Why are you acting as though Ayin didn’t confess his feelings to Ben? Why else would he have allowed him to be the only other sephirah asides from binah to keep his memory it’s obviously so that he can remember all their romantic escapades over the millions of years for him.
Ayin pretty explicitly loved Benjamin and basically enacted a romantic lover's suicide between the two of them, yes. Actions do speak louder than words so I think that much is apparent. The thing with Ayin though is that I don't think he ever examines his feelings for Benjamin or the fact that he loved him in an earnest manner in the same way he doesn't examine any of his relationships beyond the way that makes it easy for himself to understand which is ultimately surface level. A lot of Ayin's attempts to examine his relationships with the sephirot always capture a chunk of it but end up missing the mark. Think of Hod's meltdown cutscenes for instance.
Benjamin and Carmen is one of the biggest cases of this where it's clear he had a special relationship with the both of them but he also romanticizes them rather than think about the actual things that made them connect in the first place because it requires fully humanizing everyone involved. Ayin and Benjamin could have confessed and been dating the whole time and he'd still send his robot daughter to take his life and turn him into a robot so the two of them can die together upon figuring out Benjamin's confessions being genuine instead of just saying something.
This is why the Carmen reveal is as harsh as it is. She's the exact catalyst of Ayin refusing to properly understand someone and how he feels about them. And Ayin doesn't even know what his relationship with Carmen is at the end of the day. Whether they were lovers, friends, or something else entirely. The Benjamin flashback we get after the Hokma meltdown is the Angela creation where he agrees to fade away with him forever, the exact thing he wanted to hear above Hokma's pleas in reality.
I didn't mean to imply Ayin/Benjamin were one-sided, far from it, but rather that the core of lobotomy corporation is the many ways Ayin avoids truly examining how he feels about others and instead settling for the safe and palatable version. And despite this, Ayin still wants to dehumanize himself most of all.
Sorry if I've conveyed this poorly and for the prior confusion in my initial post. I'll always keep in mind Ayin is an extremely interpretable character on the account that he barely talks so his actions, small monologues and other peoples' accounts are most of what we go off of but I also find Ayin's exact words and choice of memories to explore intentionally worded to serve his ultimate goal of erasing himself rather than to truly care about the others' individuality and I think that makes for a fascinating character, especially when Hokma is the closest to breaking this mindset but still ultimately gets used as a stepping stone.
