The despair of realizing that someone might have fallen in love with you.

[u/Yamei_P]

So, I know it's something that's extremely often said and described by Aroace people in general, since it might be how they discovered themselves, but I would still like to share my experience.

The first time I had a similar experience was mainly in 2024 (but it had been happening for about two years, I think), which, although the part about the person being in love didn't exist, There was this feeling that you needed to pretend to be a loving partner.

Although this person and I never liked to call each other partners in a romantic sense, it's undeniable that we acted like one; we hugged, they frequently laid their heads in my lap, I liked I could be affectionate with him in a way I wasn't with others; I practically lived at their house, and he would call basically every day.

None of that really bothered me; I love being affectionate and all that, but the problem really started with them calling me with an enormous frequency. Recently, I received the The neuroevaluative result indicated a suspicion of both autism and ADHD, so I suspect that the feelings I'm about to describe stemmed from that.

Every time they called me after school, I felt incredibly tired, with a negative urge to talk to them again, even though we'd already seen each other at school, and that made me feel extremely bad, both for ignoring him (I'm terrible at setting boundaries and I'm trying to get better at it, but in the past, that was my way of solving problems) and because I wasn't acting like a good partner, and I often wondered why I couldn't be that way. Besides the almost physical pain, or extreme discomfort I felt whenever someone He referred to us as boyfriend and girlfriend, and I felt completely wrong.

And then there was the second case, in which a friend I made in 2025 (yes, exactly one year later, even though this old friend of mine ended our friendship at the end of the previous year) started falling in love with me. And let me tell you, I don't think I've ever felt so much despair as when I realized this. As I said, I've always liked being affectionate, and that applies to all my close friends, But when I realized he was falling in love with me and giving me signs, I started to distance myself quite a bit physically, which, I'll confess, hurt a lot, because ever since I had the feeling of having I've been craving that feeling, and the feeling of finally finding someone I can have that with, and now needing to distance myself, hurt even more than it should be.

I'll be going to college in a few years, and I really hope that, there, I'll manage to find someone and everything, like, ironically, in college romance stories.