I used to be romantic but now feel aromantic

[caedar]

Hello, everyone. I'm feeling very confused, and this seems like the perfect place to talk about those confusions.

My first two relationships were both long-term, three to four years. I remember falling deeply in love and sustaining that love into something deep and meaningful. The second of these relationships ended a few years ago, a short while before I got a chronic pain condition. This condition changed my life significantly, mostly in that I now feel extremely independent and guard my time and space carefully, especially because I also run a business.

Over the past few years, I've gone on dozens of dates and have been in a few relationships, but none have lasted more than six months or so. Here's the main reason they haven't lasted long: I feel neither the burst of limerence common early on, nor the deep, abiding endearment later for longer than a brief, rare moment. Instead, most of the time I feel like the attachment of a relationship is a burden. I look into the woman's eyes and, most of the time, feel nothing. Mostly I just want to go back to doing my own thing and living my own life.

I'm not afraid to be vulnerable and share my flaws and fears, but I feel awkward and guilty when someone starts falling in love with me. Telling the person that I'm very protective of my time and space doesn't help, and neither does saying that it takes a while for me to connect deeply. I feel guilty because I don't feel capable of falling in love anymore; I feel like a fraud, liar, and imposter.

I still do social things, I still feel deep affection for my friends, I still feel very thankful that people who are close to me exist, and those feelings do even bring me to happy tears sometimes. But in the context of a relationship, I just feel like a robot. In fact, I coined the term "robot mode" to try to explain it to my last girlfriend. It's frustrating because deep down, intellectually, the idea of a relationship is still appealing, and love songs and stories still tug at my heart, but the reality of loving someone feels impossible and the reality of being in a relationship feels wrong. I think I've been in the last few relationships because I've wanted to see if I could tough through how I feel and maybe reclaim the old way I felt love, but that doesn't seem possible. I'm starting to come around to the idea that I'm just, maybe, aromantic.

Have you aromantics felt the same way your whole life, or have any of you had similar experiences to me, where your ability to feel love shifts over time?

[Phantasmal Fingers]

No, I haven't. But some people are fluid. Looks like you've changed.

It's interesting that you're nostalgic for a time when you were in love. From what I can gather what troubles you is not that you're nostalgic for the people who were the objects of your affection, but rather for the state of being in love with them which you experienced at that time? If so, and on reflection, do you think there's any narcissism going on here?

Maybe there was something left unsaid/unthought/undone which is why you now feel the need to revisit that state of affairs? Is any relationship ever really finished? (I wouldn't know, I've never had one.)

But you've moved on. Except you haven't...

If there was a you that used to fall in love, who is it now who feels nostalgic for that? Has the person you are now arisen since the time when you used to fall in love and replaced that person you used to be? Or was the aromantic you (the person you now perceive yourself to be) lurking in the shadows all along? Which is, perhaps, why you now feel guilty?

Where did "robot mode" come from? From inside, so to speak, the you who fell in love? Or somewhere/someone else?

In other words, are the nostalgic you and the guilty you really two sides of the same person? So at the moment the previously hidden side is now visible - and vice-versa?

Are you Jekyll or Hyde? Is one of these people a memory of a you who no longer is? Or are you Jekyll and Hyde?

Hmmmmmm........

You've reminded me of a something by Pessoa I once read called The Book of Disquiet​.