I think people put too much weight on romantic love, maybe because I don’t feel it, but I find I’m at constant war with myself over whether I like the idea of it or hate it. People write about it like it’s more important than family, then friends, then everything, like you can spend your life with your people, have their absolute love and devotion, but because it isn’t romantic it’s worth less.
Fanfiction always seems to put romantic attraction first, “I love my family, but X is more important than them and I’ll betray them/leave them/hurt them for X.”
There’s circumstances I know, where people aren’t close with their family or xyz.
But I’ve known my best friend for 17 of my 22 years of life, she’s basically a sister, and I mean less than her boyfriend?
I’ve known my sister my whole damn life, but she wants to spend time with her partner more than with me? To talk to them more? See them more often? When I would very well do anything for her?
My father would rather preserve his wife’s happiness, her peace, her family dynamics, more than mine?
When there is no one more important to me than them?
That hurts. I don’t like that my standing in other people’s lives is lesser because I’m not someone they sleep with/next to/whatever.
That it’s expected that one day I won’t mean as much to them because they found someone to fill that illustrious hole in their heart??
That’s fucking bullshit. Media is obsessed with romantic love, the hero has a lover, an interest, always. Or they’re a child.
I’m not a child. The wiki articles for aromantic characters is stark, remarkably empty. Even just… characters that you can speculate about without changing the canon narrative.
I’m reading a fanfiction right now, and the main character is injured and her love interest notices her before his own family, who is dying in a bid to protect her because “he can live without me, he can’t without you”
She has to tell him for him to notice? That’s pathetic, it’s disloyal, it feels obsessive and unhealthy. And I know media isn’t reality, but honestly the narrative is the same.
One day I’ll find someone who will fix me and make me fall in live and I’ll just get it? I don’t need fixing, there’s nothing wrong with me, my ties are strong, my loyalty isn’t so shaky that good sex and emotional dependency with fuck with them. Why is it that I can’t say that the people who mean everything to me feel the same?
My father says I’m the most important thing in his life, funny that my word meant nothing, my feelings meant nothing, when he was married to a woman he can’t even say the name of without vitriol now.
My sister says I’m her favorite person, that nothing will ever change that, but a boyfriend means I don’t get a response to a text, a call, that I don’t hear from her except about him for weeks?
Am I so unimportant? I don’t think I’m the one that’s fucked up there.
