases, people can be welcomed while still feeling invisible because the story was never written with them in mind.
What strikes me is that the Christian tradition itself offers a much wider vision than many churches do today. Jesus was unmarried. Paul speaks about singleness in ways that would make some modern Christians uncomfortable. For centuries, Christians understood friendship, community, vocation, and spiritual kinship as central parts of a faithful life. Somewhere along the way, many of us began treating marriage as the destination and everything else as secondary.
That is why I think asexual and aromantic Christians have something important to teach the rest of us. They invite us to ask whether our communities are built around belonging or around assumptions. They remind us that friendship, commitment, care, and chosen family are not consolation prizes for people who do not find romance. They are among the deepest ways human beings experience love. The question is whether our churches are prepared to believe that too.
