How does that work? Does she hate it or is she just apathetic?
Yeah... that's the thing. It doesn't work.
She cares for her, but she doesn't love her. It's an entirely doomed one sided relationship. Areo Ace people can deeply care about and love people, but they can't ever be IN love with them. That's the aromantic part of aro-ace.
Functionally, she might as well be straight.
Ok so, this is a take I see a lot on stories about aro and/or ace people, and it's not always wrong, but it definitely isn't always right.
I think there's two issues people struggle to understand.
The first issue is misunderstanding what it means to be aro and/or ace, and the answer to what those words mean is... "it's complicated". Like, really complicated. Imagine trying to describe "falling in love". How do you get someone to understand what love feels like using only your words? Then add on to that the fact that even among ace/aro people it's not always the same. They're referred to as spectrums for a reason.
So yeah, it's complicated.
The second issue I see people having trouble with is understanding the area between "friends" and "lovers", which is, ironically, exactly what this manga is about. That's where a lot of the details lie for aro/ace people. Some don't want anything past "friends" at all, but many still desire companionship. A lot of the time, like in this story, that kind of companionship is really tricky to nail down with a label.
These things combined obviously lead to a lot of misunderstandings, which is really tough because god knows it's confusing enough already for the people it even matters to. And all this is barely scratching the surface.
At the end of the day, I at least would really just prefer if people didn't try and decide for others how a relationship "should" work or what it "should" look like. I think that we can all agree that even if it's well intentioned it's not really anyone else's business.
TL;DR if their relationship works for them, it's fine, isn't it? if it changes course then that's fine too. people change in many ways as they grow.