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brushing your hair, aroace style. holding your hand, aroace style. leaning on you, aroace style. laughing with you, aroace style. cuddling while going to sleep, aroace style. braiding your hair, aroace style. dinner together, aroace style. long hugs, aroace style. inside jokes, aroace style. "babe, love, dear," aroace style. making fun of things together, aroace style. giggling at three am, aroace style. driving to see you, or you see me, aroace style. meeting each other's friends, aroace style. meeting important people in your life, aroace style. dropping off a coffee while at work, aroace style. opening the car door for you, aroace style. comforting hand on knees, shoulders, head, back, aroace style. sleepy drives, aroace style. "I have ibuprofen," aroace style. "don't forget your meds," aroace style.

platonic swag, if you will.

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Smile at strangers , kiss your friends

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oh wow thanks for the throwback

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I crave platonic love with you:

Watching you play video games while I lay on your bed and hyping you up. Going grocery shopping together and laughing at a bad pun in the spice aisle. Napping in each other’s arms. Sending each other memes even when we're sitting in the same room. The soft glances whenever we pass by each other. Cuddling while watching a movie. Having a cup of tea or coffee on a chill morning. Just being the best of friends in ways that defies the usual bounds of friendship 💖

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The aromantic feeling of wanting to spend the rest of my life with my friend, living together and growing old together but not being married or doing any of that romantic shit but we are together in the sense that they are my person and I’m there’s but again, not in a romantic way

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qpr culture is this:

(not quite sure if I should tag them on this or not seeing I got the photo off Pinterest)

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there's such a reality about being the aroace friend and seeing all of your friends start having relationships they invest their entire souls in and sitting back and wondering 'when are they going to forget about me' and then overcompensating to keep everyone together and act like everything is fine.

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been going a little bit insane about this sentence from Ace by Angela Chen for the past week

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saw this card today, shoutout fellow aros and/or aces!!

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“i love being aromantic” i say as i feel my chest cavity rotting from the inside at the unquenchable desire for love in a way that is truly a secret third thing but its not a secret i want to keep it is a secret nobody is willing to listen to and im trapped in a state of isolation of my own making because no matter how much love i have to give it will never be enough. it will never be enough. it will never be enough.

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liking someone platonically is so embarrassing like. yeah i admire you. yeah i think about you all the time. yeah i look forward to every time i see you even if it's only for a minute. yeah it's all platonic and yeah i couldn't explain this because it'd sound romantic. fucking hell

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so i guess a mini update to the 0 people reading

i did come out as aro-ace to my 2 closest friends, as much as i love one of them, fuck we lived together and i would happily spend many more years of my life living with them

i did initially plan to only tell one of you.

i don’t know how it became this way, i couldn’t even with a gun to my head explain how i became so open with you.

i swore to myself i wouldn’t let anyone that close, i wouldnt give them enough information to use it as a way to get to close to me, as a means to manipulate me with.

and yet. it hadn’t even been 2 weeks since barely meeting you, my first real interaction being while i was drunk at a party. and i called you, with tears in my eyes as i cried over my mother like i had to my abuser, having given her all the ammunition to manipulate me, i called you. ‘with a simple question, do you have any tissues?’

i was less a block from my place, i could’ve walked home, confronted my roommates questions but cried in relative peace.

but something, i don’t even know what, something in me pushed me to call you to ask for a spare tissue as i stood outside your building. even when you apologized for not being home, i continued on.

i couldn’t tell you why i did that. but i did.

i may have taken most of my life to realize i was aro-ace but i knew it took me getting to know someone to truly let them in, to truly love them. and yet. you were the only person in my whole life i truly think i loved upon first meeting

it took me a while, i didn’t quite realize i was aro at the time. i placed my lack of romantic attraction on my trauma, that may still be the cause, but back then i hadn’t really accepted the label.

i thought maybe i did love you, maybe in a romantic way, just a very respectful distanced way, where even so much as holding your hand was only an occasional desire. everything else i took as platonic, even if i couldn’t bring myself to lean on let alone want to cuddle with any other platonic relationship.

i let myself assume it was cause i loved you. and, in a way it did i guess. but in a queer platonic way.

i could see myself spending the rest of my life with you, but as a roommate, a coparent.

someone who orbited you like a moon as your world was centered around your partner like they were the sun.

a small piece that seemed mostly insignificant but needed your grounding presence as much as the earth needs the moon to control the uncontrollable presence of the seas

but how do i tell you that. someone who has a community to lean on, a partner who you see the rest of your life with

you have so much to rely on, so a solar system of your own to lean on and orbit with

but you’re what i would build my entire galaxy around, you’re the center of my universe but i know im only a star you see at night when you care to look

how could it possibly be fair to tell you you’re the center of my universe, the reason i push to better myself, what pushes me to become better, the reason i pursue what i truly want and not just the expectations placed on me, that you’re the reason i’ve grown into a true version of myself and not the expectations placed on me.

you’re my everything, i would give almost anything to tell you just how much you mean to me and how i truly feel about you

but i don’t know that im willing to give our relationship up to tell you

you’ve told me how many relationships of yours you grew distant to because of their feelings towards you

i dont know that i can lose the center of my universe just to be honest with you

id rather live and die knowing i never got all i wanted and needed out of a relationship with you than to lose you and what we have

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do you ever think about dead versions of yourself that are fossilized in someone else's mind

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I've been feeling my friends pulling away from me for about a year now.

It started when we all made plans together, and the week of, I was asked if a specific person would be coming. When I said they weren't, this friend responded, 'Oh, I just assumed you'd go to this event with them. The rest of us made these plans to go months ago.'

It felt like a slap in the face, everyone had watched me struggle to coordinate a weekend, and when we finally set a time, being told that i was actually an unplanned addition and that they always intended to go without me and had planned to just send me off with someone else, so they could pretend like i wasn't there.

Then my roommate graduated, and my closest friend abroad the next semester. That was a lonely next semester, and I was never asked to hang out with people after rehearsal, invited over on the weekend, or generally wanted.

But maybe everyone was trying to be respectful of how busy I was.

But I was told the day after Valentine's Day, my friends had decided they didn't like me, I never got a concrete reason. It was hard to ignore all the signs once they'd been pointed out to me. But maybe I was just seeing patterns that weren't there, maybe I was getting everything wrong again.

My closest friend said I was being self-destructive, isolating myself, and pulling away to keep things from blowing up.

That's true, but it's easy to say you can't pull away when you weren't blamed for someone attempting to take their life after you tried to resolve a conflict in a friend group. It's easy to say you can't take the easy way out when you weren't blamed for their attempt, had the blame placed on you by your own mother.

Why would I want to open the conversation when the last time I tried I watched them swing at the locker in front of me, getting yelled at, blamed for not telling them sooner that their partner wanted to break up with them, and their partner blamed you for blowing things up, it didn't matter that I was crying in a corner being pushed to tell them why their partner was pulling away, being jabbed at saying you know, you know why and if you don't tell me you're as bad as the rest of them. And after all of that, watching all the abuse, and trying to pull away from them, being blamed for their attempt. It didn't end there. When I went back to my friend to confide in someone I trusted about everything that had happened, I got told it was my fault for being manipulated. If I weren't so soft, if I weren't so feminine, if I hadn't smiled or made conversation with them, then they wouldn't have thought I was someone they could use.

It took so much for me to rebuild that broken kid, it took moving schools, harming myself, and a fucking global pandemic to force me to isolate away from the rest of the world. Being handed a fresh slate when quarantine ended, a chance to start over where no one knew me as the transfer, the transfer who would bite if anyone got too close.

But I don't know that I can handle being broken like that again, it took the world nearly ending for me to rebuild myself instead of building walls.

I know you said our friendship doesn't depend on what I choose to do now, that you wouldn't think less of me, that you weren't trying to pressure me.

But I know you'd never forget or forgive me for making the wrong decision, for choosing to hide away, for taking the easy way out.

But I can't help but think of that kid, the kid whose mom was in the hospital, being told by her grandmother to take care of her brother and father as the woman of the house, the kid who felt like the ground was falling from under her. The kid who got offered a lifeline by someone with bad intentions, the kid who accepted the company of a liar, a manipulator, an abuser. The kid who got blamed by her mother for leading them on by acting like their friend and then trying to leave, the kid who got blamed by her friend. The kid who was broken down so badly they tried to rebuild themself, trying too hard to avoid being manipulated, that she began presenting masculine and considering never using feminine pronouns to avoid being seen as someone that could be used. The kid who turned to self-harm as a means of control. The kid who only rebuilt themself in the isolation of quarantine and came out to a new city with a chance at truly restarting as the healed older version of that kid.

That kid, she's who I think of when making this decision, I know she would've done it, I want to make the right decision this time around for her.

I know friends being petty and pulling away isn't nearly on the same scale, but everything in me is screaming to pull away to avoid having to endure that again.

But I don't know if you can forgive me for pulling away, either I disappoint that kid or I disappoint you, and I don't know who I'm more afraid of disappointing.

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did i ever tell you that i bought a coffee table for you, sure it’s in my living room, effectively mine, but i bought it for you

when i was alone while you were gone the emptiness didnt bother me, but when i thought maybe id have you over, the emptiness in my apartment bothered me

i bought a coffee table, thinking when you came we could play games on it, it’s for holding drinks on all the coasters i own, i bought games i know you all play, so i could host us, i own multiple places to sit for everyone to have a space for when they come over, i pushed my couch and television into places that could host people for movie nights

ive only had guests over once, even when i offer my place no one comes, or they offer their own

this coffee table i bought with you in mind, the coffee table i bought for all my friends to sit around feels like a reminder of how no one wants to be in my space. no matter how much i dress it up, no matter how much i bake and offer if someone would come over. no one wants to be in my space

i’ve spent every night ive lived here alone, never the person people want to see, never the place people want to go

but did you know, that table i bump into and bruise myself on, i bought it for you