I want to talk about my journey through understanding love. Love was a very difficult concept for me to understand. I think the reason it was so much more difficult for me to understand was that the only love that people seemed to talk about was Eros (romantic love) and lust. I didn't understand for a very long time that there were other forms of love: Philia (deep friendship), Storge (familial love), Philautia (healthy self-love), and Agape (love of all). No one took the time to explain that love didn't have to be romantic to me, ever. It was assumed that I knew what love was and what forms it could take. You would think with my family telling me they love me, I would have known the difference, but although I repeated the words back to them, for most of my young adult life, I didn't understand what they meant when they said that, I was just being a mirror of their emotions and felt none of my own. My lack of understanding about love probably had much to do with how angry I was growing up.
When I was around 12 years old, one of my special interests was in a series of books called the Babysitter's Club. I learned all my social skills from those books, and they taught me about boyfriends and crushes and love. None of it made sense to me on an emotional level because tween books aren't very good at explaining deep emotions; I did understand that in building my mask, I had to show some sort of interest in boys. Some of my first journal entries were focused on trying to understand and perfect the mask I was building. I knew I was different, but no one had the words to tell me how, so I just wrote about things I was supposed to be interested in according to the books I read. Going to the movie with my sister and having boys throwing popcorn at us and getting a crush on them, and being jealous that they seemed to like my sister more than me, it was all a mask I was trying to build by writing about it. By writing about it, I hoped that I could make it a reality.
However, as I progressed through journaling over the months and years, a need for knowledge and understanding, for digging into the truth of myself began to emerge, and a conflict between what I perceived to be emotions I was supposed to feel and the ones I felt began to emerge. I was in a constant state of discordance with myself during my teen years because I have alexithymia, but at the time had no understanding of what that was or meant.
Alexithymia is an inability to describe or even identify your own emotions. The first major episode of alexithymia I remember feeling was when I was 15 years old and had watched the ending to the anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion. It took me three days before I understood what was happening inside of me. I had to analyze not only my mental state but my physical state for those three days, write it out, and chart it before I understood what I was feeling and the profound impact the experience had on changing my outlook on life. These 3-day explorations of my emotional state still happen to me, the last one being an intense exploration of how the first episode of the Sandman made me feel this very year. It's exhausting. Alexithymia is why understanding love and the many ways it can manifest took me such a long time to come to terms with.
In grade 8, I experienced a "crush" on a boy who we will call Jamal. I now understand that my interest in Jamal was just in friendship, but at the time, it was drilled into me that a girl could not "just be friends" with a guy. So all emotions that I felt toward Jamal I assumed had to be romantic. When discussing this with some of my girlfriends at school, one decided to tell Jamal I wanted to pork him. This mortified me. First, I had no idea what porking someone meant, only that it must have some sexual context. Second, I hated the idea of Jamal thinking that I wanted to be romantically involved in any way, as the idea repulsed me (see the previous description of my sensory issues with spit in Let's Talk About Sense, Baby). I immediately confronted Jamal and told him that what my girlfriend had told him was completely false. It ruined any budding friendship we had with each other.
The second time I truly remember experiencing a dissonance about what love is, was my first crush and, ultimately, an intense hyper-fixation on a person (instead of a thing). Let's call this person Luka. Luka was aesthetically pleasing to me. I liked the way he looked. His hair, in particular, fascinated me. And his facial features were soft in a way that made me comfortable. I became obsessed with being near him at every moment I could, and the more we interacted, the more I realized we had a lot of things we liked in common. My journals around this time are full of my analysis of how I felt toward him because I can assure you I did not feel any romantic feelings toward him. Still, I was in constant conflict because everyone around me informed me that I did. When you don't understand your feelings on any level that others do, I can assure you that you believe what everyone around you says. This obsession culminated in Luka spending a day at my house, where we played video games. I had so much fun, but also felt repulsed by the idea of him touching me. This encounter left me feeling like I couldn't have a friendship with him, especially since I also had religious teachings telling me not to get close to people of the opposite sex or a different faith.
When I was 16-17 years old (oh my goodness, was I that young?) I decided I wanted to be a computer programmer. Thus in grade 11, I took a range of electronics and computer programming courses, where I was one of two girls or the only one in the class. At that age, I was skinny, looked like the epitome of snow white (long dark hair, skin as white as snow, piercing blue eyes) and was extremely attractive to the opposite sex (despite my belief that I was fat and ugly). This spins the tale of being the pawn in a few of my fellow students' manipulative games. I can assure you it wasn't until a few months ago that I realized that these people were heavily preying on my alexithymia. Let's call these players Irvine and Gordon. As I was learning to program, I was all about making websites (this was the early aughts). I had a dragon adoption website with an about me page that I had extensively listed all of the things I was interested in. Irvine was secretly stalking me online in the hopes of winning my affection in real life. I was completely oblivious to this. I had no intention of befriending any of the boys in my classes. As a female programmer, I had a lot to prove and being tangled up in some relationships with them was not interesting.
Gordon liked me, and to manipulate my affection towards him, he used his information about Irvine stalking me online to ease me away from Irvine and into his good graces. After discovering that Irvine was stalking me online, I avoided him as much as possible, and Gordon came to my aid as a protective shield. Gordon was in a relationship with a girl we will call Betsy, so I didn't realize that Gordon had any feelings toward me. Over time, Gordon began to organize situations where we would be alone. The one I particularly remember was when we drove together to his house to grab some film equipment, and he told me that he had ended things with Betsy because he liked me. I informed him that I did not return the feelings. This somehow did not dissuade Gordon because, as I have come to learn, people don't believe me when I tell them things regarding how I feel about men (we'll get to that). After a few months of this sensitive soul hanging around me, I started to feel something towards him. However, having just been baptized and devoted my life to my religion, I informed Gordon that there was no possible way we could ever be together because he had stated in one of our conversations that every time I talked about my religion, he wanted to tell me how wrong I was. Despite this conversation, Gordon had wormed his way into my emotions, and I truly felt I was in love with him. He continued to prey on my emotional upheaval, regardless of the directness of my words telling him I didn't want a relationship.
In my grade 12 year, after he had graduated, he came back to the school and told me he still loved me. As an extreme empath that had been manipulated subtly over the past year, I felt that I loved him too and remember hugging him while telling him that it was our final goodbye. After that, in an attempt to cause me pain for rejecting him, he slept with my best friend. Even after that, my alexithymia made me unable to continue to hate him or my friend, and I felt incapable of loving anyone after that "relationship" ended.
During this same period, the only relationship that I felt I had real feelings for was with my best friend, who I will call Kivessa. At this point in my life, I didn't understand what philia love entailed. I didn't understand that you could love a person as intensely as I loved Kivessa and it not be romantic. I was struggling with the idea that I might be a lesbian, and as I said, I had just dedicated my life to my religion and being a lesbian was not an option. I felt I was burying myself deeper below this mask I had built. Kivessa also had a long-time boyfriend, and the late 90s/early aughts were not known for being very friendly towards the LGTBQ+ community, at least not that I had been exposed to. Regardless, after Kivessa slept with Gordon, despite being unable to remain mad at either of them, my relationship with her seemed to taper off slowly until we were not as close as we had been during our high school years.
Near the end of my grade 12 year, I had my one and only boyfriend who we will call Howie. Howie checked my boxes of same religion and same interests. So I was confused why it felt so forced for me. I didn't like having to check in with someone to see if we had plans before I could do anything. I also had my one and only kiss with him and hated it. Everyone told me I'd get over my aversion to saliva when I met someone I liked, but I didn't and still haven't. I learned valuable things from my time with Howie, that I didn't like having to check in with someone and I was never going to like kissing, hand holding, or being touched in general.
My confusion over love and gender continued until my 30s.
After high school, I became close with another friend we'll call Miles. Now Miles has mental health issues, so I'm not sure how much of the manipulation that he used on me was related to that and how much was just because he knew it would work on me.
Miles knew that I was devoted to my religion, and we were never really super close during high school. But after high school, Miles used my religion to get closer to me. He used a few things to make me feel obligated to continue my friendship with him: 1) he told me that I had saved him from committing suicide, 2) he started studying to become part of my religion, 3) he used the hurtful things his other girlfriends had done to him to show how vulnerable he was being around me, 4) he often told me he felt I didn't like him and I constantly had to prove I did, 5) he would buy my things all the time, or buy things for himself and leave them at my house to use when he came over.
Miles was my friend for over 20 years until the day I moved away from my hometown for a job. When I moved, he said I abandoned him, and he refused to remain my friend. It was painful and part of a pattern of people constantly leaving me. He even convinced one of my best friends that I had left and abandoned her; our relationship barely survived this.
As much as I enjoyed spending time with Miles, I had to, on several occasions, have a very straightforward talk that I had no romantic feelings whatsoever regarding him. I thought we were clear on this, but there were many times when it was apparent he was just waiting for my resolve to wear down and come to a movie-like ending where I finally realized I was madly in love with him. He often told me how his mom talked about marriage concerning me, he often "jokingly" talked about dreams he had where we were married, and he often did things that were inappropriate for a man who has feelings for a woman to do, such as backrubs that he would stop as soon as someone else walked into the room. I was completely oblivious to the fact that he was just waiting for me to finally admit I loved him because let's face it, I'm autistic, don't understand subtle cues, and thought I had very clearly told him what our relationship was.
It was when he started treating me like we were already married that I started to get uncomfortable with our relationship. He started leaving his items at my home, cups, clothes, video games, etc. He would freak out if we didn't communicate at least by phone every single day (the first time that he did this was the day I realized that we did talk every day and that was not okay with me). He would get extremely upset if I made plans without him (these were the times when he would manipulate me by telling me he thought I hated him). He hated when I made decisions about how I changed things in my house without asking him first (we did not live near each other). I was not okay with any of this. Still, during my friendship with him, I had come to finally understand that there was a love involving friends that could be an intense a bond as romantic love, because of the Kingdom Hearts game series, in particular Kingdom Hearts 2.8 (the philia love that Riku displays towards Sora made me understand philia in a way I had not understood before. My pathway to understanding different types of love came first with the show Cardcaptor Sakura. Still, it wasn't until Kingdom Hearts 2.8 and playing the game as these characters that I understood the power of philia love). This understanding of philia made me intensely loyal to Miles because I loved him with all my heart. He was one of my best friends, and I loved being with him. His betrayal of 20 years of friendship because I moved to a different town was devastating and heartbreaking because I realized that he only had eros love for me and not philia at all.
This led me to finally understand myself as an aromantic asexual being. After understanding philia love finally after 30+ years of life, I realized that the only two relationships I have ever experienced intense love for were philia love. I have no desire to be sexual with a person (my hypersensitivity has made sexual experiences intensely painful for me, so sex is interlaced with pain and always will be for me and not in a sexy masochistic way, but a loathsome way). I have no desire to be romantic with someone (saliva-sharing and touching make me want to die inside). So it was with great relief that I was presented with words that fit how I feel: Aromantic Asexual. Much like finding out I was autistic gave me the vocabulary to understand my lived experience, aromantic asexual is a beautiful way to describe the only relationships I want to have with a dear friend or a close family member.