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The queer platonic question brought up something that I’ve been struggling to talk about, which is like, that there’s a word to describe something about myself that I’ve always kind of known, but played off as a joke, or an thought I must be unconsciously exaggerating, or that there was some connection I was just missing.
Aplatonic.
Even before I found out there was a word for it– that it was something other people experienced– I was getting the strong sense that there was something “wrong” with the way that I interacted with people that I got close to.
A few years ago I made the deliberate choice to stop letting myself get very close and intimate with people I met online, because inevitably, again and again, I would get a crush on them, and fall in love with them. And I would fail to understand what– in hindsight– were completely normal boundaries of intimacy between friendship and romance.
I don’t know how to interact casually with someone I’m close to without flirting with them. I don’t know how to care about someone without wanting to kiss them, and brush their hair and take them dancing, and solve their problems, etc etc.
And it was seriously complicating my life– which at this point is comfortably married and settled– so I just sort of stopped.
I’ve gotten better at managing it for the last while, just by being aware of it.
Learning that ‘aplatonic’ is a thing you can be has helped me understand and manage myself, just by having a word for it.
For one thing, it’s made “platonic shipping” and “friend shipping” and “familial shipping” and platonic F/Os in fandom make a whole lot more sense to me.
It makes my enemies to lovers fixation make a whole lot more sense too.
I genuinely didn’t– and still don’t, emotionally– understand how you can want two characters to have an intense relationship that *isn’t* romantic.
But I understand that there’s this whole experience of attraction that I’m missing out on and that that’s what other people are experiencing and expressing.
I don’t really have an end to this post. It’s something that I’m still struggling to communicate, and figure out what it means beyond the obvious way I’ve been living with it my whole life.
Thanks for having patience with me.
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