#aces!

... it might be feeling physically comfortable near the person; feeling less hyper-aware of personal space boundaries seems like a characteristically romantic feeling, whereas even around some of my close “clear-cut platonic” friends, we still find it most comfortable to maintain the respectful armor of distinct airspaces (”the ambit of amity”).   But your personal space habits may differ from mine.

Secondly, obviously people in long-term relationships can trade so much culture that they build up a shared, syncretic culture of their own.  Am I saying that because they’re less alien to each other, they’re less romantic?  Maybe a little --- if we talk about the difference between an “initial spark” and the kind of love that grows from it --- but mostly no, because even people who have known each other for a long time still create new culture to share with each other.

Third, what about family members?  If you meet your long-lost parent for the first time, surely that’s a meeting of alien souls.  But we wouldn’t say that those kinds of meetings are friendly/romantic, right.  I think the difference is that when you approach a relationship as familial, you are usually occupying unequal roles, even if there’s mutual respect.  And I feel like there are other differences, too, even if they’re hard to express.  But I imagine that (without being grossly incestuous) romance must overlap in some ways with family feeling, because some people who have romantic feelings eventually start a family together. Or when I think about the difference between a set of elderly siblings still living together in their family home and taking care of each other, versus a set of friends doing the same, versus a set of “romantic partners”, the distinction gets fuzzy to me.

Fourth, what about the stuff I’ve left out of romance --- flowers and dates and butterfly feelings and aesthetic attraction and all of that?  Well, my friends and I have dates, and sometimes trade flowers, and I feel giddy about how great they are, and I think they’re beautiful people so --- I don’t know if that’s a special characteristic of romance for me.