Amber's Coming Out Story

Amber Brown sent us the shortest story we have, and the only one where the turning point is a piece of vocabulary rather than a conversation.

"Hello, my name is Amber Brown, I saw your post today and thought I would briefly share my story.

I have never been interested in dating with any gender, serious or casual. I felt like all dating was a waste of time. I like being independent. I am the only person I know who has never dated anyone. I thought I was the only person who felt this way about romance.

Then I was scrolling through Pride Palace products and saw the aroace flag. It absolutely changed my world! I learned that I had an identity, not just a quirk. I learned that there were countless people out there like me.

Can't thank you all enough. Now I am so proud of being single!"

"I thought I was the only person who felt this way"

Almost every story on this page turns on a conversation. Amber's turns on the moment before a conversation was even possible, because she had no word for the thing she would have been disclosing.

"I am the only person I know who has never dated anyone."

That is a specific kind of isolation and the genre rarely describes it. She was not hiding an attraction from anyone. There was nothing to hide. Aromantic and asexual people instead spend years being told, usually kindly, that they are a late bloomer, that they have not met the right person yet, that it will happen. Every one of those sentences carries the same premise: that the current state is a delay rather than an identity.

The word did the work

"I learned that I had an identity, not just a quirk."

Nothing about Amber changed that day. What changed is that a set of feelings she had been carrying as a personal oddity turned out to have a name, a flag, and other people attached to it.

That is the entire argument for visibility in one sentence. A flag on a wall or on a product page is not decoration. For somebody who does not yet know their own category exists, it is the first evidence that the category exists at all. Amber found hers by accident, while shopping, which is a very thin thread for something that important to hang on. It is a large part of why we publish these.

"Now I am so proud of being single"

Read that line next to the one near the start: "I felt like all dating was a waste of time. I like being independent."

The facts did not move between those two sentences. The verdict did. At the beginning she is describing herself as the outlier in every room she has been in. By the end she is describing the same life as something to be proud of, and the only thing that arrived in between was the information that other people are like her.

Notice also what Amber never says. She does not mention telling a parent, a friend, or anybody else. Her whole story is a disclosure to herself, and she treats it as finished. For a lot of aromantic and asexual people that is not a first step toward some more public version. It is the destination, and it counts.

If you are somewhere in the middle of this

Our coming out stories page is filling up with accounts like Amber's from across the community, and it exists because reading someone else's version is the thing that makes your own feel survivable.

And if you have a story of your own, we would like to read it. There is a form at the bottom of the stories page. You choose whether your name appears on it.

If a flag is not safe where you are, a pin or a ring carries the same thing more quietly, and you can read what each of the flag designs actually means on our flag meanings page. All sales benefit LGBTQ+ charities.

Last updated: September 30, 2026