Review of The Ace and Aro Relationship Guide: Making It Work in Friendship, Love, and Sex by Cody Daigle-Orians

Last year I reviewed the internet’s favourite ace dad’s book I Am Ace: Advice on Living Your Best Asexual Life. Now, Cody Daigle-Orians is back with The Ace and Aro Relationship Guide: Making It Work in Friendship, Love, and Sex. While both books are aimed at aspec readers, this latter is a more focused and broader exploration of the nature of relationships—of all kinds—as an acespec or arospec person. Jessica Kingsley Publishers has been killing it putting out so many awesome books about being asexual and aromantic—check out my asexuality bookshelf for more. I received an eARC in exchange for a review, and I read this book during Ace Week!

As many of you already know, I am both asexual and aromantic. I’ve known this about myself for a long time and found both labels at different points in my twenties. Personally, my experience with discovering and navigating my sexuality has not been traumatic. Aside from a few awkward attempts at asking people out in high school, romance and sex just never happened for me, and I have always been happy with that. In fact, when I was initially offered a copy of this book, I debated whether to read it. My first impression was that this book is aimed at ace people who want to find a romantic partner, or vice versa, aro people looking for a committed relationship without the romance angle. Neither of those things describe me—I learned from this book that I am nonamorous, i.e., I don’t desire a single, central relationship in my life and instead find fulfillment through a decentralized network of various relationships.

So I couldn’t have been more wrong: this is a book for all aspec people. Whether you are aroace like me, alloromantic asexual, allosexual aromantic, or some form of demi or grey or whatever other labels work for you, The Ace and Aro Relationship Guide has got you covered.

And let’s talk about labels for a moment. This always seems to come up when we start discussing any type of queer identity beyond the basic Neapolitan ice cream flavours of gay or straight. Yeah, there a lot of labels and microlabels out there, and look, I get it—it can feel overwhelming. And yeah, I was a little bored during parts of this book because Daigle-Orians covers labels and ideas that are familiar to me, as an extremely online queer person. I know all about sex-favourable vs sex-averse (me) versus sex-repulsed. But hey, maybe someone—especially younger someones in their teens and twenties, who are the primary target here—needs to learn those terms. Like I said earlier, I learned about nonamory from this book and that it applies to me, and that is pretty damn cool.

Indeed, if I have a criticism of this book, it’s that it reads more like a serial of wiki entries than an actual “guide” of sorts. I don’t know what the print version looks like, but the ebook would benefit from a lot of hyperlinking, and I’d love to see a print version with callout bubbles saying, “For more on this, go to page….” The content here is perhaps more suited to a nonlinear form, like a wiki, rather than a book. Yet here we are.

On the bright side, the book’s organization is logical and extremely helpful. It’s divided into two broad parts: “The Relationship Toolkit” and “The Relationship Workshop.” Daigle-Orians constructs a framework around the idea of an “ANKOP relationship” (“a new kind of perfect”) where we redefine our expectations of the conditions required for a relationship to be valid, healthy, and loving. That is, their thesis here is that relationships need neither sex nor romance to be valid. In the first part, they explore the tools we need to be successful in any relationship: an understanding of boundaries and consent, communication, trust, etc. In the second part, each chapter applies these ideas to a different kind of relationship: platonic, sexual, romantic, etc. Daigle-Orians also does their best to acknowledge how the lines between these kinds of relationships blur, how some relationships don’t fit neatly into boxes, etc.

Like many a more reference-oriented work, this organization lets you dip in and out—it’s not meant to be read linearly like I stubbornly do with all books of this type. So you could pick up this guide just for a couple of chapters. But if you read it all the way through, of course, you also get to see the themes Daigle-Orians develops and the connections made throughout the chapters.

To be frank and vulnerable, this was kind of a healing book for me. Although I haven’t experienced much direct trauma as a result of being aroace, I experience the erasure, the amatonormative pressure, the compulsory sexuality that our society constantly directs at all of us. I nearly broke down playing The Outer Worlds this week because its ace NPC, Parvati, was coming out to me, and the game includes dialogue options that not just allow me to sympathize but actually say, “I am ace too, and I am also aro,” and that was so powerful. Just to be seen and recognized like that, both in terms of Parvati sharing her lived experience but then also getting to assert my own through my player character. Wow.

In the same way, The Ace and Aro Relationship Guide carefully and compassionately acknowledges the hurt and pain that often comes from being aspec in an allonormative, amatonormative world. Perhaps more significantly, it does this in a constructive way. The ANKOP framework is here to say, “Look, it doesn’t have to be this way.” And while this book really gets more into the weeds than an allo reader might need, this is the kind of learning allosexual and alloromantic people need to do as well.

So, to sum up: this is a book that made me feel seen and valid as an aroace woman. It introduced me to some new terminology. Even though I feel like I am largely successfully applying the ANKOP ideas in my life already (humblebrag), I got stuff from this book. For a younger reader, for someone just figuring out their sexuality, for people trying to put into words their feelings or desires around connection … yeah, The Ace and Aro Relationship Guide is invaluable. Highly, highly recommend.