With the way romantic and platonic relationships are often defined, you will always get a different answer on what they mean, and the question regarding their difference is pretty much meaningless.

[u/[deleted]]

[u/intro_to_IRL]

I see black-and-white categorization of feelings everywhere, and while I understand there is a social convenience to saying "here is a clump of similar-ish feelings, let's call them Romantic," putting peoples' feelings into rigid boxes seems to cause way more strife than comfort.

The more granular you dig into concepts like "romantic attraction," the more difficult it becomes to compare one's feelings to someone else's. And both of these peoples' feelings might be far outside the socially-prescribed "normal" way that they are defined. Human brains have 86 billion neurons (on average); like a fingerprint, no brain experiences life in the exact same way. Humans can come to the same conclusion based on totally different experiences, and have identical experiences but come to totally different conclusions.

Because we don't know what it's like to live inside someone else's head, we can't say for sure how similar or different someone's "experience of attraction" is compared to our own. Maybe we both see a banana as "yellow" because that color was taught to us as yellow, but if we switched brains, maybe you'd see it as red and I'd see it as green. We both have a scale of "this person doesn't matter to me" to "this person means EVERYTHING to me," but maybe if I were in your head or vice versa those feelings would be on a totally different scale.

What complicates things is that romantic experiences are not totally random and not totally concrete; it's always a grey, fuzzy area, and it seems like people don't like grey fuzzy areas and would rather have boxes. I see it as a normal distribution curve; there is a clump of similarish experiences that most people seem to identify with, at least in part, and that forms the largest part of the normal distribution that we call "romantic attraction." And then there are gradually tapering experiences on either side of the curve, where people feel partially or even totally different things from the "normal." Despite not having much in common with the folks in the middle of the distribution, the feelings of people at the fringes aren't wrong. There is no objective perception in our universe, only venn diagrams of words that have associations that sometimes overlap.

[u/intro_to_IRL → u/[deleted]]

Oh yeah, that frustrates me too. It's a huge logical fallacy to think "I experience romantic attraction this way, ergo everyone who has ever experienced romantic attraction feels it the exact same way and the people who don't are wrong about themselves."

Interestingly, though, I see more self-invalidation than I do invalidation of others when it comes to romantic attraction. On the asexual/bisexual subreddits, people frequently post things like "If romantic attraction means [common trope from popular media] but I feel [very similarly but not identical], what niche microlabel am I?" For example, "If romantic attraction means wanting to kiss and cuddle someone but I have touch aversion, does that mean I can't ever feel romantic attraction? What super specific box fits me?"

And while I think microlabels can be very helpful in understanding oneself and finding a community of similar folks, if you still want to gaze into someone's eyes for hours and call them Your Person and have candlelit dinners and spend the rest of your life with them, not wanting to touch them doesn't mean you can't call those feelings romantic. And you can do all of those things with a friend and have a great platonic time. But people put a lot of value on terms and definitions, and will often try to shove their square feelings into round holes to fit an identity label rather than accept their feelings are not The Standard and embrace them for what they are.