What are Romantic feelings?

[radicallyunique]

I have been pondering this for quite a while now because all my previous answers to this question don't make sense because of new stuff I know. For one, I used to think that I had feelings for someone if I felt "butterflies" around them or particularly wanted them to like me as a person. However, it turns out that the butterflies were just due to social anxiety and it just so happened that I was particularly anxious around boys because they had way more social power at my high school. All of this fit right with me because I never thought I could be anything other than straight. So I would not think anything of any "butterflies I felt around girls but would overanalyze whenever I got anxious around boys. Also, I was attracted to all the boys I thought I had feelings for, but I am attracted to lots of my friends though I still think of us as just being friends so I don't think that tells me anything either. I also thought that if I was jealous of someone's girlfriend it meant that I wanted to be with them. However, I also really wanted a relationship in high school because I thought it would make me feel better about myself so I was jealous of a lot of people in relationships, especially if I knew the guy a little bit.

So I'm wondering how I'll know when I have romantic feelings if I mistook all these things for them.
I'm probably not going to be dating anytime soon because I'm still too afraid of rejection, boys and the LGBT community at my school so this is not that pertinent. It's just been bothering me.

[al]

Hi there radicallyunique,

What you're asking about is a pretty unclear question for everyone, especially if you're newly learning about yourself and your relationships with others. I had to ask myself what my own answer would be to that question after I read it, and I wasn't sure I could come up with a clear definition. But at the risk of sounding like a boring adult, I think everyone could answer it differently- romantic feelings are different for each person, and each experience. Some people don't experience romantic feelings at all.
Similar to what you described with butterflies, people often talk about feelings of nervousness or excitement around someone they feel romantic towards or have a crush on, or wanting to spend extra time with them (especially alone time). Those feelings could be accompanied with sexual feelings or not, but often it does feel like something a little extra beyond just recognizing that someone is attractive, or appreciating time spent with them. But romantic relationships are so dependent on the personalities and behaviors of the individuals involved, as well as their environment (whether it's between people in high school, in their 40s, etc), that it's hard to give a universal answer. And at the risk of saying "you'll know it when you feel it", I think you're doing the right thing! Paying attention to the way you feel about others, how you've felt before, and what makes a difference. We're always learning about ourselves and relationships!

[radicallyunique]

I guess what confuses me is not knowing if I've had romantic feelings or not. I had a lot of really intense crushes in high school that lasted between 1 and 3 years, and they all overlapped. And I'd just constantly think about them even though I had never spoken to them and did not know much about them. As a matter of fact, they were just the first boys that ever spoke to me. One of them was especially weird. It was on a guy in my school that had been disgusted by me for a while. I'd convinced myself that if I could get his approval, I'd be past the phase of being disgusting to people. So I got pretty obsessed with getting his approval and yeah that was a very weird time. I don't think any of that sounds romantic though. It just feels really dumb now.

And I mentioned the sexual attraction because I don't understand how for people their friendships differ from their romantic relationships. From what I hear, they sound about the same, you share stuff about each other, you provide each other emotional support, you want to spend time around each other, you care about each other. A lot of people say that it's just friendship plus sexual attraction. But that seems odd to me. If that is so, how are friends with benefits different from a casual non-exclusive relationship?

I wonder about this stuff mostly cause I haven't had many friends that I am fully comfortable around, so most of the time I'm trying to make friends. Also I never understand why people on TV complain about being alone because they're not in a relationship when they have so many friends.

[LandUnderWave]

Hi radicallyunique,

There are some who would say that crushes are similar to or the same as romantic feelings, regardless of whether the experience of having a crush felt particularly romantic in retrospect. I know when I think back on some of my own past crushes, the experience of having the crush itself wasn't particularly romantic; in fact, it could be pretty stressful when the person I had a crush on wasn't right for me, or when I was trying to hide it. I think we use the word romantic in a couple of different ways - we say "romantic feelings" or "romantic relationship" to describe the type of feelings, but we also sometimes use "romantic" as a positive adjective to describe an experience when we think of it as good or beautiful in a way that tends to relate to relationships. So, the crush I had on a friend in high school was a case where I had romantic feelings for him - I thought about him a lot, fantasised about being his girlfriend and spending lots of time just with him, and wished he felt the same way. But even though I had feelings of a romantic kind toward him, the experience of the crush itself wasn't especially "romantic", because he didn't ultimately treat me very well, whereas it might have been a "romantic" experience if he had taken me aside one day to tell me that he really liked me and told me why. I wonder if that makes sense of the distinction.

It sounds like a lot of the challenge for you in defining romantic feelings, in your own experience, is that you aren't sure whether certain feelings derive from romantic attraction or if they come from a desire to be wanted, accepted and approved of, and so you find it hard to tell what the source or cause of your feelings is. Is that right?

If so, I wonder whether it provides any comfort to know that a lot of people experience challenges like that, especially when they are navigating feeling lonely or wishing they were more socially included. I think it is totally possible and normal to have romantic feelings for someone that happen to derive from complex and varied sources and feelings, including a desire for approval or closeness in general. Whether to pursue romantic feelings that feel, to you, like they mainly come from that source is a different question. I would argue that the kinds of romantic feelings that make for really good experiences in romantic relationships may derive partly from a general desire for closeness, but also come from/have a lot to do with a desire to be close to the particular person in question, perhaps because you enjoy their company, enjoy the conversations you have with them, "click" really well with them, or admire them in as a person. Those feelings might have a lot of overlap with friendship feelings, but might be accompanied by that crush feeling you are familiar with, or with, in my experience, a sort of warm glowing feeling when the person you like that way is around.

There are also some people who don't necessarily experience the crush feeling or the butterflies or the warm glowy feeling, and that is ok too - as al said, these things are so individual. I know someone (I'll call him Jay) who used to be worried, similarly to you, that he wasn't necessarily able to recognise or experience romantic feelings, because he had never experienced one element some people describe when they describe romantic feelings. Jay had never felt an intense compulsion to be around or do big romantic gestures for the people he had been interested in as "more than friends", and didn't have a lot of those big desperate feelings they seem to depict in romantic movies. In essence, he doesn't experience "limerence". Because of that, he was wary of getting into romantic relationships, in case he wasn't "doing it right". He ended up getting involved with a friend in a sort of friends with benefits relationship, and gradually developed feelings for her that were somewhat different from friendship feelings or sexual attraction - he found that he wanted to be around her and share things about his life with her more than he did with other people, and being around her made him feel more at home and warm and content than other people, and he was particularly drawn to her presence in a room in a way that wasn't necessarily sexual (which is something he had experienced before with other people but hadn't pursued because he was worried about eg disrupting their friendships). Jay decided that was his experience of romantic attraction, and a pretty rewarding one, even without the limerence.

From what you've said about your friendship experiences so far and your nervousness/social anxiety, it makes sense that it might be hard to tease out the different specific feelings involved. It sounds like as you take steps toward getting more comfortable with social situations and find more opportunities to make friends (if I'm reading right, you're no longer in high school but are now in higher ed, which can have some great opportunities to find people who click with you through avenues like clubs and societies, and also might have free services available to help with social anxiety), some of the confusion may lessen because there may be less stress about general social issues crowding out your ability to "hear" or distinguish your feelings about specific people.

[Karyn]

I love what you've said here, LandUnderWave! (Great username too - always nice to see another Discworld fan.)

[radicallyunique]

Thanks. LandUnderWave. I found this very helpful. I only didn't reply for so long because I think this is such a well-thought and accurate response.