As an aplatonic person, one of the most frustrating aspects of amatonormativity for me is that there is a normalized, consent-based social script for navigating the commitment and intensity of a romantic relationship, and there is no equivalent for platonic relationships.
For romantic relationships we have:
Casual dating, where you're expected to be getting to know one another and it's understood that the relationship could end at any time.
Formal dating/"Going steady", where you've acknowledge that you have a bond that you are interested in pursuing and you want to spend significant time with one another.
Engagement, where you're actively working to enmesh your lives completely, and are expected to be interested in one another as people and supportive to one another through serious difficulties.
Marriage/partnering, where you have formally intertwined your lives and have an expectation that this will be a permanent, continuous relationship based on mutual interest and mutual caretaking.
And every time you want to "go up a level" in a romantic relationship, the expectation is that you actively ask the other person, and get their consent. There is (ideally) no confusion about what the other person expects from you in terms of commitment and intensity of your relationship.
Friendships don't have that.
Which means that instead of a consent-based checkpoint for going up "levels" of friendship, you just have to try to figure out where you stand based on vibes. And there's no way to tell if there's a mismatch of expectation until someone makes a mis-step.
And there's no socially appropriate/expected way to navigate friendship rejection either.
It's totally normal in a romantic relationship to say "I'm not interested in/ready for that kind of commitment" but when you have to handle a friendship the same way, the person being rejected is often scandalized because they had no clue you had a mismatch, and they have no socially appropriate way of expressing the grief of a friendship rejection.
I hate that romantic relationships are put on this pedastal and socially regarded as worth formalizing with consent, whereas everything about friendship has to be based on vibes and intuition.
