#but i haven't really noticed people talking about how qprs are kinda used sometimes as an extension

[contagious-watermelon]

is it just me or have qprs become the nonbinary of relationship types: they originally described a much-needed in-between/outside-of type of experience, but now people have forced them into a strict box that sort of defeats the purpose of the descriptor in the first place

like, there are tons of posts out there bemoaning the creation of a gender trinary / reinventing the binary when it comes to how people treat nonbinary gender — and I'm not nonbinary, so i probably wouldn't be able to describe all the nuances with that as accurately as if i were, but it does feel very similar to how people often discuss qprs —

to me it seems that people have gotten in their heads the concept of a new kind of relationship, in addition to platonic, romantic and/or sexual. but instead of taking it as "some people find this to be useful to describe their relationship dynamic. some do not. all of these people may have very similar or very different relationships; what's important is how the people inside the relationship think of it, rather than how it looks to outsiders," people have added it to the list of relationships and treat it the same way they do the others, in an amatonormative way.

(and note — I've gotten that description of a qpr from reading aromantic stuff online. so it's not like an all-consuming type issue, I'm not parading myself as the sole voice of reason or anything, i just think the view I've seen expressed and paraphrased above should be a lot more common and accessible. bc in my experience it hasnt been, enough)

like, as an example of what I'm talking about: i often see an aro person expressing their difficulties with feeling alone/lonely because they can't or don't want to do romance, and that they wish friendships were taken more seriously — and then the person they're complaining to says something along the lines of "yeah, it really sucks that people prioritize romance so much. but also, have you thought about a qpr?" as if it's some sort of catch-all solution, or romance substitute for lonely aros.

and i know I'm by far not the first person to say this, but people seem to have just reshuffled the relationship hierarchy rather than throwing it out entirely. romance is still on the top, but since you probably don't do that if you're aro, you can have the next best thing, which is a qpr. and then after that is friendship (see: definitions of qprs which imply that friends can't get married, live together, have sex, etc). when really ofc the goal should be relationship anarchy, with none of those relationships being inherently more intimate or serious than any of the others

and i think that is people's goal; it's in human nature, i think, to like things to be in little orderly boxes, with nothing too complicated not to fit within a label and everything completely describable with a few pithy words. I'm guilty of that too, obviously (autistic brain like categorizing), but i think it's detrimental to our ability to actually make any progress dismantling the whole amatonormativity thing, if we just set up a new system that's slightly nicer to all the aros who want and can find a qpr.

[mcrmadness]

A funny thing I noticed today as I was working on a fanfiction of mine.

This is just my random deep thoughts about aspec and attraction in general cos my aroace ass doesn't have a clue of anything as usual.

So, I always struggle more or less with how to write any kinds of relationships because I am aromantic and asexual, and I guess you could say I also believe in "relationship anarchy", and on top of all that I'm also a loveless aro.

What all that means to me:

I don't experience romantic nor sexual attraction at all.

I don't know if I experience platonic attraction. Maybe? It depends on whom you ask, because some say it's about QPRs and some say it's about whether one feels the need to have friends or not. I do, but I don't know where's the line between platonic attraction and just naturally learning to know people and getting along with some better than with others.

I am sex-repulsed, romance-repulsed and very touch-averse. However, I no longer believe that certain acts are inherently sexual or romantic only. I believe everyone can define what they mean to THEM and THEIR relationships and friendships, but no one can define those for OTHER PEOPLE. But because I am pretty much repulsed by all kinds of physical touch, physical intimacy is not part of any friendships of mine, this doesn't really concern me.

And this takes us to the fanfiction writing part. All three - platonic, romantic and sexual - are pretty much a grey area for me. I don't know how they differ from each other. In a way I can try to imagine that and I think I sometimes might even understand all this better when I write about two people in some kind of a relationship (might be an QRP, I haven't wanted to give it a name tbh), but still I do not know if I'm getting even close to what it is like for allos. All I can do is guess.

Before I thought the difference is exactly in what kinds of actions are allowed in which kind of a relationship, but since I have abandoned the idea that e.g. platonic friends can't hug or kiss without my mind going "they can't be JUST friends!!!", now I'm just left with... nothing. My previous understanding was just the rules of amatonormativity and society's standards, what I just grew up to believe because you possibly could, and still can't, watch or read (or play) almost any kind of media without it eventually shoving these ideas into your face as the only truth.

The attraction part - I still don't understand how allo brains do that, it's still such a "seems fake but okay" moment to me every single time allos show symptoms of attraction towards someone they don't even know. This is why I understand the demi way of attraction so much better! It just makes sense to me that you'd develop other types of feelings only after knowing the person well and for a long(er) time. Even tho I don't think I'd be demi, I'm too romance-repulsed (and sex-repulsed) and touch-averse for that in general, but just the overall idea just makes more sense to me.

Today I was writing something and I was kinda analyzing my own writing at the same time. The characters often take the reins and I just write what they do, but I don't necessarily understand what they do or why they do that. I don't know if it's confusing to someone who might have experience on those things - I mean I don't have. I had typical school time crushes but I think they were mostly aesthetic + just me wanting to do what others did too -> have a crush so I can talk about a crush with a friend so we band bond over crushes. I believe it's an ADHD thing, it's no different from me seeing someone drawing and me starting to draw because it just made me want to draw. Or when people talk about writing. I also want to talk about writing! So when as pre-teen and teen my friends had crushes, I also wanted to have a crush.

Needless to say, my last crush I had when I was 16, and that lasted for 3 years (started when I was 13) and I never even talked to this person. Just felt like running away screaming if they even saw me. After that I had fictional crushes cos they could not show "feelings" back. I think those were either platonic crushes, or my antidepressants just messing up with my head so much it affected even that part of my brain.

Hm, I got distracted. I was trying to say that after analyzing my texts, I realized that I actually have two moods for... some... attraction. I don't know how to call that. But I am writing about two people who are not aro nor ace, so I am not even trying to make them aro nor ace. One of them has slight vibes but not enough that I'd want to touch that part of their identity too much in my stories.

But yeah, I realized that these two characters, when they've just learnt to know each other, they kinda develop some sort of crush-like feelings. I don't really know what that even is. Basically it's platonic but still not (leaning slightly towards romantic/sexual attraction sometimes). And then much much later, it's still there but now it feels different? I still can't explain it, because I literally cannot feel it myself, but I can use empathy for imagining what that feels like but I still don't... comprehend a single thing about it. All I know is that it feels, or has different vibes, between those two scenes despite the setting basically being still the exact same. There just are so many years between those two scenes.

This is where I got the eureka moment today, as I started wondering that is the first one basically the way allos experience attraction, and the second one closer to how demis experience attraction? At least it would make more sense to me, EVEN THO it's about the same two characters so it's a bit funny that they'd have both the allo and demi brain lmao. But like I said, I myself don't have any experience, and even imagining anything myself is really difficult because I _don't experience attraction (aesthetic to some extent, but I'm really low even on that), and I have no clue how can you tell different forms of attraction apart from each other when you haven't even felt majority of them ever.

Okay, I guess this is enough deep thoughts for today.