Oooh, roleplaying. I've had a lot of roleplays and romance was rarely the main point. In fact, most of my lifetime romance was straight up non-existent for me, meaning I would look at some couple and think "hmmm yea, they're friends". My very first rp involved romance at some point and I totally missed that it was actually romance, because I thought it was a very strong platonic attraction lol.
However, overall I'm quite chill with romance in roleplay. Sometimes it can be even fun to dive into what a person might feel when romantically falling in love. I like exploring the emotional insides of characters and their personalities in different situations. But there was a time when it was too much romance. Just too much.
So I had this one person with who I rp'ed and our rp was practically endless - we were always starting over or turning time back when things were coming to a logical end. And my co-roleplayer loved romance. Like, a lot. Therefore we had a ton of romantic feelings between nearly all characters . Once the storyline came to it's logical end once again, my co-player started making up random situations involving romance with absolutely random character that will never ever appear again. I went with it, but it was that point when it started to feel like way too much romance. Not to say that all those short romantic random situations with some random characters were very much pointless. Later on, at one of once again restarted timelines I decided to make one of my male characters aroace. I did it just so he would be finally left alone. I never intended this character for romance, he is the demon that uses others for personal gain, be it own survival or power sources (he feeds on soul energy and even can use souls as some sorts of power plants to make himself stronger). Even if he would get into a romantic relationship, it wouldn't be a healthy relationship. But with that co-player it all eventually was coming down to fluff, so I decided it will be best to cut off any romantic possibilities with this demon. He was Out Of Character most of the time anyways, so I tried at least something to show his real intended character. I blame my co-player on this, she would often take over my characters without my consent. But I'm at fault too, because I was far too shy to stand up for my children back then and was going with everything she did. It was a very complicated time.
I didn't expect it to turn into a full-on rant, I'm so sorry
So to summarize, I'm chill with romance in rp if it's not the main point of the play and there's not too much of it. Sometimes romantic feelings can spice up the plot a bit, but nothing more. Sometimes I might actively want to create romance between characters, but it's a very rare occurence. In fact I have an ongoing rp where I want two female characters to catch feelings for each other, simply because I think it would be fun to see how my confident dominant evil main girl would behave if she gradually got closer with one of her allies and fell in love later on. This is pretty much the only time when I really want to have romance in the story. Another time would be my recently finished rp with that same girl character of mine, where her second identity got feelings for kinda-ally-more-enemy male character while being on a mission of infiltrating and acting as a spy gathering information to expose a government structure. It was also done to spice up the plot and make it more interesting by having a character getting some conflicting feelings. These are the only times I ever really wanted to roleplay romance. Maybe that's because I not so long ago figured out that romance actually exists and I was just missing it this whole time. Action stuff is simply far more interesting, same for relationships that are not romantic. There's a lot you can do with them.
On this note, I'm planning out my own someday-to-be comic (which is, funnily enough, to some extent based on that endless rp that I ranted about earlier) and I don't want to be there any romance between main male character and his female best friends. We already have more then enough stuff about falling in love with a best friend. I want to show that men and women can be very good friends without catching any romantic feelings. I want to show a close, caring and sincere friendship. I want to show that you don't need romance to be so close to someone. Although the main point will most likely be about personal emotional well-being, I really want to cover the topic of very close friendship too.
