Heads up – it’s one of those personal and cathartic blogs again.
I’ve always wanted to have a romantic relationship. To feel like I’d met my soulmate. To feel butterflies in my stomach when I saw someone. To yearn to be with them. To miss them when they’re away and to feel my heart jump when they return.
For years I’d convinced myself that I’d just not met the right person. I guess I thought that one day a man would come into my life who would make me feel differently. That somehow he would cause all those things I’d read in books, seen in films, and that my friends had told me about would happen to me. For a long time I pretended to have those feelings otherwise my partners would question if I liked them or not. The problem was that I really did like them, I just didn’t love them romantically.
To an outsider our relationships must have looked like we were in love. I did all the ‘right’ things and made all the ‘right’ noises. We kissed all the time, we said that we loved each other and we cuddled when we went to bed. But I don’t know. It just always felt a bit empty to me. Too forced and to conforming.
Opening up my relationships and dating multiple people allowed me the opportunity to experiment with different ways of relating to people. I had/have the beau who is no romance and all intimacy. Then there was my beautiful girlfriend who was all physical closeness and very little intimacy. And now there’s Adam who is… well… I don’t really know what we do, but it’s different to anything else.
And that’s great, I hadn’t really realised that relationships were capable of coming in such different flavours. It seems to obvious when I look back and write it down, but it was never obvious at the time. Instead I’d always just felt broken and inadequate, always waiting for my man in shining armour to come and make me feel something. Anything.
It was a conversation last week that made me wonder if I might be aromantic. I’d seen the term in passing before but never given it too much thought. After all, I enjoy kissing and cuddling and things like that – at least when it’s on my own terms. But basically the Beau accused me of having feelings for him (yeah, we have an unconventional and brutally honest relationship) so as I pondered that thought I put it out on Facebook to ask my friends how I would know if I have romantic feelings (because when you’re lazy and looking for answers – Faceache is clearly the answer).
Unfortunately that post has also spawned the ‘do they fancy me or do they not fancy me’ debate because of a comment a friend made about teenage awkwardness. All I can say in response to that is this…
And that has been taking up vast amounts of my thoughts. Now back to your regular programming…
POST INTENTIONALLY PUBLISHED UNFINISHED.
WRITTEN: SEPTEMBER 2015.
PUBLISHED: OCTOBER 2015.
