I know romantic love isn’t the “highest level” of love, but I crave it, I think because I crave the idea that someone would love me and be so openly affectionate.

But I know I can’t fall in love and a romantic relationship in practice cannot happen and would not be truly desirable. I’m merely creating an unrealistic ideal of a romantic relationship.

This here is now in attendum to my one post where i ended up coming up with the concept of a "Romance Object" (basically a sex object, but applied to romance instead of sex).

It's such a weirdly common thing once you actually start to think about it, especially in amatonormative society. People fantasizing about their crushes, the tendency in most fandoms to romantically ship characters instead of platonically or otherwise, the very existence of the concept of a "dream partner" (prince or bride or otherwise) as an ideal to chase and lense to view potential partners through and measure up against. The willingness in extreme cases to also keep on persisting and pressuring another person with romantic gestures and so on.

And lastly also the perception and base assumption of simply being worth less for not acting perfectly like a romantic object. The patch up of that with "well, if they would've truly loved you, they wouldn't have done any of that" instead of literally just "woah, that was fucked up."

How every instance of two people, who happened to be able to fullfill each other's romantic desires and needs, gets picked out and shown around as an example of romance always being good and aspiring over the hundreds of couples where that just wasn't the case or didn't work out even with work put in.

How aromantic people have experiences of either getting pitied for their lack of romantic desire or not taken seriously when they are the object of romantic desire to someone. Or how often aromantic people get called cold hearted and emotionless, even manipulative for openly stating that they either just don't feel it or feel uncomfortable about receiving unwanted romantic attention.

i swear if i see 1 more post by an ace going 'u have to tag all ur smut for sex repulsed folk' (very true. i do 100% agree with this for many reasons just to make that clear) but then proceed to post so many romantic lovey dovey posts and ships with no tagging at all to say that theres romantic content i swear i am going to punch a hole through my thick brick exterior walls. tag ur romance please. and stop acting like thats so shocking or like were evil for wanting u to tag.

also this weird expectation that u have to 'make up for' ur lack of atraction through romance and platonic love and this weird treatment of romance as this amazing thing that has to be experienced and its clear theyre just trying to say fuck you to acephobes but they just end up coming across very aphobic and like they dont veiw aspecs as valid unless theyre alloro and/or allopl

and the fact that i cant bring up being aspec without it being assumed that im either alloace or completely unloving (neither true (also the fact they go to 'unloving' instead of aroace is odd (im not aroace either but still odd)))

and how very 'aspec pride post' i come across consists only of ace demiace maybe aroace if ur lucky but no aromantic or aplatonic or afamilial or anything else

and 'aspec inclusive' places/event never even having the aromantic flag available let alone other aspec flags or alloace and alloaro flags. and their focus on romantic relationships even tho they were never labeled as having any focus on romance

and the focus on needing love in aspec communities. ive seen so many posts go along the lines of 'aspec doesnt mean we cant feel love' which is true but then go on a rant about how evil and 'psychopathic' it is to not feel love and how theyre 'not 1 of them' and trying to separate themselves from loveless and love complicated folk

tldr: i dont feel comfortable in the aspec community due to the heavy focus on lovefull alloaces and how any1 who doesnt feel love or is a non-ace aspec is just left out and how romance repulsed folk r ignored and treated like were some evil anti-love villian for wanting a bit of tagging