Woven Threads: How Non-Romantic Connections Are Helping Me Love Healthier

Woven Threads is a series of blog posts where I compile and expand on tweets and threads I’ve posted on Twitter. They may cover a number of topics that I often ruminate on. 

I’ve been single and living alone for the last year, and it’s really solidified something for me: I don’t experience romantic attraction. To be honest, I think I’ve only really felt platonic attraction to anyone initially. I’ve recently started to identify more and more along the ace/aro spectrum. 

Which may be hard to believe for some considering I’ve spent, cumulatively, roughly 12 of the last 15 years in serious long-term, sexually active relationships. But that may also explain why all of those relationships were extremely unhealthy. 

As a kid, I remember thinking of marriage as a social milestone that you needed to achieve by a certain age or there was something wrong with you. Relationships, sex, marriage: They were all achievements to be unlocked and they all had their own deadlines. 

But when I would talk about my “dream” future, spouses and partners never really factored in. I wanted to have a million different jobs (check), I wanted to have my own apartment in the city (check), and I wanted to sustain close lifelong friendships that, arguably, could look a lot like a healthy marriage to a lot of other people (partial check).

It was actually translating friendships to relationships that made the switch to polyamory completely logical to me. 

Sometime when I was middle school age, I used to get really jealous and insecure about my best friend having other best friends. Up until that point, I tended to cycle through singular best friends. We’d be inseparable for 1-3 years and then we’d slowly drift apart as they’d develop new friendships and I would feel abandoned. Seeing my best friend develop new close friendships with other human beings—no matter how much I also liked those humans—-was an omen that this friendship would also subtly untether itself from me and drift off into old memories.

I must’ve been acting out in some fashion, because at some point she sat down with me and asked me what I was feeling. When I told her about my insecurity, she explained that her feelings for me were changed by her having feelings for other people. She loved our friendship, but her friendships with other people were different. That didn’t make them better or worse, just that we were all different people who offer different things in our friendships. 

[Sidenote: We could not have been older than 12 for this conversation and I’ve noticed a lot of grown ass people unable to have an interaction this healthy. It shouldn’t be a surprise, honestly, that we’ve held onto our friendship for over 20 years.]

After that, I stopped believing in “best friend” as a title and started seeing it as a category. Discovering polyamory was a relief to discover that I could do the same with romantic relationships. 

But here’s where the aromanticism comes in. Desiring one or multiple romantic relationships doesn’t actually mean the same thing as experiencing romantic attraction. During my pubescent years, I was what you might’ve called at the time “boy-crazy.” I always had a crush on some boy from my class (or from a show or book or movie) that I would pine over with (embarrassing) dramatics.

In retrospect, I can see now that these “crushes” were a product of living in a heteronormative culture where my desire to fall into the “best friend” category of these boys must mean that I was actually attracted to them. But my feelings for them weren’t that different from the feelings I had when one of my “girl” friends didn’t seem to reciprocate my desire to be closer friends. 

And most of those guys I’m pretty sure I was “attracted to” because they offered me a model of masculinity that aligned with my own. Most of them were funny, considerate, creative and smart, though in different ways. Those were traits I ended up mirroring until I found the version that fit me right.

I know a lot of people struggle discerning between romantic and platonic attraction, but to me, the only difference between best friends and romantic partners is the intentionality of our commitment. A best friend, to me, is someone who can give me a lot of what I desire out of a romantic partner, but our lives are still separate in a way where we may drift in and out of each other’s lives as we choose our own paths and our capacities change. A romantic partner is someone who I’d want to involve and be involved in each other’s decision-making process.

Recently I’ve been thinking back on a friendship I had with an ace/aro pal. Our dynamic was something I would describe as what a queerplatonic relationship would look like. And I realized, I think we might’ve actually been in one, we just never outright labelled it. 

I actually started the friendship with what I’ll call a “crush” on them (given that I’m not sure I’ve been using the word as intended), but when expressing that to them didn’t change our dynamic, I was content to continue on as we had. But it definitely became a relationship that felt more intimate than the romantic one I was already in (non-monogamously).

We’d meet up over drinks and lunches and dinners. We’d take each other to plays and shows and each other’s work events. We’d surprise each other with tokens of affection and vent and introduced each other to our other friends. I even introduced them to my mom. We came to each other with the little and big news in our lives. It may have actually been the healthiest relationship I ever had, but we technically never defined it. 

But thinking about that friendship, it made me realize why I felt like romantic relationships were so vital. It often feels like we're not allowed to ask our friends, even best ones, to prioritize us when we need it while it’s already integrated into the definition of a romantic relationship. I think a lot of my closest friends are people who could’ve been short-term partners (especially if there was mutual sexual attraction), but there was some incompatibility that would blow up a long-term relationship. 

Which has made me realize that we treat our romantic and sexual relationships the way we treat our friendships. And to be honest, some of you treat your friends like shit.

The unhealthy habits we have in romantic relationships often find ways of showing up in some of our friendships too. Like lack of communication or control issues or insecurity issues. It’s why when you start identifying toxic cycles in your relationships, you start to see them in your friendships too. 

When I look back at the romantic relationships that I’ve had, there’s a common pattern I’ve noticed. I never really intended to be in any of them. I got into my first relationship because I desperately wanted to be wanted and once it felt like somebody did, it felt like I had to reciprocate because “beggars can’t be choosers.” The rest were all supposed to be short-term flings that were just supposed to help me get over the one preceding. 

But at some point, they all displayed a desire to be a consistent and supportive part of my life. If I started to drift away as I did in many of my friendships, they’d reel me back in. They’d be hurt if I didn’t show affection regularly. They all wanted relationships with me (whether they were honest about it or not) to get more access to me, and most often, I would get into those relationships because I was scared to lose the security that it brought. 

When I look back over the last 15 years, my exes aren’t the people I think of when I think of feeling loved. I think of my best friends. Not because they never hurt me—I’ve felt hurt at some point in all of them—but when they did, they didn’t blame me for it and when we eventually drifted out of each other’s lives, it wasn’t with hard feelings, but just because our lives were moving in different directions and we saw no reason to hold each other back to maintain a closeness that we no longer needed from each other. 

And all of those people are people I could message out of the blue, even after years, just to check in or share something that reminded me of them or celebrate good news or offer condolences on bad news, and we’d show care to each other still with no expectation that we owed each other anything more. 

But this is why we shed what we outgrow in order to allow new and healthy things to thrive. Now that I’ve prioritized having healthier friendships and non-romantic connections in my life, I’ve realized that I’ve never really wanted a romantic partner. I wanted support and security and stability and someone I can rely on. 

But partners often can be no more reliable than your friendships, but trying to be anyways can often lead to hurt feelings and burned bridges. Now that I see all my connections as friends first, with their own lives and capacities that don’t have anything to do with me, I don’t need them to build their life around me to make me feel loved and supported. I can accept when they can’t show up for me and vice versa without needing to feel like there has to be someone in the wrong. 

Obviously not everyone subscribes to this approach in their friendships though. But I’m sure you’d find, if you gave it a try, that it could improve a lot of the connections you have in your life.