Romantic Delineation

Tyrael Goo dissects the definitions, difficulties, and differences between romantic and sexual love.

Most people who aren’t aromantic or asexual, at least as far as I’m aware, don’t think about the definitions of romantic and sexual love very much. The boundaries for romantic and sexual attraction make a lot more sense to people when they’re all wound up together into a singular feeling that you get for a person—the butterflies in your stomach, the desire for their body, the urge to mash your face against theirs. Your friends are your friends; your lovers are your lovers, and never the twain shall meet.

But to be frank, I’ve never quite fully understood the difference in dynamics between romantic, sexual, and platonic love. Sexual attraction has long been out the window for me, since people are kind of gross in my opinion, but I was sure that romantic attraction was within my grasp. I’ve had crushes before—people that I thought I might like to be in a relationship with—but then I was met with the daunting question: what would a relationship between me and that person even be like?

As someone who’s never been in a relationship, I haven’t really found an answer to that question. The thing that it sparked was a quest for the truth, a hardline fact and definition of romance, that quite honestly, not a single person I asked ever gave me. It just seemed to be an unwritten rule, a feeling that people got, the sense that “this is the one.” It made even less sense to me when it came to the game of romance: trying to get someone to fall for you, or look as attractive as possible to “win” the girl. Romantic attraction seemed to be a native tongue that you didn’t know the grammatical rules for—you just knew when something seemed right or wrong. It was a language I didn’t seem to speak.

So now that I’ve clearly established my robust qualifications for writing a submission in this love-themed magazine, I’d like to offer a few of my thoughts on the definition of romantic love, not by defining it alone, but by separating it out from the platonic relationships that I do understand, and completely ignoring the importance that sexual attraction has to romance.

As my best friend so eloquently put it: a romantic partner is just a friend that you also want to

smooch. Ignoring sexual attraction, there should still be, to my mind, an element of physical attraction involved. Wanting to cuddle, hold their hand, kiss their lips—these are all decently well established elements of romantic attraction. For evidence of this, read most other stories in this issue.

However, additionally, and more importantly in my opinion, romantic attraction should have some element of exclusivity to it—the desire to have your romantically attractive person all to yourself. My reasoning behind this is rather simple: this is the literal definition of a date. No matter what you’re doing, the purpose of a date is to have someone all to yourself for however brief a period of time, to enjoy their company and to get to know them as a person.

And as far as I’m concerned, that’s pretty much it. Many people, I expect, will have other additions, or issues with the two singular aspects that I’ve written about here. But the actual definitions themselves are not the point of this piece. Romance is something that people often take for granted that they understand—that they can speak, or perhaps understand but not speak, the language of romance.

I would encourage you to pull up a note and write out the definitions of the attractions—platonic, sexual, and romantic. Consider only the hard evidence from an external perspective; ignore the feelings that you might know very well. It’s important to question the things that you claim to understand implicitly and think critically about all the things that make you blush.

by Tyrael Goo