I know this would be a massive overhaul of, like, the entire site, so it's pretty unfeasible, but it really would be nice if ao3 had an easy way to filter for, for lack of a better term, secret third thing relationships. obviously this would have a lot of utility for aspec characters in weird relationships where the honest answer to "are they dating and/or having sex?" is "we shrimply don't know," or for characters who are straight up explicitly in qprs, but I think fandom as a whole often enjoys digging into blurred, indefinable, and dramatically over-intense relationships. examples: characters who don't want to kiss or sleep together but are in a committed bond and functionally act as spouses, friends with benefits who are decidedly not romantic with each other, and characters who are romantically and sexually involved but mostly as a side effect of the Weird Intense Thing they already had going on.
it wouldn't be a defined Third Type of relationship filter, it would be a grab bag for anything outside of "romantic and sexual" and "nonromantic and nonsexual," but as it stands I think it's mostly the "&" tag being used as the grab bag for "???" relationships currently. what if I want to write about that classic "two queer woman characters have been best friends since elementary school and functioned as an inseparable unit until young adulthood and have had moments of attraction towards each other since high school that they've never acted upon but they absolutely never would have had this kind of bond with straight female friends" experience? is that a / or an & ?
