After much deliberation, done while waiting for my friends to arrive at the restaurant, I ordered a breakfast burrito on New Year’s Eve. Inspired by my father, I asked for added onions and was pleasantly surprised by the choice of red or caramelized (I obviously went with the latter).
I didn’t ask for the cheese to be removed.
One of my fun facts that I would wield to surprise people was my distaste for cheese (and pasta and rice, but this isn’t about them). It was always an easy shocker to pull out during the beginning of the year ice-breakers, and it was true. My grandmother who would adopt me for a week down the Cape during a summer told me often how one summer I ate mac ‘n’ cheese everyday and the next summer I turned up my nose at every box of Annie’s she bought in anticipation.
(I didn’t top my new classmate during the high school freshman retreat saying he had touched a tiger penis that summer, but we can’t all be winners.)
I was always the “Can I have the salad dressing on the side” girl, the one who got nervous going over to new people’s houses because spaghetti was always the crowd pleaser, the thorn in the side to my housemates when we planned house dinner. When a Calvin alum hosted the entire New England Saints 2018 caravan during our first night in MA, it was the first time I had eaten lasagna in my recent memory. Picky eater, some may say.
As I started experimenting with my own recipes, opening up to saying yes to soup and I’ll tolerate it to other previously refused culinary delights, my hatred for cheese abated. There are still a few recipes with “too cheesy” marked in my comments, and I still order hamburgers at Five Guys. But I eat the salad at the New Year’s party with parmesan without picking out the shreds. I order the breakfast burrito. I skip the shredded cheddar in the taco line, and I still sometimes drop the disliking cheese bomb as an easy lighter fluid on a dull pre-class conversation, but I don’t stress about it as much.
I’ve had some periods where I have obsessively thought asexuality, aromanticism, the like. I’ve talked about it with friends, I’ve trawled the asexuality handbook and reddit for answers, I’ve spilled much ink about it.
I still haven’t given anyone a straight (lol) answer, really—whether I’m in or out. When I tell my friends about a potential relationship, one that’s been incubating for a while, some of them ask, “But wait, didn’t you say you don’t want to get married?” And I shrug. Easier than saying I think I want him but I’d also be fine without him and wouldn’t mind if he met someone else. How do you sum all that up in a traditional framework of romance? Doesn’t sound like a Hallmark movie, that’s for sure.
But reading “I think I don’t worry so much anymore about romance” from a short comic on Tumblr made me feel like I did with Moses Sumney—like someone straightened all the picture frames that I had accepted to be a little off-kilter forever.
There are still seasons where I put myself under a microscope. But for the most part, I’ve gotten over obsessing about whether I have the empirical definition of romance, if my experiences actually do fit in an alloromantic framework and I’m just overthinking everything, if potentially entertaining a relationship automatically excludes me from buying a cute little aro pin. What I want doesn’t have to be in a box, and it doesn’t have to make sense beyond me and potentially my partner.
Most days, I don’t worry about romance anymore. Most days, I just eat the cheese.
Alex Johnson (‘19) is a virtual computer science teacher and a proud resident of Grand Rapids. When she’s not brainstorming the newest project to inflict on her students, she’s cooking semi-vegetarian food, reading too many romance books, and playing rhythm games.
