As someone who is herself aromantic and asexual, I was very much anticipating Loveless, to the point where I pre-ordered it. My experience with Alice Oseman has been varied: I adored Radio Silence but didn’t much care for Solitaire. Here I find myself very ambivalent: on one hand, I really enjoyed the aro/ace representation here. On the other hand, I’m not sure that, overall, Loveless is a very good book.

Georgia Warr is going off to uni, fortunate to be accompanied by her two best friends Pip and Jason. While there she befriends her roommate, Rooney, who is the extroverted, sexually-active foil to Georgia’s introverted, sexually-inexperienced self. Indeed, as the title and most of the first part of this book emphasize, Georgia is obsessed with the fact that she has never had sex, never had a boyfriend (or girlfriend), never even been kissed. She is low-key worried something is “wrong” with herself. So much of Loveless entails Georgia’s fumbling attempts to force herself to feel sexual attraction, to finally have that kiss, and to figure herself out. But it turns out—and this is not a spoiler, because it is literally the whole premise of the book—Georgia is not broken; she’s aromantic and asexual. She just didn’t know those terms! Unfortunately, along her journey of self-discovery, she makes some mistakes that hurt herself and her friends.

Overall, I really liked the portrayal of Georgia’s experiences and her journey of discovering that she is aro/ace. Now, I don’t entirely identify/sympathize with that journey myself. You can hear all about my personal aro/ace journey by listening to this episode from my podcast with my bestie, We Just Like to Talk. (Please note that we recorded it before I came out as trans, so we use my dead name, of course—you can just ignore that.) To summarize, though: I had it “easy” in the sense that my dearth of romantic or sexual relationships never bothered me the way it clearly bothers Georgia. I took a few half-hearted stabs at asking out girls in high school because I figured that’s how it works; when that didn’t work out, I shrugged and just … didn’t do it any more. I went on with my life of books and tea, finished university, found the labels of aro and ace somewhere along the way and said, “Oh, huh, it me, ok,” and that was that. I didn’t wrestle with my identity like Georgia did, didn’t blame myself or wish I felt differently, didn’t encounter much in the way of acemisic behaviour. Moreover, I didn’t move away for university, and I never sought the “typical uni experience” that Georgia seeks here—I was largely asocial for the first three years of university and only found my people towards the end of my time there.

That being said, I recognize there are a lot of aro/aces out there whose experience must be closer to Georgia’s, so if you see yourself in her, awesome. Also, there were definitely moments where I nodded my head and said, “Yes, definitely, you’ve nailed it for me.” Georgia and Rooney have a frank conversation about masturbation, and Georgia talks about how she doesn’t imagine herself having sex when she’s fantasizing—this is very much my experience too. I’m happy that Oseman shows an asexual character who is sex-repulsed personally (although, as other reviewers have noted, Oseman doesn’t actually use that term and I agree this is a mistake) yet still masturbates. Similarly, there’s a moment in that same scene when Georgia says, “You have got to be joking” and reacts to Rooney’s statements with incredulity. Again, it me: I genuinely have these moments where I wonder, just for a second, if anyone really likes sex or feels sexual attraction, or if the rest of y’all are just pretending. Because it truly boggles my mind, this thing that you are experiencing that I just don’t experience.

I wish Oseman had handled the explanations of terminology with more deftness and grace. At one point, Georgia is researching this stuff online, and she eventually shuts down because “it’s a lot, like a lot a lot.” I can understand this reaction, but it feels unsatisfying to see it in a novel that is purportedly trying to raise awareness of asexual experiences. Like, it’s kind of your job to parse this into a format that is digestible to the reader. I acknowledge that, as Georgia learns about these terms and even tries to educate others, like her cousin, there are attempts to acknowledge the diversity of the aromantic- and asexual-spectra, including the fact that some asexual people do like or seek out sex.

Similarly, I really, really like that Loveless ultimately champions the validity and worthiness of platonic love and friendship. More of that in books, please! However, as she does this, Oseman puts her thumb heavily on the scale that reads “aromantic and asexual people never get married or have romantic/sexual relationships,” so that’s disappointing. Throughout the novel, Georgia wrestles with the fact that she wishes she felt attraction to people, because she wishes for the kind of lives she has seen in romantic media. She is unsatisfied, even after discovering the labels that match her experiences, because she doesn’t want to be aro/ace. She thinks this limits her options, and that is a very uncomfortable conclusion to draw about aro/ace identities. It would have been nice even just to introduce an ace person who is happily married—how simple and easy that would have been, to show us that there are situations where, if that’s the life you want, you can have it? 

Anyway, although I have some critiques as discussed above, by and large, I liked the aromantic and asexual representation in Loveless. It isn’t going to be every aro/ace’s experience, and if you don’t see yourself reflected in Georgia, you are still valid. But I think Oseman thoroughly captured many of the struggles that young aro/ace adults experience when they haven’t been as lucky to learn about those identities already or, like me, didn’t just stumble through adolescence in a charmed fashion.

Ok, so if I liked that part of Loveless, why the long face at the beginning of this review? I’ve given it some thought, and my ultimate conclusion for now is that Oseman is just trying to do too much here. I have some other, more specific critiques, but that’s the main one: as a narrative, Loveless is a mess.

Is Loveless a harmful travesty? Absolutely not. Is it a perfect representation of anything, be it aro/aceness or other queer identities? Also no—but I don’t think any novel could claim that label. If Loveless steps wrong, it’s a well-meaning step caused by overly-ambitious plotting and characterization. This is a hot mess and certainly very problematic in parts, but it also has a great deal going for it. Your challenge, if you choose to read it, is to separate those two things and decide if, on balance, the latter outweighs the former. In my case, as ever my indecisive brain comes down on the “definitely, maybe” middle ground!

Please note that my review on Kara.Reviews is significantly longer but contains spoilers for the plot of the book.