Aromantic

Aromantic (often shortened to aro) means someone does not experience romantic attraction. An aromantic may or may not experience sexual attraction. Aromantics can have any sexual orientation including asexual.

A common misconception is can aromantics lack emotional and social connection. In reality aromantics do have emotional needs and desires; which are often met with friendships, queerplatonic relationships, or other non-romantic relationships. Some aromantics still desire and seek out romantic relationships despite their lack of attention. This would make them cupioromantic.

Aromantic can also be used as an umbrella term. Referring to anyone on the aromantic spectrum.

The sexual counterpart of aromantic is asexual.

History
The term aromantic was first coined in an AVEN thread titled 'Relationship Definitions' in June 2005. While this is not the first use of the split attraction model it is one of the first mentions of the term aromantic. After this there is very little mention of aromanticism until 2010, when aromanticism begin to gain a community on AVEN.

Aromantic Flag and Symbols
The first proposed aromantic flag had four strips. Green, because it's the opposite of red, the most commonly associated romance color. Yellow, representing platonic love, because yellow roses represent friendship. Orange, for greyromantics, because it's in between red and yellow. And black, representing alloromantics that 'reject traditional ideas of romance'. This flag as later changed because it resembled the Rastafarian flag, and because it had a strip representing alloromantics. The second proposed aromantic flag was a five striped flag. With dark green and light green representing aro-spec identifies. A yellow strip representing friendship. And a grey and black strip representing the spectrum of sexual identifies in the aromantic community. The design was later altered; changing the yellow strip to white; due to it causing sensory problems for certain individuals. The meaning of the strips was kept the same during the redesign. There are several other symbols used to represent aromantics and aromantic love. One is an arrow, due to aromantic often being shortened to aro, which is pronounced the same way. Like asexuals, aromantics also use the symbol of the spades to represent themselves. Aromantics have also started using the symbol of a green heart, representing non-romantic love. An older, lesser used symbol is an aardvark which seems to have originated from a meme.

Etymology
The term aromantic uses the Latin prefix a- which means 'a lack of'.