"Love Expanded: How Asexuals and Aromantics are Redefining Love, Life, and Family" by Wren Burke

 Here's yet another book on asexuality and aromanticism that I got my hands on! This was a lovely surprise as these tend to come out in October when Ace Week is. I found this on Twitter also, so I was able to get it right as it came out (important for reasons that will come later). Overall, I don't think I necessarily learned new things, but it struck me that this book is an excellent model of how to blend the ace 101 information along with what to do and what changes to make with this information. 

The book has ten chapters covering everything from what love means to a-spec individuals to gender to family structure and ending with legislation. The author covers plenty of material that I'm already familiar with such as Ace by Angela Chen or Refusing Compulsory Sexuality by Sherronda Brown but also pulls from anecdotes, a survey of 1,900 aces they designed for the book, and interviews with ace researchers. I was really pleased to see that aromanticism was an integral part of the book, with Single at Heart by Bella DePaulo getting its turn in the spotlight. And in general, the book is very inclusive and just feels very queer. It isn't breaking up identities to only focus on one but discusses elements of queerness and what that can look like in other cultures.

Helpfully, the book does not assume that you know much about asexuality and aromanticism, but it does not pander to folks that are new to the community. I find that if authors are writing more 101-type things that there are constant caveats about what they mean. This has its nuances, but I also felt that Burke just had a great handle on the material and was writing about what they were interested in. I also just feel that if you're picking up the book, you know what asexuality is and are likely asexual. But maybe I'm wrong (hoping that I'm a little wrong anyways). 

The ending though talks about what we need to do to make things better. And it starts with changing legislation and writing to MPs. Burke is British, I was honestly surprised how much US law was in the book, so I wasn't shocked by that. I do wonder though how quickly this book will go out of date as a result. Seriously, the most recent reference to the Ace Community Survey that I could find was 2019, it's been going on annually since then. How quickly will those legislative references go out of date? Or even more tragically, how many won't?

All in all, I thought this was a great addition to the canon of works on asexuality and aromanticism. I think it definitely has its niche as an intro text or something for someone who knows about asexuality but wants to start digging in deeper. I hope that it's a model for more works situating asexuality less as its own thing and more as fundamentally queer. And I dearly hope that there's more positive changes in legislation coming for us.