Picklethewickle

Wow, congratulations!

The parts about finding yourself feeling whatever other people are feeling sounds like a lack of emotional boundaries. People who don't have boundaries tend to absorb what other people feel, and look to other people's feelings, reactions, and behaviours for guidance. They tend to struggle to make decisions or to take actions on their own. It can be hard to set boundaries at first, particularly when you don't know what your limits are. It might help to start by getting in touch with your own feelings, such as by writing a journal. Give yourself little emotional check-ups through the day, particularly as you interact with other people. Take note if you feel good about what's going on in that moment. If you find you are irritable, tired, or impatient with what's going on, particularly for no clear reason, then chances are someone crossed a boundary without you realizing. Take note of whats going on when you feel comfortable, and compare that to what is going on when you feel uncomfortable. That will help you develop an understanding of what your core beliefs are, what your true emotions are, and where your boundaries would lie.

It lets people understand you better. It lets you know if your friends are accepting, or if you need new friends. I can't think of anything besides that.

It sounds like you already have tried a little bit. If you have no interest in these things, have no need for these things, and you are happy with the way things are now, what reason do you have for seeking a relationship? You could take all the same things you've said and use them for an argument in favour of being single.

This topic can also be thought of as "What do you like about yourself?" Put down anything you consider good, or you think you do well, be it profound or trivial. I'm good at scratching the ears of furbabies. It's been a long time since I've run into a furbaby that didn't enjoy my skritches.

This is part of what annoys me about romance, and all conversations around the subject. Romance is put on a pedestal. It is presented as more than everything else, rather than one of the many things we can feel. It doesn't matter to me if romantic attraction is a chemical process in the brain or not. Whatever the cause and however it is processed, some people feel it and some people don't. What matters to me is the excess of pretension around the subject. I want people to be allowed to feel what they feel and to be allowed to set aside what they don't feel.

I hate romance too. I find it tiresome and annoying. I don't want anyone trying to romance me in my life, I don't enjoy hearing about other people's relationships, and I can't stand seeing it in shows and books. I can definitely get wanting a break from people who emphasize it over everything else. It still remains that it isn't okay to be cruel and judgemental toward people who do enjoy romance.

There are more people who feel the same as you than you might realize. There are people who are open to having a sex-free romantic relationship. In fact, there are people actively seeking that out. Sex is not love to all people, and it's okay if you never want to have sex with anyone. There are relationships just like you dream, full of love and trust, without needing sex as part of that bond.

When writing fanfiction, I'm not really interested in shipping. I will tolerate canon relationships, even if I don't like them, and will include them in my stories if they are contextually relevant. I don't understand how shipping works, really. I don't grasp why people want these characters to be together. I did once read shipping described as "The character you project onto X your comfort character", and I guess that could be plausible. I still don't understand how people enter a space where they project onto a character or take comfort in a character, though. For reading fanfiction, I will still read a work that includes shipping, but over time I've become less and less able to engage in that kind of content. I find all ships the same. I want to read a story for the plotline or the meaning, and recently I've found I've grown avoidant toward stories that include a relationship tag. I would love to see more friendship stories. For canon relationships in books and shows, in the main I find they suck.

Do you find that it's the aros who experience absolutely no forms of romantic attraction ever are the only ones to get acknowledged? What is it called, a green stripe aro? Not here, but in general I find that aromantics who admit to having had even a single crush, or having an obsession with a fictional character, or who are simply questioning their feelings and orientation are told they aren't really aromantic. They get told they are shy, or aren't giving themselves a chance to be romantic, or they are scared of relationships. Maybe I've just been talking to the wrong people.

Some people will deliberately pretend to have similar interests in order to spend more time with you. Usually this isn't meant to be hurtful, it's intended as a way to get to know you better and to engage with you. That said, the fact that you feel put off by his behaviour and scared of him because of the age difference is reason enough to stop having contact with him.

I agree with you on this. It's interesting and helpful for many people to use the split attraction model to clearly define what they are feeling, but attraction and repulsion is not the full of human experience. You don't need to feel any form of attraction for an individual in order to respect them, or treat them with decency. As for the conversation, that's internet discourse for you. Many such discussions turn into nonsense before they are over.

If your main goal in this is to let other queer people know they are safe around you, and to tell anyone who isn't accepting to stay away, you could write something along the lines of "Queerphobes need not apply."

I'm anattractional, I don't have any of these different forms of attraction for people. I do have empathy to the point other people's emotions become a burden and drown out my own feelings. Sometimes I get tired of having to carry other people's feelings. As for emotions about the world, there's actually few things that don't have some feeling tied into them.

Robotic dragon?

Let yourself work out what love and romance mean to you, rather than trying to interpret yourself in terms of what other people tell you it is supposed to mean. Work on separating yourself from other people's projections. The fact that trolls are calling objectum a weird sex fetish doesn't mean they are right about you. They don't have the right to define you or your feelings. It sounds like you've started to internalize their attacks. Basically, you've saying it's not a fetish because it doesn't involve sex, but that has made you afraid to consider sex because then it turns your feelings into a fetish and that would make them right about you. Let yourself acknowledge that they are the ones being creepy and perverted here, what with them sexualizing you and demanding details on your sex life.

Welcome! I honestly would like to hear more about objectum and what it means to you.

I'm number three, sitting quietly with my own thoughts. Sometimes I would like to be number six, delighting in the world.

@Moth Lady it wasn't really intended as a response, it was intended as my own understanding on attraction. I'm sorry it made you feel called out.

People aren't making a calculated choice on who they feel attraction toward. Being aro and ace, no one triggers a sense of attraction for me. Someone straight isn't making a list of reasons why the opposite sex is attractive and the same is not, it's simply that people of the opposite sex triggers the feeling of attraction and the romantic urges. People of the same sex do not. That extends to whatever gender the person prefers.

I already had my feelings about sex and romance figured out before I knew the words asexual or aromantic. It's hard to look back now and find a point where I worked it out and made a decision, I simply was always uninterested and averse to such things, and I knew my feelings were right. When it comes to being non-binary, on the other hand, I'm still insecure. I've always felt this way, so I could say I've known since I was six. At the same time, I didn't figure out that everyone doesn't feel this way until I was thirty. It took me a bit to process that some people only have one gender, and it's the one they were named at birth, and it doesn't ever change even a little tiny bit. Part of my insecurity is that while I do have gender vibes, I don't have strong feelings. I judge myself that I should have more intense experiences to be legitimate. Also, sometimes my gender changes frequently, and sometimes it stays the same for a long period. The times when my sense of gender stays the same as my AGAB for a long period, I start to wonder if I was wrong about being non-binary. Then one day my gender shifts again, and I start the figuring-out process all over.

I'm sex-repulsed. People can't come near me with that stuff. It creeps me out when sex is on a show or movie. I've heard people on AVEN saying they can't even stand to be aware of the fact that other people have sex. My repulsion isn't so strong that the very existance of sex upsets me, but I sure don't want to know about other people's sex lives.

I really like being aromantic. I don't feel it as a lack of something, I feel it like my love takes a different shape. I care about people for themselves, not for the emotions and attachments they give me.

I relate to this so much. I've tried writing romance, not because I wanted a romance story but because it was contextually obligated for the character. I couldn't figure out how to do it, and I got stuck on it for ages. Eventually I went with some advice I once heard: "Skate fast over thin ice". With time and effort I learned that I can write characters in their canon relationships so long as I keep to their typical day-to-day interactions, but creating a romantic scene is too hard.

Maybe instead of trying to categorize the people you have dated in order to find a label, just let yourself date whoever you like.