Is it normal for romance to not feel natural?

[Galactic Turtle]

Hello humans.

 

So while growing up when friends or family asked if I was open to dating I'd always say I didn't know but that hypothetically if I were to date maybe six months to a year into the relationship we could hold hands then two years after that we could kiss then three years after that marriage would depend on how well the man did during that 5-6 year trial period. They'd laugh at me and sex would never be brought up. At that point in my life the romantic relationships of my peers would rarely last more than four months. I was puzzled by the way my friends would act when they had crushes on someone but wasn't overly bothered by it since it was never really the center of daily conversation. There were only two people in high school who tried to seriously pursue me. The first one was too scared to do more than awkwardly try to sit next to me during our co-ed music classes and the second one tried to spread this rumor that I shut down by screaming something about setting his guitars on fire, feeding his dog's intestines to the school fish, and impaling him on the garden fence if he dared to ever spread lies about me again. It's a miracle I wasn't expelled.  My parents assumed I just wasn't a fan of the teenage methods of courtship. To get people off my back I pointed to my favorite member in a boyband and called him my husband. It didn't feel right saying that but I did anyway because it seemed like that was what was expected since it was normal for a girl my age to have a celebrity crush.

 

When I got dropped off at college freshman year I promised my parents that I'd be open to dating as if just by saying that I could activate whatever it was in my brain that didn't get the memo in middle or high school. There ended up being a man who I did consider to be handsome though I was shocked when he started to flirt with me. I wasn't giddy about it like my friends always were. We got along well, he didn't mock me for my interests, and he dressed decently. I feel like we could've been really good friends but I jumped right over that step and spent weeks trying to picture myself kissing him because that's what was expected, my older sister even confirmed it. I thought that if a boy his age (he was a few years older than me) asked me out on a date and I said yes, he would buy me dinner then I would have to kiss him. During the time he was flirting with me I became aware of the fact that people in relationships who were my age had sex. I became aware that this person in front of me who could be my friend wanted to have sex with me and that in the real world waiting six months to a year just to hold hands seemed completely unheard of and sacrificing a kiss just for dinner was a child's fantasy... even children didn't view kissing someone as a sacrifice.

 

It made me feel very out of place in the world of romance. The next person after that responded to rejection with violence which made me feel even worse. I changed the way I dressed and started looking at the ground whenever I was walking to places. Arranged meetings with boys set up by my parents made me feel like I had a price tag on my head. I avoided leaving my apartment unless it was to go to work. The stories I wrote while growing up never contained romance. Groups of friends lived together and worked together. They were the emotional support for each other. Their hearts would break when that strong bond of friendship was broken by something like betrayal. Romance never occurred to me as being part of the natural progression of life. That concept was hammered and enforced more as I got older. Now my friends are getting married or moving in to live with their boyfriends. I don't see many of them as much as I used to. Still I don't want to have a boyfriend but I go on dating sites because I'm expected to have one. It feels like I'm playing the part of a real woman instead of being one myself.

 

QUESTION: I think it's a stretch to say I'm aromantic, but I was wondering if maybe people felt similarly to me but perhaps romance snuck up on you later in life anyway?

[Prufrock, but like, worse]

My story is one more of confusion than of trauma, but similar.

 

I knew about the existence of dating from books and TV, and the existence of romance from similar, but I never associated the two. Maybe because I was only exposed to the Disney and older Hollywood "love at first sight" stuff. I really didn't understand what was so special about going to a restaurant that people got so worked up about it. Yeah! Eating food with someone you know from school! It's not like that happens every day at lunch!

 

In my infinite naive humblehubris I assumed it was just too complex a concept for me but I would understand when I got older.

 

That theory worked until middle school when my peers actually started "dating." I'm disinclined to believe that twelve-year-olds were fucking each other, but in some way it wouldn't surprise me either. I didn't understand where this impulse came from, or how they knew the rules. Presumably, like me, they learned from TV, but I still don't get how they understood the significance of those scenes. My alternate theory was that it came from "The Talk" which I never got (I got "The Book" which I refused to read.) And, everyone around me was talking sex (including the ludicrous "my penis is 8 feet long" type stuff from certain corners.) What I concluded from that was that everyone wanted me to want sex and have it, yes at age 12. I had the dubious advantage of being ugly, nerdy and male, so nobody ever approached me, thank the dark powers.

 

I never did try dating because I had massive moral qualms with the not-splitting-the-bill thing. I brought this up to a friend, years later, when being slightly subversive was less of a nuke-to-the-face affair, and he all but called me a misogynist for that view, and that seems to be general social consensus as well, so just ban me already.

 

Slowly, slowly, I uncovered more of the "rules" by overhearing others' conversations that I could never participate in, and learned not only was it even more tightly constrained and prescribed than I thought, but it was a massive faux pas to not know one of the rules. Yet, I never learned the rules, and everyone seems to have picked them up from somewhere.

 

I still felt some kind of loneliness, and a longing for the kind of emotional intimacy generally portrayed as a part of romantic relationships, but I got more and more jaded as I realized that I could never achieve that within the framework of rules (mostly "men can't have feelings, and if they are visibly upset they deserve to be made to feel worse" and "YOU MUST LIKE SPORTS AND FOLLOW ALL TRENDS" but many many other examples abound and I have to leave in 2 minutes.) That's why I've been so incessant at wanting to know a more exact definition of romance, because I want to know if the thing I want falls under that umbrella or not, and whether there is any sort of hope for that kind of connection.

 

Sorry to hijack your thread with my life story. That's been my experience with unnatural-seeming romance.

[Anthracite_Impreza]

From what you wrote you seem textbook aro to me. I never attempted to date because I was never interested, but the lack of romance as 'natural' is very familiar to me. I thought about calling Clutch my partner several times but to this day my hackles raise at the idea. Romance just isn't a thing for me.

[Mychemicalqpr]

I briefly tried to date one of my good friends once before I had my romantic late blooming. I'd never thought about it being romantic until someone else started joking about us being "love birds" and then in my head I was like, "Oh, so this is romantic love?" He had a real crush on me, it turns out, that I'd have never picked up on if he hadn't spelled it out, but I realized I didn't really feel the same way.

 

Point is, in my experience, if you don't naturally think about the possibility of dating on your own, aside from what other people think or want, you're probably not feeling romantic attraction.