What does it feel like to have an aromantic crush?
So this is a weird question. Aromantic people don’t get crushes. We don’t experience romantic attraction, and a crush is, by definition, feeling romantic attraction towards another person.
We do get other kinds of attraction feelings, though. A squish is a platonic attraction to someone, the “oh my god this person is so cool and has the same interests as me I need to be their best friend” feeling. There’s also lush, which is a sensual attraction towards a person. It’s harder to define since everyone’s definition of what is sensual v. sexual is different, but it’s usually the “I want to spend as much time as possible in physical contact with this person”. If you experience queerplatonic attraction you might get a plush, which is a desire to form a qpr with the person. There’s also smush, for sexual attraction if you’re gray-ace or allosexual
(Edit: I cut “swish” out since I’ve been told it’s a slur - Mod Alice) ((personally I believe this was someone mistaking swish as some kind of slur for a sex worker, possibly due to confusion over SWERFs being a thing on this site and ‘sw’ being an accepted way to refer to sex work without using words that might get your post filtered? I have found no evidence that swish is actually a slur for anything but have left the edit in for less confusion - Mod Meg))
Feelings of attraction vary from person to person. I’m gray aromantic so I do occasionally experience crushes. For me it’s a combination sort of of a lush and a squish. I want to spend tons of time with the person, and usually I want there to be kissing since for me kissing is a romance behavior. More often though I just get squishes or plushes. I’ll meet someone knew and get really impressed with something and then *bam*, I am suddenly desperate to be considered their friend. I had a discord friend come to visit me specifically and I about died because I had such an intense squish on him.
This got kind of rambly. I hope I at least answered your question some! If any of the other mods want to add on to this, or if you want me to elaborate more or something, feel free to!
- Mod Meg