Friendship Sprouts

[mesotablar]

This is my entry for August Carnival of Aros and my attempt to fill the prompt: How has your orientation impacted your relationships with individuals?


Friendship Sprouts

The type of Aromantic I am means that I react badly to romantic overtures. They have to be pretty blatant for me to even notice them, but once I do there is only bad. Because of this I find my orientation has been a major influencing factor on which friends I keep and which friendships I let wither and die. 

I start out most friendships as a bond of convenience, someone to sit next to in class regularly, someone to talk to while we pursue hobbies in a club or group, people I see frequently for any reason. These connections are all weak, they are friendly but not really friendships, yet. Work and effort must be put in to create a friendship but these proto-friendships have all the potential, like a seed that just needs us to put in a little persistence for it to sprout. 

Getting out of the comfort zone of convenience is how I build a friendship, but other people have taken it in a different way. I don’t see romance very well, if it is subtle I probably won’t even notice it. So I have been accused by friends of ‘leading them on’ because I wanted to spend time with a friend when they thought it was more than that.

There is no way for those misunderstandings to end well. They feel betrayed and rejected and I feel betrayed and ambushed. Needless to say those sprouts tend to wither and die pretty soon after. A few times the friend has become pushy and won’t take no for an answer because they think friendship building equals interest or consent or some other thing…..I spray weed killer on those friendship sprouts and run for the hills.

All of this means I basically have no male friends anymore. One by one they killed our sprouts. Not all those friendship deaths are related to my orientation. All the usual other pressures have taken their toll, like moving house/jobs or working hours changing, but I feel those friendships can be revived by another change in circumstances. The friendships stomped out by romance however feel permanently corrupted. 

Comments

[violetemerald]

This feels really relatable and undertandable and I love your sprout and weed killer metaphors. That all being said now as an adult who will turn 30 in a few months, I've found myself actually having a lot of straight male friends where romance is not a factor to worry about. Sometimes it's age difference, sometimes it's that they're married or in a monogamous romantic relationship already, sometimes it's that I'm very out as asexual (which for allo straight people means I'm not romantically really compatible with most of them either and they see me not as a potential romantic partner but more the way they would see a sister or something) - I come out during that pre-friendship more friendly acquaintances stage and only when they react well do I end up eventually friends with these guys.

If I felt romantic interest from any of them it would scare me away from the friendship too.

[mesotablar]

Thanks for the comment! It actually made me notice I had a spelling mistake in there.

95% of my friend making occurred before I even knew Aromantic was a thing, let alone that I fit under the Greysexual umbrella so I'm sure there were lots of wrong assumptions made by both sides over the years. Now that I have the vocabulary connected to my orientation I'm sure there will (hopefully) be less issues in the future.