Experience Tumblr like never before
Some of the main points I see used against aromantic and asexual people are narratives that go like:
You can't know you're aromantic or asexual if you've never tried dating or having sex. (Translation: you should date someone you aren't attracted to and have sex with someone you aren't attracted to just to be sure you aren't attracted to them).
You can't be asexual or aromantic if you've dated and had sex. (Translation: the actions of dating someone and sleeping with someone can only ever be motivated by attraction, directly opposing what was demanded in the first point.)
If you date or have sex with someone despite not being attracted to them then you are manipulative and deceiving your partner. (Translation: dating/sleeping with someone without attraction as a motivation is inherently Bad and Evil)
And like, I've come across people who believe all three points at once without seeing the hypocrisy of it all.
Anyways, you don't need to try out all possibilities in order to figure out your orientation. Most people don't go around demanding that straight people sleep with and date the same gender before being allowed to call themselves straight, and yet they'll demand that of aspec people without hesitation. At the same time, there's nothing wrong with trying stuff out. While certain actions can be motivated by attraction, they don't always have to be. People have sex without being attracted to each other all the time, for all sorts of reasons. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, and it doesn't necessarily determine your sexuality either.
And I think the last opinion comes from a) people's tendency to tie attraction to a bunch of other feelings that just sum up to caring about someone, and then translate the absence of attraction into the absence of even liking a person and b) the tendency to see romantic attraction as the highest emotion one can have for someone and seeing any other feelings as inherently lesser, therefore making such a relationship "unbalanced". And with the way most people view aromanticism it's very easy for them to jump to the conclusion that the aro person is obviously being dishonest and just using their allo partner for their own evil little plans. It's all bullshit and I wish people would realize how easily these arguments fall apart when looking at them critically.