This is almost certainly the most talked about model among ace communities. The model for this relationship has a few possible manifestations:
| Kitchen | ? | Common
Bed |
Art Studio/ Office |
| A (Me) | Living Room/ | Dining Room | |
| B |
and
| Kitchen
|
? | ? | Art Studio/ Office |
| A (Me) + B | Living Room/ | Dining Room |
This model is probably closest to the romantic/sexual norm, but I can see that normativity (norms aren’t inherently bad, and I don’t think the romantic/sexual norm, as an option is inherently bad.) giving this kind of relationship strength and stability, and while I’d love to be a rebel against the romantic/sexual machine, strength and stability are two things I might be willing to trade for.
In regards to the common bed, I modeled this relationship both with and without it, since I think that the individual bedrooms would be in question in this kind of relationship and haptics could be achieved by having a shared bedroom.
I think that both the strength and weakness of this model lie in its closeness to the norm, since the norm offers more certainty than the less charted roads of larger chosen families, this model is more stable. But at the same time as The Thinking Aromantic points out (in their characteristically aroace-supremacist way) “Romantic-sexual people, whether straight or queer, are very attached to the fantasy they have of that romantic-sexual happily ever after, and they cling to it even when it fails them continuously over the course of decades, even though they all know several people who have also had no luck with that fantasy.” Just because the norm is better explored does not mean that the norm offers more certainty of long term relationship, the normative lifestyle is prone to collapse right alongside the more inventive one.
The Ace Librarian 