The Rise of Platonic Co-Parenting

Transcript Transcribed by Laura M.

Courtney: Hello everyone and welcome back. My name is Courtney, I’m here with my spouse Royce, and together we are The Ace Couple. And today we are talking about the rise of platonic co-parenting. A recent New York Times article talks about platforms that match partners— I don’t like this subheading, it says ‘partners in procreation’.

Royce: Is that not at odds with the title?

Courtney: A little bit, a little bit, I guess.

Royce: I had to look up the definition of procreation to be sure.

Courtney: I don’t know, I guess there could be, like, an IVF situation, like, “Hey, you’ve got a sperm, I’ve got an egg, we’ve got medical interventions, we don’t even have to touch each other, we can still make this happen.” [chuckles] But yeah, it says: “Platforms that match partners in procreation are experiencing a post-pandemic uptick.” So I’m envisioning dating site, but for exclusively having kids, not romance or hookups, which, uh, I hear is a very common use of dating sites. This remains unconfirmed. [reading] “In November – the article starts – Rave Reid went out to dinner with a man she met on an app. Over Italian food, they spent almost 3 hours talking about their values and goals. What are their views on politics and religion? Where do they envision themselves living, how many children do they want, and where would they want to educate them? This was not a date, but a meeting to see if they could be successful co-parents. Two adults with no expectations of maintaining a relationship outside the shared raising of a child. ‘A co-parent doesn’t need to be my romantic partner,’ said Miss Reid, who would like to have a child before she turns 36.”

Courtney: So I am incredibly fascinated by these apps. I haven’t actually tried to poke around on them ’cause I assume I can’t. Most apps you can’t even look around on until you make accounts anymore, which profoundly irritates me. But they talk about these apps that are growing, including… Mo-damily? Mod-amily?

Royce: Modamily, I would assume.

Courtney: Modamily.

Royce: It’s Modern Family.

Courtney: Oh, Modern Fam— oh, it’s Modern Family. Mm. This is the app Miss Reid in question uses, which connects people looking to start a family through dating, sperm donation, or platonic co-parenting. So that’s kind of interesting. Does that mean, like, a traditional dating app might be like, “What are you looking for?” and people will be like, “Casual hookups,” or “Long-term relationships,” or… You know, is an app like this, like, “What are you looking for?” “I’m looking to date people who want kids,” or “I’m just looking for sperm donors,” or— That’s kind of interesting. If there’s enough people using apps like that, I almost like apps that are more specific. Because a common experience I have heard, especially with women on dating apps, is that there is such a mismatch in what people want. Even on those sites where you can tag what you want, a lot of people just ignore those, like, “Oh, I’m here looking for a long-term relationship.” And then you’ve got dozens of guys sending you dick pics in the DMs, that kind of a thing.

Royce: Yeah, sites that connect people like these, that’s sort of a double-edged sword because if you get too few people on the site, it becomes difficult to connect with anyone that’s, you know, reasonably in your area or that fits. But there’s definitely an oversaturation on the major sites.

Courtney: Right.

Royce: Where people are just, again, taking, like, a shotgun approach to trying to hook up. Like, “I’m going to send messages to literally everyone.

Courtney: Throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks.

Royce: I was trying to click around here and see what these sites were like. Some of them literally only have apps, which always annoys me. Like, you can only use this on a phone, you can’t use it on a computer.

Courtney: Yeah, hate that. Hate everything about that. Throw them out.

Royce: The naming conventions— I see CoParents, that makes sense. I see LetsBeParents, that makes sense.

Courtney: Yeah, both of those are also mentioned in this article.

Royce: Yeah, I’m not a fan of Modamily for–

Courtney: Modamily!

Royce: –for Modern Family. And I also, when I searched ‘co-parents’, the first result was a paid ad by a competitor called Pollen Tree, which is— it’s more focused on sperm donations.

Courtney: Oh!

Royce: Whereas a lot of these other sites do all three.

Courtney: That wasn’t the direction I thought it was going to go because something in that title sounded vaguely like a slant rhyme about, like, polyamory. So I thought, I thought it was going to be like people who want to be a part of multi-family households in a polyamorous capacity. Like, I want to find more than one non-platonic parent.

Royce: I guess I said that too quickly. It looks like Pollen Tree also does do some amount of co-parenting, but donors are also mentioned.

Courtney: So since we are talking about numbers, uh, this article does talk about it a little bit. So it’s sort of focusing on the growth over the last few years. Because in 2020, this Modamily had 30,000 users. By 2025, that grew to 100,000. LetsBeParents, when it debuted in 2023, had 1,200 active monthly users. Now it has 10,000. And CoParents reports having 150,000 registered users. Now this still seems, like, very low numbers.

Royce: Compared to the millions on the popular dating sites, yeah.

Courtney: Yeah. Because, like you also said, talking about, like, regions, with numbers like that, you might find someone who seems to be the perfect co-parenting partner to you, but they might live halfway across the country. I imagine there are some areas where you might sign up for this app and it’s like, there is one other person in this area, and you meet them and they have polar opposite political and religious views and you can’t figure out how to raise a kid that way. And it’s like, then what do you do now? There’s no one else locally. And I wanna be really clear, anyone who’s a regular listener of ours is not gonna be confused about this. I’m totally on board with the idea. I think more people should be aware that platonic co-parenting is an option that you can consider or even aspire to. All of my criticisms are just the tech companies behind them, and the apps and websites. Because I am a certified technology hater.

Royce: I was curious what their financial models are like, but I haven’t found a clear answer for that.

Courtney: Oh yeah, I mean, if they’re sort of based off of the idea of dating apps, I imagine a lot of people are paying monthly subscriptions.

Royce: That could be. I don’t know if this is accurate because I can’t find a reliable source right now, but some of them might do fees for personal matchmaking. And it also seems like any companies that are dealing with egg donations, sperm donations, or surrogacy might be working through concierge services where they may get a part of the transaction.

Courtney: Well, because that’s interesting too. I’d be curious, and we probably don’t have time to go into it today, but when it comes to, like, sperm donation, like, there are companies who have done the sperm donation – like matching, selecting, acquiring – for a very long time. So I wonder where it comes to that, like searching for a platonic co-parent, that’s newer. There aren’t like pre-established industries built around that. So I can see why that is a new concept to people to get excited about. But when it comes to, like, sperm donor, I want to know what an app like this brings to the table that the traditional agencies doing this don’t. You know what I mean? So maybe that’s something to look into in the future.

Royce: I mean, as a software engineer, oftentimes what new companies do is they take something that already exists and try to unify it through one website.

Courtney: And make it an app.

Royce: Yeah. [Courtney laughs] That’s— that is a business strategy.

Courtney: So this talks about the social pressure of, you know, the old biological clock, women who do want to have children the old-fashioned way but know there’s a limited window of time to do that. But are also pairing the idea of parenting with someone to having a romantic and sexual relationship, probably a marriage with them. And the woman in this article, Ms. Reid, is talking about how, you know, I had a lot of older friends who were so stressed about finding a partner with which to have kids by this certain period of time that— The quote here is, “They want to have a baby with the next person they meet.” So— and that does happen. I mean, when people have sort of a bigger goal with smaller things they need to achieve to get there ahead of time, sometimes you’re a little laser-focused on that end goal and you might overlook some red flags. You might move a little quicker than you otherwise would organically. And that can lead to some real interpersonal problems down the line.

Courtney: So when she learned about the concept of co-parenting, she loved it. She said, “I really feel like it let me separate two huge decisions: who do I want to date and who do I want to parent with? We put so much pressure on our partner to be everything.” And then it also says that she does use a different app to date. So that’s really fascinating. Like, she is still actively trying to date, but she’s also ready to have kids now and has decided that these two things don’t need to be one in the same, and I respect the hell out of that. I’m sure she’s gonna have some weird conversations with people that she is going to try to date down the line because not everyone is going to be cool with this idea, but some, some will be. Some might just need some education if they’ve never heard of it before.

Royce: But I mean, we are getting into dating in your mid to late 30s or beyond that, you’re going to meet people who have already been married and divorced and have kids, and it isn’t that different.

Courtney: Right. Well, that, that’s exactly what I was thinking too, because it would be interesting, and it might be situational based on who she meets and how they decide to negotiate that. Because some people who date people who already have kids want to become some sort of stepparent and want to have a relationship with those kids, and some people do keep that very separate, like, “My kids are my kids, and we’re just gonna date.” And it’s always different, like, do you actually want to cohabitate with the person that you’re in a relationship with? Is the goal to ultimately move in, or do you want to keep separate households? That sort of thing. She is talking to a man right now that she met in November, and they’re continuing to have these conversations, navigating this. And apparently she has a very, very traditionally religious mother that she told of her plans and was bracing her to not accept it. But apparently she was very open-minded and supportive of that, which is a delight. I wonder how much of that is that very religious woman also just really wants a grandkid. And at this point she’s like—

Royce: “I’ll take what I can get.”

Courtney: She’s like, “Yeah, your biological clock is ticking. You gotta figure this out one way or another.” Although any– any time anyone earnestly uses the phrase biological clock, I can’t help it, in the back of my head, every single time, I start reciting “Cut the crap, Hamlet, my biological clock is ticking and I want babies now!” from The Complete Works of William Shakespeare Abridged. The article goes on to talk very briefly, not at all in depth, about the sort of legal decisions that underlie any type of relationship like this. There is a lawyer here, Amelia Demma, based in New York, who practices reproductive law, and she says she is seeing a big uptick in co-parenting contracts where two people who are, I assume, usually not married – given this type of family structure – are coming in, and in lieu of marriage— which is itself a contract, albeit a very easy one to enter into compared to any other type of contract. So she’s drawing up agreements like this that talk about things like custody, visiting, financial obligations, which I imagine by the time you have selected a co-parenting partner and have come to a lawyer, you have probably already had these conversations. I wouldn’t be surprised if folks going this route have better, more in-depth, more comprehensive conversations about what parenting means to them and what they want it to look like and what they expect out of the other than probably the average, like, at least cis straight married couple who end up having kids.

Royce: Oh, Definitely. That’s not even a question in my mind.

Courtney: Because having kids the old-fashioned way is also just like the simplest way to have kids. Like, you can have kids that way, on accident. You can have kids that way without having really in-depth conversations ahead of time. But anything like this with co-parenting, even if you have a romantic partner, if you’re looking at things like adoption, even if you’re looking at things like IVF that do take bigger medical interventions, like usually there’s just more conversations between the idea and implementing it because there are just more barriers involved to getting there. But I think that’s cool in just about any situation, even if it’s not just a two-person co-parenting kind of a thing. If you have any sort of alternative family structure, like seeing a lawyer that specializes in, I guess, this branch is called reproductive law if children are involved.

Courtney: There are places like the Chosen Family Law Center that often deal with, like, polyamorous families and parents. ’Cause any time you’re sort of separating out that marriage contract, which is gonna infuriate the Heritage Foundation, which is good and why we should do it more. Specifically to make the Heritage Foundation mad, let’s take the contract that they think was made by God, which is marriage, which inherently involves having sex and procreating. All three of those things are exactly the same thing. Same bundled contract. Can’t separate it out. I say let’s separate it out even more. As many ways as we can separate this contract, let’s do it. But any, any sort of alternative family structure, seeing a lawyer who can actually draw up a contract is usually in everyone’s best interest.

Courtney: And I would say even more so when children are involved. Like, breakups amongst two or more adults can always, always be messy, but like, I don’t know, you gotta be an adult, you gotta sort your shit out. If there’s a child or children involved, that’s when I’m a lot more inclined to say like, yeah, get that kid protected regardless of what would happen. Or anything that might happen in the future.

Courtney: And I don’t know, then we have a couple of people here– I am becoming increasingly frustrated at how often and how casually therapy is thrown out as just like a one-size-fits-all something. Because I mean, this is normal for articles like this. They talk to so many different people. Someone they talk to for 20 minutes might only appear in a single paragraph in this larger story. But like, they’re talking about platonic co-parenting, they’re talking to a specific woman who is seeking this, they’re talking about the apps with which you can do this, then they talk to a lawyer, and then they’re like, “And by the way, if you wanna do this, you should go to therapy. Here’s a psychologist who says you should go to therapy.”

Courtney: I don’t think all therapy is bad. I really don’t. But I also don’t think all therapy is good. There are bad therapists. There are people who have been subjected to medical and psychological abuse by the psychiatric systems that we have. And I just don’t think everyone has access to a good psychologist who would actually be equipped to deal with this specific set of, you know, family structure differences. And I don’t know, I feel like this just always throwing like, “By the way, go to therapy. Therapy’s good. Therapy’s great. Everyone should be in therapy. Everyone should have a therapist.” Are we culturally, as a society, – because that is just how we talk now – is it our fault that bullshit like BetterHelp exists? Everyone talks about therapy all the time now. “Go to therapy. Therapy’s good.” And nobody ever talks about how sometimes therapy is bad.

Royce: Particularly when it becomes so large and commercialized.

Courtney: Yeah, and so everyone, all the time, is hearing, “Go to therapy, go to therapy, go to therapy, it’s good, it’s always a positive thing, go to therapy, everyone should seek therapy.” So of course there are gonna be exploitative companies like BetterHelp being like, “Is everyone telling you to go to therapy? We made therapy easier than ever with an app!” I don’t know, do they have an app? They probably have an app. ’Cause then the way they advertise also, like, you know, when you’re starting a business or you’re trying to grow a business or advertise for one, everyone says, “Who’s your target market?” I can just see the BetterHelps of the world sitting there with smug little grins on their faces being like, “Everybody. Everybody is our target market because everybody should go to therapy.” Fuck right outta here!

Courtney: Everyone’s gonna label me a therapy hater, and you know what, maybe I am. Maybe I’m radicalizing myself even further against therapy. What else did I say I was a hater of this episode? I’m just in a hateful mood. I— oh, technology. I am a certified technology hater. I’m a hater of all apps, and I’m just gonna say it, I’m a therapy hater. What else do I hate? Ball caps. I hate ball caps. The next section here is “One size fits all doesn’t even work in ball caps.” And then we’ve got a photo of a family here and the guy is wearing a ball cap. I also hate ball caps. They aren’t real hats. A real hat should command respect. When you walk into a room with a proper hat— You know what? Add it to the list. Hate ball caps. Let’s see, let’s, let’s find out what else I can hate today.

Courtney: Okay, so we have a couple here who matched on Modamily, a name which I do hate. Theme of the episode: Courtney hates everything right now. They spent three months vetting each other, talking on the phone for a week, then meeting up for dinner, and then talking on the phone every night. Oh, and lovely family photo here. They have two sons now, so family of four, on the outside looking in, almost looks like a nuclear family I’ve heard so much about. Which is also something I hate. But I’m dying to learn more about this family because this is extremely cool to me. So after these extensive conversations they decided to pull the trigger. They have two sons now, ages 5 and 3, who were conceived through IVF. So it seems as though they are both the biological parents of these children. They live on a 52-acre ranch where they each have a house surrounded by lots of space. The kids live with her, quote, “across the pasture,” and he often travels for work, so he’s not even always in his house but he sees them between projects.

Royce: Oh, okay, this makes sense. I was just looking at the size of the land, but they live in a place that isn’t even technically a town in Texas.

Courtney: Ah.

Royce: It’s an unincorporated community.

Courtney: Fascinating. Yeah, and this guy, apparently, he grew up in a home with a lot of arguing, and just like many people who grow up in a home like that, promised himself that he would never put his own children through that. And the solution he came to that felt right for his life was that he should have children with someone who is his best friend, not his lover. And I think that’s cool. If that works for them, I love that for them. It is interesting. And I would love to see percentage-wise though, because both of the people using these sites, one who has already started a family, and one who is actively looking for it, they both seem to be, like, a woman searching for a man to co-parent with. And I wonder how much of that is just, you know, “I wanna go the IVF route, like I want to bear my own children and I need sperm with which to do that.”

Courtney: And I wonder how much of it is these are straight people who still, like, their worldview is still very much, “Well, even if we aren’t gonna be married and even if we aren’t gonna be in a romantic situation, I still picture my kids having a father.” I don’t know, I guess a percentage of straight people versus queer people looking for this arrangement, I’d be really, really curious to see. Because on the one hand, queer communities have been finding creative, alternative family structures that work for them forever. So this isn’t maybe as new or novel of a concept within queer communities. But things like creating an app to make it easier to search and actively seek out the right people for this is newer. So, I don’t know, feel like it could go either way.

Courtney: And of course there are some academics starting to study how children and parents fare psychologically in platonic co-parenting situations. I’ve already committed to the bit of being a hater of– I guess I just said therapy. I didn’t say I hate psychology yet, did I? Maybe I do. We’ll find out. A report published in May from the University of Cambridge looked at how children and parents in 23 families fared psychologically when the elective non-romantic parents met online compared with those who already knew each other. 23 families, not a ton of families. That’s still a relatively small report. But their conclusion nevertheless, I don’t think should be a shock to anybody who listens to a podcast such as ours, but: The children seem to be doing well and no different to other family types.

Courtney: Oh no! Heritage Foundation mentioned even. We’ve got a policy analyst who is talking about the Heritage Foundation and the push in the prenatal space to promote more babies. Why, we know all about that, don’t we? Don’t we, gang? Or what is it, chat? Don’t we, chat? I’m not a streamer. In fact, I hate streaming. Wow, I properly did not know how feisty I was gonna be today when we turned the microphone on, but I’m just a hater. Just hate. Hateful. Hate in my heart. Not for the platonic co-parents! I don’t hate them. I do not hate any of them. I think it’s great. I love that for them. And we really do hate the Heritage Foundation. And this is what I hate about articles like this. They were like, “Look at how great it is that these families have more options and they get to do this.” And then they bring on someone from the fucking Heritage Foundation to directly contradict what these researchers from the University of Cambridge said, where children actually can thrive in this family structure just like they can in every other one.

Courtney: Then they bring on Emily— Emma Waters from the Heritage Foundation to say, “No! These people are bad! They’re placing their desires to have a child over the best interests of that child.” And then they say all the same nonsense we’ve always heard the Heritage Foundation say where they’re like, “Oh, children can only have good lives if they have a married biological mother and father who conceived them via sex.” So after that little bit of, like, political whiplash, then they go on to, “But what about three parents?” Now that we heard from the Heritage Foundation, let’s get even weirder. Three parents is easier. This is a woman, a different Emma, a better Emma, TV writer from Montreal, who found, or thought she found, a co-parent through a Facebook group, but tried and failed at-home insemination for a year before giving up. But then found a couple she had been friends with for 15 years, and she found in them an offer to have a baby together as the three of them. Now I assume when they say ‘a couple’, I assume they mean a pre-established romantic couple who are just sort of then bringing her in as a third co-parent.

Royce: It says “a couple she had been friends with for 15 years.“.

Courtney: Yeah, I mean, like, technically, like, it could just mean like a couple of friends, but I assume when they say “a couple” they mean a capital-C couple.

Royce: I think that’s the intention.

Courtney: Which is very interesting because when I started this article, I was immediately thinking about David J, the founder of AVEN, you know, prominent early online asexual activist. He is the third platonic co-parent in a family arrangement right now. He also had two friends who were an established couple, and the three of them have decided to raise a child together. And I think that is amazing. There are some articles out about this. I’ll try to find one, but last time I was reading about this, so many of them were just like behind paywalls that I could not get around. I think if you have a Medium account, I’m pretty sure David J has written about his experience on his own, which is probably the best way to read that story if you can. I’m pretty sure The Atlantic covered it, but that was one that I couldn’t actually gain access to.

Courtney: But one thing that I know that he has said of his experience is that even though it still is not a traditional family structure, he does think that they get less scrutiny in their arrangement than a, like, polyamorous triad would. Because in their situation, he’s like, “Well, I am asexual. I have this couple over here–” who I believe are allo in all of the senses, and they are a romantic unit. And then they have this third asexual platonic co-parent in their arrangement. And I believe he has said that he thinks people would be less open to it if they were like, all in a relationship with each other, which is of course also— people do that also. I know I’ve seen plenty of articles lately, probably even on the New York Times that are like, “All three of these people are lovers and parents and—”

Courtney: Oh! What was that awful, awful show recently, like Polyfamily, I think. Well, I think that was 4 people. Basically any time there’s going to be a rise in a certain type of non-traditional relationship type or family structure, there are always going to be the, like, “Look at how weird these people are!” like spectacle, articles and TV shows. And then you’ll get things like the New York Times that are like, “Look at this thing that a lot of people like and they like this option and here’s a quote from the Heritage Foundation and you should go to therapy. And have you seen a lawyer?” And here’s a different tangential, I don’t know, they— I’m sure they think they’re being fair and balanced. But the dots they connect– they refuse to connect are the fact that these policy analysts at the Heritage Foundation are part of the reason why it is so much harder to create a family structure like this. They’re part of the reason why you really ought to actually see a lawyer to draw up your own contract, because the preexisting contract of marriage isn’t gonna work in this situation.

Courtney: They’re the reason why you have to do something different. They’re probably also the reason why you have to go to therapy. Because they’re the reason why people are gonna look at you a little funny when they tell you how you’re having a kid. I do think it’s interesting to talk about parenting decisions in a more-than-two-partner situation because– A quote here: “In this 3-person parenting family, she thinks that difficult parenting decisions are a lot less intense than the ones had by her friends who have a traditional 2-person romantic parenting situation.” Quote, “It isn’t one person against another. We have to come to an agreement with three people, and it makes the discussions easier.” Which is really interesting. I imagine that’s the opposite of what the average person’s jerk reaction is. I think the average person is like, “Well, it’s hard enough to come to a parenting decision when it’s only two of you. Adding more people’s gonna make it even harder.”

Royce: I think there’s also a psychological factor though, that people tend to be better behaved when there are more people around. Like, I think it’s easier for two people to start shouting if they’re alone.

Courtney: Oh sure, for people who do that, I’m sure that is true. One of the women in this arrangement says she is constantly afraid of people not understanding their situation, but she has encountered much less confusion than she assumed she would. Which is great. I love that more people are becoming more open to different family structures. I do wonder— a little part of me wonders, because like, an arrangement like this within our community doesn’t seem unusual. It makes a lot of sense for people who want this, who think they can flourish in this arrangement. So I certainly wouldn’t bat an eye if someone told me this was their family relationship.

Courtney: But I do wonder, in people who are in maybe social circles that are more heavily built on that sort of nuclear family kind of a thing, a lot more straight people, cis people, two people conceiving children the old-fashioned way, I wonder how many people hear about an arrangement like this – whether it’s like two women and a man or two men and a woman, and like two of them are the biological parent and then they have a third parent – I wonder how many of the people hearing about this aren’t fully internalizing that these are 3 parents of the kid. And I wonder how many of them are like, “Oh, you know, that third person’s Uncle Joey,” you know?

Royce: Or depending on the nature of the conception, if it’s just like a couple who, like, either was gay or was having some fertility issues and needed a third person, but they have a hierarchy in their mind of the relationship between, you know, two and the third too.

Courtney: Yeah, hierarchy was what I was getting at. Yeah, I wonder how many people that they explain their relationship to are going to incorrectly and arbitrarily assign a hierarchy in their mind. Because I think humans just tend to do that when they don’t have as expansive of worldviews. And maybe I’m wrong, I’d be delighted if I’m wrong, if truly everyone they explain their arrangement to who has been very cool and not confused at all about it are just like, “Yeah, all three of you are equal and valid parents of this child. And that’s cool. Good for you.” I love that. I hope that’s the case. I hope I’m wrong. But even like, in cases of polyamory, like I have known more conservatively minded people who can wrap their head around a straight married couple who are just swingers, or occasionally have a threesome, as opposed to being able to actually wrap their head around, you know, this is a triad, and they’re all in a relationship with one another.

Courtney: So that– that’s why in my mind, I wonder if there are situations where people are still sort of not internalizing the full situation. But I think any type of family structure that works for you is awesome. And our community has been doing it for so long already. But especially for people who are newer to accepting their ace or aro identities, or people who may be younger or trying to envision what their life looks like, there absolutely are ace and aro people who are parents in a variety of ways. Like, of course we know that if you want to and it works for you, even ace and aro people can conceive children the old-fashioned way. I don’t know when I started saying that, but I’ve really committed to that bit the last couple of months. But in separating out that, like, social contract that the Heritage Foundations of the world want us to adhere to where they want you to have a relationship that is romantic and sexual and procreative and married, there are obviously aces and aros among us who want to opt out of all of those things.

Courtney: There are people who want to be single for life. There are people who do not want to have children. And that is wonderful. But we’ve also got a myriad of aspecs in our community who maybe do want some portions of those things. Like, I want this without that. And I feel like a lot of those folks, especially when they’re younger or newer to their identities or trying to envision what their life might look like, there’s a real source of pain and almost grief trying to figure out how they can get the life they want without needing to buy into the parts that they don’t. We as a married asexual couple frequently get emails correspondence from usually teens, young 20-somethings who say, you know, “I’m asexual, and I do actually want to get married,” whether it’s because they are not aromantic and they do have romantic attraction.

Courtney: Maybe they’re even monogamous and they just do want to get married, but they don’t want the implied sexual activity that comes along with the traditional marriage. And a lot of aces in that situation will think to themselves either, “I don’t get to be married and I don’t get the thing I want,” or, “I have to make all of these concessions in order to get it, and it still won’t be completely right for me.” And parenting is another one of those things. Some— like, take for example, an ace who does want to be a parent, but definitely doesn’t want to conceive or procreate in the old-fashioned way. You’re already outside of suspected societal norms, so— That’s another one where people say either, “I don’t get to have children like I want,” or, “I’m gonna have to make concessions in other ways.” And the real importance of seeing different types of families like this, who are flourishing, children who are deeply loved and supported, relationships that do work when you pick and choose the parts that are right for you? Extremely, extremely important.

Courtney: But I think that’s going to be all for today. So as per the usual, I will send you all off with today’s featured MarketplACE vendor: OnBearFeet, where you can get custom teddy bears, including Pride bears, handmade by a biromantic demisexual artist who is also neurodivergent. And these are great if you have a kid, want a kid, or if you want to feed your inner child. Because, oh, do we have teddy bears. We have some nerdy bears, we have like Captain America, we have a Pride Captain. Oh, not even America, it’s Captain A-bear-ica. That’s even better. I know we’ve got some– Oh gosh, why did I just lose that Neil Gaiman nonsense with the angel and devil that everyone was like, “Oh, they’re so queerplatonic.”

Royce: Good Omens?

Courtney: Good Omens, yep. We’ve got two… Ineffabears. An Ineffabear angel and an Ineffabear demon. Extremely good. I actually got a dolphin. They’re not all bears. Most of them are bears, but you can also get, like, a nice narwhal. Who doesn’t love a nice narwhal? Links to see the article we discussed in today’s episode as well as our MarketplACE vendor shop OnBearFeet are gonna be in all the usual places. That’s gonna be the show notes on our website as well as the description box if you are listening on YouTube. As always, thank you all so much for being here, and we will talk to you all next time. Where I will be back with even more things to hate. Goodbye!