Divident

I ship for the angst! I really enjoy reading/watching idiots being stupid and oblivious or generally just crying over their dead lovers. It's a bit sadistic, yes, but it's also really entertaining. Most of the ships I ship never end up together, or one dies soon after they met , or the writer is just too good at their job. Shipping was what actually made me realize I'm aromantic. Apparently, people get the same giddy feeling that makes you grin when you think about your ship, but for their actually real people romantic interests and not two fictional idiots. :/ It also helped me realize I'm asexual, so I guess I owe quite a bit to shipping.

I'm from Hong Kong, and I just made an account to reply to this! Been lurking a bit here without an account for a while, but I figured that I should share my experiences as well. My parents were also very liberal and open-minded about lgbt. They thought I was a lesbian when I was a kid because I never mentioned any crushes or anything. They kept thinking that for a while and dropping hints that they'd be fine with a girlfriend after I came out as aroace... Did anybody else who came out to their parents been met with a lot of confusion? Because I got the feeling that as westernized as they were, growing up in a British colony, they still had the notion of marriage as a life-long commitment of mutual support instead of the result of romantic or sexual attraction, because my dad still tries to convince me to get into dating on the basis of "what will you do when you get old" or "who will take care of you if you get sick" etc. (I don't know, die? Who wants to live forever anyways?) My mom just tries not to talk about it but she seemed to warm up a bit more to me being aroace after I got her to watch Heartstopper s2. (Aroace rep, yes! So grateful to Alice Oseman and the Heartstopper cast.) These days they're trying to wrap their heads around me being non-binary. It helps that we don't use gendered pronouns in spoken Cantonese and that I've always been averse to being particularly masculine or feminine since I was a kid, and they've given up on grandkids for a looong time. Sometimes they think that it's because I'm young (which I admittedly am, but I suppose two decades and uni is more than enough time to have at least a single crush, or even a best friend- which still haven't happened). They also had this 'no dating until uni' rule, which made my dad's whole 'you need to find a life partner' speech really out of the left field for me. Actually, they surprised me with the rule, because dating had never even crossed my brain and I was very surprised to find out that my classmates had been dating for years by the time we graduated secondary, lol.