links.mimuki.net

Only when I started reading more broadly about different kinds of bonds and decentralizing romance, about how deeply romance-centered our culture is, did I begin to understand that what I wanted was not romance at all.

I am a loving person. I form deep, committed friendships. I crave emotional and intellectual intimacy. I can admire people the way I admire a painting or an intriguing book cover, aesthetically, intellectually, with curiosity and warmth. This kind of looking isn’t pursuit but attention without possession, closeness without claim, something our language rarely makes room for.

But the gravitational pull everyone described, the merging of lives around a romantic feeling, did not happen. And I certainly didn’t want anyone in my bed. What I wanted was connection, and society taught me I could only truly find it in romance.

Particularly the book recommendations on compulsory sexuality seem interesting.

Do I think labels are useful for me right now? No. Do I feel called the hell out anyway? Absolutely.

Food for thought, and if nothing else corroborates with the "I haven't (yet) experienced romantic attraction" theory.

The relevance of this model lies in a particularly suggestive idea: romance may not be an autonomous form of intimacy, but rather a cultural narrative built from several combined intimacies.

From this perspective, what we call “romance” ceases to be a fixed essence and becomes instead a particular relational configuration among many others.

[...]

In [queerplatonic] relationships, what matters is not necessarily romance or sexuality, but the structural quality of the bond itself: mutual care, deep intimacy, emotional continuity, shared meaning-making, and sustained presence in one another’s lives.

Rather than rejecting romance outright, queerplatonic relationships seem to question the assumption that every profound bond must necessarily be organized around the classical romantic model.