#even before i knew i was aroace ppl would assume that my platonic relationships were romantic

[apatheticlexicographer]

People like to talk about how Mike might have never actually liked El at all because his prepubescent puppy crush was actually just comphet, but what I haven’t seen discussed so much is the very real possibility that El never liked him (romantically) either.

When El and Max were clothes shopping in S3, El asked how she was supposed to know what she liked. She didn’t know how to discern her own taste, and this was after about 8 months worth of time where she was, if not integrating into society, at least hanging out with the party. By this point in the show, what things do we actually know that el has decided she likes? When she was with Hopper she listened to whatever records he had and watched whatever was on TV, because her world was so small that she didn’t have the luxury of choice. The only things she seems to have stated a preference for are Mike and Eggos. Mike, one of the first people she ever met outside of the lab, and Eggos, the first food he ever brought her. Now what are the odds that these are actually her favourite things, and that she’s not just imprinting?

We see a lot of this lack of knowledge of what she wants in how she dresses. As a small child, she only wears the hospital gowns that the lab provides her with. Once she breaks out she wears Mike’s clothes and Nancy’s old dress. When she lives with Hopper she wears his old clothes and whatever he brings her. Even when she has her punk makeover she’s just wearing what Kali dressed her up in. She chooses her own clothes while she’s out with Max, and almost immediately after that she breaks up with Mike. Even then, she feels the need to ask Max, as if she expects to be told what she’s supposed to like. In S4 it’s unclear how much of her wardrobe she’s chosen herself, but I’m assuming that the oversized shirts are probably Hopper’s, in which case she’s wearing them because she misses him and not because she actually likes them.

When El and Mike first met they were still small kids, and they knew each other for a grand total of a week. Regardless of what you think his reason for it was, Mike basically decided that their relationship was going to have a romantic context. El didn’t know what that meant! She spent her entire childhood in a laboratory and ended up repressing most of it by the time she escaped. We see in S2 that she likes to watch romance shows on TV, but those aren’t a realistic portrayal of relationships, and they’re likely her only interaction with the concept of romance. Despite apparently having been in a relationship for months, she seems pretty clueless about dating when talking to Max in S3. I’ll bet good money that she saw romcom meet-cutes and, overlaying them over her own experience with Mike, assumed that “love-at-first-sight” relationships were the norm for the general populace.

So here’s El, who’s never been able to consider what it is that she actually wants before, and one of the only people she’s ever met tells her he likes her romantically. Of course she’ll go along with it! Particularly when she sees relationships just like that on TV, because soap operas are her only real window into society for a whole year! She goes along with it because Mike says he likes her, so she assumes that means she must like him too, yet the moment Max prompts her to think about what it is she really wants, she breaks up with him. And then when she returns to the status quo of their relationship, long distance this time, she’s blatantly lying about so much! She’s not thinking about what she wants at all, she’s only considering what it is she thinks Mike wants.

I do think El likes Mike a lot, as a friend, but she’s never even considered their relationship through a platonic lens because she’s been told from the very start that it’s romantic.