Don’t know where I fit on the arospectrum

[Guest confuseddd]

Hi... so this will be a little complicated. First off, I was in a 2 year long relationship that really wasn’t. I don’t know. I agreed to the relationship bc this boy was my best friend. However half way through the relationship I started to lose all romantic attraction and basically felt like i was labeled as being in a relationship despite having no attraction towards them. I have quite strict parents, so I could never go on individual dates and always had to go in groups and even then I couldn’t go alone with this one bit due to the fact that I had anxiety and always had the fear my dad would show up out of nowhere. I also wonder whether it’s my depression numbing my feelings tbh. Just as the relationship started we said “I love you’s” which is major bs so everytime I said it was completely fake and never reciprocated because I just couldn’t feel a romantic attraction. 

 

So I definitely know that I’m not demiromantic because even after having a super close bond with them (or other ppl) I haven’t felt that attraction. But I wonder whether I may be lithromantic due to the facts above. But I’m confused because I may be cupioromantic because I do desire a romantic relationship but always have the fear of never being able to reciprocate those feelings (which I’ve now accepted). As a child I never had any crushes and just stated that I did due to the fact that everyone else did + I never dreamed of weddings when I was young. 

 

Im still confused to where I belong as both lithromantic and cupriomantic seem to fit me but I’d like all the help I can get!

[Apathetic Echidna]

I shall try to help by asking some questions, but please there is no need to answer me, they are just questions to help you think about things from maybe another perspective. 

4 hours ago, Guest confuseddd said:

I agreed to the relationship bc this boy was my best friend. However half way through the relationship I started to lose all romantic attraction

if we remove the word romantic from this sentence just to make it more general to understand: it implies you had some sort of extra attraction to your friend before you started dating, is that true? 

if we leave the word romantic in the sentence: so you still wish to be or are still friends? what made you friends has (not) changed because you dated/broke up?

an attraction that waxes and wanes, especially in relation to how a relationship progresses, sounds like litromantic, but if it isn't distinct or identifiable it could be something similar to what quoiromantics or aroflux talk about experiencing 

4 hours ago, Guest confuseddd said:

felt like i was labeled as being in a relationship despite having no attraction towards them

as you were generally in a group interaction, did you feel the relationship was defined or at least labelled by your social group rather than you and your partner? (so basically did you feel other people were putting you in a box of expectations?) 

These sorts of things can sour any sort of relationship if you are sensitive to it. This is not an aro-spec specific thing, 'living up to expectations' or acting within a predefined set of actions is rejected by many people because it can be very stressful.   

4 hours ago, Guest confuseddd said:

Just as the relationship started we said “I love you’s” which is major bs so everytime I said it was completely fake and never reciprocated because I just couldn’t feel

 Another big thing (at least for me) that can sour a relationship. You say you started fake saying it fairly early in the relationship because you saw it as an expectation, well could this and other things just have built up and strained the bond you had with your partner? Could your attraction to spend time with that person have slowly been strangled out by the mounting pile of things you didn't like?

If it is something like that, well it would indicate a level of aversion or repulsion to certain romantically coded actions or expectations. Orientations are different to repulsions/aversions, sometimes they help people find orientation labels (like in my case) other times they just complicate things because plant themselves like landmines in a field of attractions. 

Final note: Crushes are generally identified by the experience of limerence, a specific form of love/attraction, and not everyone experiences that anyway regardless of attraction and romantic orientation. Though having no crushes over an extended period of time is generally a fairly good indicator of being aro-spec. Marriage is a false clue, because marriage has much more to do with specific cultural and social expectations (matrimania, singlism and amatonormativity are problems for all sorts of people, not just aro-specs). 

[Guest confuseddd]

Thanks for the reply! 

To answer the first question, I honestly just wanted to know what it would feel like to be in a relationship with my best friend, and thus I think what i’m trying to say is  that after the r/s started I started to lose all interest in it and felt like exactly what we had before, only just we were “dating.” So the word romantic could be removed, yeah. To me I could easily just move back into what we had (a platonic one).

For the 2nd q, I fairly see what you mean. He always raised my anxiety in high levels so those little things could’ve caused me to slowly dislike him but that was only towards the latter 2 months, and for the entire 1 year+ time it wasn’t like that. When I wanted to break up with him only and when I was thinking that it would be a good idea did only I see all of his other mistakes and things I disliked, prior to all I never considered/ did that matter at all. 

But what does it mean when I realised that I just couldn’t feel any romantic attraction and not just towards him?  I 100% prefer platonic friendships over having a relationship and to me I don’t see the point of holding your partner in a higher position than your friendships as to me they are both equal. 

What I meant when I said I felt labeled as being in a relationship it was because we didn’t really go out and mainly talked online as we didn’t have a safe place to talk. So to me the entire time it felt like he was still my best friend rather than boy friend, where as he saw the opposite. And I never felt a romantic attraction towards him or another guy I dated in the past. 
 

I do eventually want to be in a relationship one day and marry; but truthfully the idea of being in a r/s where I can never reciprocate the feelings, feels to me like I’d be leading them on and that scares me.