I am terrified of people falling in love with me.
I just saw a post that kinda gave an example of how easily some people fall in love. More specifically it said: “Stop playing with my hair. Please. Do you want me to fall in love with you?” And my first thought was about how I would react to that, about how I would stop mid-move because I don’t want that. I don’t want someone to fall in love with me. And this brings me to a point I feel should be made if it hasn’t already. The point I want to make is not about aromanticism, no it’s not. The thing is, I don’t want someone to fall in love with me, yet I really want people to love me, I want to be liked by at least a few people. I mean liked in the general way, as in ‘appreciated as a human’, not the having-a-crush-on-someone way. The reason I don’t want people to fall in love with me is simple: I don’t want to have to feel guilty about not returning those feelings or not being capable of having these feelings at all. And to be honest I think that is really, really wrong. The feelings of another person are something I honestly cannot control and it should not make me feel guilty if I don’t reciprocate these feelings, I am not guilty for not reciprocating feelings. But why do I feeling like I would have to feel guilty about friendzoning someone? That question also has a kinda obvious answer: society. Our society gave it a name, made the ‘friend zone’ a thing and even worse made the word ‘friendzoning’ a thing. This word is, in my understanding, a passive word, because it is not the person ‘friendzoning’ doing something, it is more that the person doing that isn’t doing a thing, the person ‘who is being friendzoned’ wants them to. The way we use that word, the way we use that concept, immediately makes the person who doesn’t have these romantic or sexual or whatever feelings the bad person, the person with the problem when, in fact, that exact person is the person who doesn’t have the problem. I mean, I’m aromantic so I don’t understand that exact concept but I do know that wanting something from a person and not getting it sucks. And (at least I hope that) this simplified, it becomes obvious how wrong this behaviour is, especially if you take in consideration that the person can do nothing to change it, to give the other person what they want. And I’m tired of this. I’m tired of people blaming their miserableness on someone else and I’m tired of constantly worrying about if I’m too nice to someone or if someone is developing romantic feelings for me and will be angry at me or upset with me because I can’t reciprocate these feelings. Can’t we just grow up and live with it when we don’t get what we want?
Tl;dr: I am furious about our friendzone-culture and I don’t want to and more importantly don’t have to be guilty about not returning the exact same feelings that someone has for me.
