Relationship/crush weirdness

[Spider_Queen]

So I'd like to preface that I don't experience crushes/romantic attraction often, and the feelings can be a bit hard to identify for me? I don't think I'd say I'm aro or anything, because I do want a relationship pretty bad?

Now to get into the actual meat of the post, I've felt like I might be developing feelings for a friend of mine but I'm not quite sure what to do about it. I've had incredibly little relationship experience, with my only experience coming earlier this year, being initiated by the opposite party, someone I wasn't extremely into in retrospect, and seemingly being mutually weird. In this situation I'm very unsure of what to do because I honestly don't know if they're that into me? On top of that, they're turning 18 soon while I'll be 16 in a few weeks or so putting a two year age gap in between us, which if we were a bit older I doubt I'd notice, however 2 years is a large-ish amount of time seeing as we're much younger.

Both of us are trans, with them being nb and wanting to present more masculine, while I'm a trans woman, which complicates things slightly, seeing as I'm still not really sure how attracted I am to masculine presenting people. I find the way they currently present attractive, but I'd feel weird about seeking a relationship out depending on where exactly they'd like to end up presentation-wise because I don't really think that would be fair to them.

I'm not entirely sure to what extent this plays in but as both of us id as lesbians we've talked a good amount about how frustrating it can be that there's so few queer women in our area, which makes any sort of dating especially hard. I have wondered if I've felt like this specifically because of that, but I highly doubt this is all just me sort of picking someone as a last resort

At this point my basic questions are A) am I overconcerned about the age gap bit at all? B) how standard are my concerns I suppose? Like is this stuff ordinary to worry about when you develop feelings for someone? I highly doubt that I'll ever tell them my feelings in full, and even then it's unlikely that I'd pursue a relationship with them if that can help add any context to the post.

[Heather]

Hey there, Spider_Queen.

I'm not really sure how to answer what you're asking, but I'll do my best. Some of that is that I don't know that there are really "standard" concerns in the massive diversity that is human intimate relationships. My experience from where I'm sitting decades into working in this field is that because who we are and our relationships are so unique and diverse, so really are our concerns.

That said, we certainly have heard people before who have concerns about age gaps, and people who have concerns about gender identities and sexual orientations aligning.

I think in this particular situation, though, as with many like this, since it doesn't sound like you're even sure yet you'd want to pursue a different kind of relationship with them than you already have, you might not really need to resolve these questions first. In other words, why not feel this out a little more first? I'm talking about spending more time in the relationship you're in, and while you do, think about how it might be in a different kind, consider your feelings, see if you can get any feel for any chemistry you two might have. You can also find out some more about what you each want in a romantic or sexual relationship, to get a better idea of if those wants would line up. You can try to get a better feel for if they have interest in you in this respect.

Once you have some more answers to all that, only then does it seem to me like this other stuff would be more pertinent, you know? If you're not going to pursue a dating relationship, then it obviously doesn't matter. And just having the age and identity issues resolved wouldn't answer the larger questions about if pursuit of that kind of relationship with them would be right.

Does that make sense?