quoi thoughts

[aesthetic mess]

(i've had this typed up in my drafts for a while and just wanted to post it somewhere. maybe it'll help someone else? idk.)

I've seen people talk about quoi being all about refusing a false dichotomy, saying “this category is not applicable to me, it is not useful to me, so I am not going to use it,” and the more I think about it (and I’ve been thinking about it a lot) the more I agree. 

I think about the categories of romantic vs. platonic, friends vs. dating, sexual vs. sensual, and it just doesn’t make sense to me. It makes more sense to think about attraction as “how much” rather than simply “how.”

It feels silly to say I realized this because of shipping, but I kind of did? In the fandom I’m in, there’s a core close friend group that many people ship as an OT4. I was reading a bunch of fics of them, some of them shippy, some of them platonic, and I thought, “What’s the point of even having this distinction? They act mostly the same in both scenarios except in one they get to kiss and one they don’t. But they still cuddle and hang out and love each other. It’s just a slightly different set of behaviors. What’s the difference?”

Because for me, there functionally is no difference. I think about my attraction as more on a scale of how much I like you (from, say, “stranger” to “acquaintance” to “best friend”) rather than trying to quantify it into an arbitrary category like “romantic.” It just isn’t useful to me to try and do that, not least because I don’t know how to tell the difference, but also because I feel like it doesn’t really matter. I mean, if I like someone and care about them a lot, why does it matter what kind of liking it is? As long as we both have agreed upon behaviors that we both like to do and we both know that we care about each other, then what’s the issue? (I realize this is a very relationship anarchist way to come at it, but it kind of comes with the territory lmao.)

Like when people talk about “blurring the lines between ‘just friends’ and ‘romance.’” I’m just like blurring the lines? There are no lines. It’s a perfect gradient and it’s also all the same color. Like yes I can understand on an intellectual level what you’re talking about (and also bc i’ve been bombarded with that narrative my whole life) but  w h a t  are you talking about there is no difference!!!! It’s just how much you care about people!!!!

Like if you are my very close good friend there is a good chance I have thought about cuddling you, or being in a qpr, or maybe even kissing. It's just different ways to show affection. There definitely is a demi aspect to it for me, but the label I feel closest to is quoi. I don't know shit about my attraction but also it doesn't matter, you know?