Controversial opinion maybe, but I feel like people should really let up on pretending that “romantic attraction” is something that’s ever going to have a one-side-fits-all definition.
There’s absolutely a distinction between romantic and platonic relationships, but I think saying that the line exists, and that it exists in the exact same place for everyone, is really different – and the source of a lot of pain and confusion for people who are trying to figure out their identities, or even just understand other people’s. It’s why the distinctions between close friendship/queerplatonic relationship/romantic relationship are very blurry and often sound the same, and why people tell each other that someone else’s name for what they have or want is wrong, because it looks like the other kind of relationship that they have or want – because one of those things can look a lot like another, depending on the participants. And it’s also why there are people who say they can’t figure out what their orientation is due to people keep giving them different or contradicting definitions – because unlike, say, sorting out which gender(s) you’re attracted to (which is still complex, but more empirical), figuring out the category or strength of attraction is a lot less objective and a lot more personal.
I have read a lot of definitions of romantic attraction that made me feel very broken, because to me they defined what I want out of platonic relationships. But since I’m very romance-repulsed, and I was being told that was romance, it made me wonder if the relationships I wanted were something I’d ever actually get to have and still be comfortable with. It took me years to break things down enough to acknowledge that those things could exist in platonic relationships too, because I’d spent a long time seeing some them get called romantic. However, I am obviously in no place to tell the (allo) people who wrote those definitions that their idea of romance is wrong – to them, those things do characterize their romantic relationships, and likely are a way they distinguish them from their platonic ones, and it’s okay for them to say so! Our lines just fall in different places. The thing that is less okay is to make blanket statements about what is and isn’t romantic or platonic, because there are pretty much always going to be people that feel differently.
Being a very affectionate person who craves (and I’d like to think reciprocates) a decent amount of intimacy, I know that I have important relationships that some allo people would say have things in common with their romantic ones, even though I never want to have a romantic partnership in my life. Being those things and aromantic, I know that there are probably other aros out there who look at what I want and have and would personally be uncomfortable being in those kinds of relationships, even though I categorize them as platonic. None of us – not me, not the allo people, and not the other aromantics – are wrong. But pretending that a romantic relationship is something that has a solid definition would dictate that somebody has to be, if we’re all looking at the same level of intimacy and seeing different things. And someone’s going to come out of that feeling broken, because they don’t fit into a box that actually varies wildly in size depending on the person. Which is why I think it would be for the best if people started acknowledging that these lines vary for different people.
Published
¯_( ಠ_ಠ)_/¯ 