imagine if people actually took romantic consent seriously. wouldn't it be fucking awesome. i know they never will, but just. take a moment and imagine it with me
no more "just give them a chance, maybe you'll end up liking them!", no more "if you're going to reject someone, at least apologize to them!", no more shaming people for breaking up/divorcing, no more demonizing people for rejecting other peoples' romantic advances, no more shoving romance in romance repulsed peoples' face on purpose to provoke us, no more "i know we agreed to just be friends with benefits, but i thought you were going to fall in love with me eventually!", no more "i can fix them" when the only thing "wrong" with them is that they want to fuck without dating.
wouldn't it be nice?
A friend I used to hang out with every week once confessed his feelings for me, which I didn't reciprocate. I wanted to stay friends, didn't see why we couldn't, we had been friends the whole time without any romance, why did that have to change? but he decided to stop hanging out with me.
I was heartbroken and felt tossed aside. I didn't understand why our friendship wasn't worth anything to him if he couldn't have me romantically or sexually. I felt betrayed and dehumanised, like I didn't matter to him as a person but only as a romantic prospect.
When I told other friends about it, to my surprise they all sided with him. "He is heartbroken, it's hard to get rejected" even my THERAPIST said this. It's not like I didn't empathize with him, but wasn't I rejected too? No one else could see that but me, they placed me as some sort of villain that had power over him in that situation, when all I did was set a boundary between friendship and romance. All I did was not consent to the terms he wanted for our relationship, I rejected them, my terms were different and he rejected those.
I've had my heart broken by friends over and over and it hurt the same, if not more, than any romantic heartbreak. Why is friendship undervalued next to romantic feelings?
To be honest, to this day I'm still pissed that no one sided with me on this. There's so much unraveling that needs to get done around how we view different relationships in our lives, and I feel like most people can't even scratch the surface when it comes to this questioning.
i desperately need people to stop avoiding what this post is actually about. stop derailing and trying to make it be about something else instead.
THIS POST IS ABOUT ROMANTIC CONSENT.
even if the person in question didn't want to fuck them, even if he just wanted a wholesome, purely romantic, nothing sexual at all relationship, it would STILL be fucked up to BLAME someone for rejecting that.
similarly, if someone really wanted to just fuck, but they were honest and clear about that, and handled rejection gracefully, there would be literally no issue with that.
when will you people understand what i thought i made incredibly fucking clear in the original post. the problem is not, and never was, the presence of potential sexual attraction. the problem is, and always has been, ignoring ROMANTIC CONSENT.
#people think that relationships are made of two parts#one part being ~Love~ (when it is Real it is perfect and pure and incapable of harm)#and Lust (dangerous and only ever potentially safe when tamed by a high amount of Real Love)#and thus they can only imagine that harm done in or relating to a relationship#is because of a lack of Real (romantic) Love + the presence of Lust#also i say relationship instead of just romantic relationship#because i dont think allo society is actually that good at distinguishing between types of relationships#they don't really see friendships between people who could potentially date as its own form of relationship#as much as a liminal space waiting room between being strangers and being romantic#anyways it's so fucking annoying how insistently people think that romance is only harmful because either#the person doesn't Really Love You or they ONLY want to fuck you (inherently a shallow thing to want as well!)#amatonormativity has such a grip people genuinely struggle to imagine that genuine feelings of romantic love#can be anything other than inherently good and beneficial#op you are NOT overreacting people just don't fucking understand what it's like being aroallo#and they don't give us nearly as much grace as we deserve when we get frustrated with this shit
keeping @genderkoolaid's tags because they are Important
you'll never believe. whose main blog that post was from. hi, it's me, tumblr user radioactive-yuri, formerly known as thermodynamic-comedian. this is my side blog. and a good few years ago, i made that very post on my main blog.
i have been fighting in these trenches. for YEARS.
