I'm sorry to come in here with one of the "am I..." posts, but I need to talk about this somewhere because I'm unsure about this and I'm kind of nervous to even post about this anymore.
I've struggled with obsessive compulsive disorder my entire life and I often fall into depressions because of it. I'm also just in general rarely get excited or have super strong emotional responses to a lot of things. I have to wonder if maybe this could be affecting my romantic orientation? I think I might be asexual too, but then again I have to wonder if that might be due to my tendency towards being depressed.
I've thought I had crushes in the past, but in retrospect I think it was just me confusing love towards friends as romantic feelings or just simply picking crushes to fit in. I never got the butterflies or nervousness that a lot of people describe and even people I thought I had crushes on I often questioned if it was a crush. There was instances where I was asked out by people I thought I liked and wanted to date but every time it came down to it I could never bring myself to actually be in a relationship with them, it just sounded unnecessary and suffocating but I often came up with excuses to never date through high school despite multiple opportunities to. I'm graduating this year and I'm well aware that I'm not straight, for awhile I thought I was gay because everyone I had strong feelings towards were girls, but I think that's just because I was only friends with girls and I generally just feel a lot of love for my friends. It's still really confusing though because I don't know how to measure what romantic attraction is if I don't know if I've ever felt it. The only thing I can say is when I found what aromanticism was about a year ago I felt incredibly happy to realize that not having a relationship was even an option, it was freeing but I didn't necessarily consider the label for myself immediately.
I kind of wonder if maybe this is attributed to the fact that I'm just not a very social person and like I said before I tend to be depressed and unexcited. I wonder maybe if I met more people and was a more emotional person I would have romantic feelings towards other people, and this fall I'll be going away to university. I've kind of always expected that I'd meet "the one" in college, and for some reason that always sounded unexciting to me though. I kind of don't want to fall in love with someone and I'd much rather spend my life alone, but again I can't tell if it's my poor mental health talking sometimes. I also sometimes wonder if maybe I am just gay and I'm experiencing internalized homophobia or something, or maybe I'm just too young to even know or the fact that I've thought I had crushes on my friends when I was really young means I can't be aromantic. I guess I'm just wondering if someone feels the same, or if this is a common thing to experience?