ok but is romance even real??

Yeah, same. I don't want to call myself aro because apart from unrealistic media narratives (that everyone I trust says are unrealistic), I've never seen a coherent definition of what exactly [romance] is and isn't, and also all the adults in my life (who were already adults when I was a kid, I mean) have said that there's no timeline on it. The fact that I haven't felt a certain way so far doesn't mean I won't in the future, even though I can't currently imagine that happening to me, because that's apparently a very common experience for people who later feel things that they never expected to feel.

So, in answer to your question... idk?? We don't really have very precise words for this. We have all these weird nebulous cultural concepts of different feelings, but they don't have any clear boundaries or definitions. What I have concluded from personal experience is that in addition to "friendship" and "sexual interest" there is also what I've dubbed "Mysterious Third Thing", which I don't know how to define, but which seems to be... the thing, idk. Most of my relationships have ended because there was friendship and there was sexual interest but there was no Mysterious Third Thing, and because we were both happy to categorise "sexual interest" under possible manifestations of "friendship", we ended up as friends rather than as partners.

I was asking these same questions five years ago (& just went to check one of my ancient tumblr tags to confirm that/remind myself), and after five years of diverse relationship experience my answer is still a giant "idek".

 

So, this is an interesting avenue of thought... can I ask if you recognized the romantic experience right away when it happened? Because that sounds like it would be pretty confusing, in a nice-ish kind of way.

(All of this is super theoretical, for me, for now, because I've got only one friend I've known longer than a few years, and we're as platonic as it's possible to get. But who knows what the future holds re: new friends??)

 

Took me a bit to get back to this, sorry!

Anyway, I'd say sort of a yes and no as far as recognizing the romantic feelings go. Yes, in that I was fully aware that I was much more emotionally attached to Kit than my other friends, and that I was experiencing aesthetic and sexual attraction, but I was also brought up by a heavily fundamentalist-leaning Catholic mother (dad was around, just not religious, which made mom double down even harder on the whole Suppress Your Earthly Desires to Achieve Morality and Also Queers Deserve What They Get thing) and I was also aware that I have a notable tendency to fixate on a New and Exciting Thing for a while, get bored, and move on to something else. So, I was aware that what I was experiencing seemed to match up pretty well with the cultural understanding of what romantic attraction was like, but I didn't want to say definitively that that's what was going on and actually act on it.

Why? 1) I was worried that it might wear off, which would be really shitty to do to Kit (how do you tell someone you still really care for 'sorry, I just don't love you anymore'? Ugh, not a conversation I wanted to have), and all of the adults in my life went on and on about how fickle young love was, how much they wish they had it all to do over again/knew then what they knew now/ etc., etc., and being bitter and regretful about my choice of lifemate in whatever aspect was very much not something I wanted either

2) I knew the social and familial consequences of getting in a relationship with another AFAB person would be severe enough that it really wasn't worth it until I was sure that I was actually bi (tl;dr, basically I'd bought into the 'sexual deviance is just the result of an overly high sex drive and an animalistic inability to distinguish appropriate targets for it/lack of self-control', and so I was waiting to be closer to the end of puberty before I would be convinced that I was bi and not just horny), and that this wasn't just a passing crush, because crushes were supposed to wear off, and see (1), that sounded awful.

However, because I am a stubborn fuckhead, this meant that I took another like... nine months [ETA context that this is after six-ish years of locker rooms being really uncomfortable situations for small!Kai, so yeah, it took me a good seven years of suspecting I was bi] to be like, ok, yes, this not-straight thing is A Thing, and when another six months after that I was still obsessing over Kit (spoiler: turns out she'd been doing the same for that year and a half-ish, oops), so I figured this was too long-lasting to just be a crush- I did actually want to spend all sorts of time with her, and being that I didn't have any other friends I wanted to kiss, that was a pretty big indication of This Is Different for me, and I cared a lot more about her opinion and like, wanted her to think I was pretty and was more worried about hurting her feelings and interested in her opinions on things than I was with my other friends, so probably this was not just me being excited about a New and Shiny Person (who was not new at all, but I needed to be really sure this wasn't a fluke).

And, well, we're married now, so. Success!

edited to fix typo

edited x2 to add another parenthetical ramble because I can't NOT parentheses >.>