I’m aromantic, though it took me a while to realize it. Up until I graduated college, I assumed I just hadn’t met the right woman yet. I know it probably shouldn’t take me twenty years to realize something that obvious. I think in some ways, my being aromantic is part of why I didn’t realize it. I figured I hadn’t found anyone I was attracted to because I’d never really been looking and never thought about relationships enough to realize just how odd it was that I hadn’t been in one for so long. It also didn’t help that I wouldn’t hear the term aromantic until I was closer to twenty-five.

But this story isn’t about my discovering I was aromantic. This story takes place in the long-forgotten bygone era of the 1990s, back when phones were still attached to the wall, computer hard drive sizes were still measured in megabytes, and I was in high school.

One year, I started sitting with a few friends I knew at a lunch table, and as a result, I met the ex-girlfriend of one of my friends. They had managed to stay friends despite the break-up, and the girl had nothing but good things to say about my friend. 

One day, she called me at my house to tell me that a mutual female friend of ours might be interested in dating me, and she had somehow been nominated to feel out whether I was interested in this friend. I answered that I thought the friend was a nice person, but I wasn’t really interested in dating anyone at the time. She promised to relay that to the friend and asked if we could stay on the phone and talk. And so, we stayed in contact and chatted some over the next few months.

During these chats, she told me that her mother was terrible and didn’t want to be a mother — though she never gave any examples of terrible behavior, leaving me uncertain whether her mom was really as bad as claimed or she was just at that stage where every teen is convinced their parent is the worst. I also learned that she seemed to have a history of dating men she was convinced were perfect saints with no faults, who would one day be her knight in shining armor and fix her terrible homelife and all her other woes. That is, until the boy failed to live up to these impossible standards, at which point they had an amicable break-up and she still stayed friends with him while going out searching for her next knight to save her.

I wasn’t convinced this was the best approach to dating, but then again, it’s not like I was an expert in how dating worked. My giving out dating advice is about as useful as a blind person giving fashion tips.

Then, one day, she called me and told me she’d had a fight with her mother, had left the house, was outside in the winter cold alone, and needed a friend to talk to. So, I hopped in my car — well, my parent’s car, as I only barely had a license to drive — and drove the short trip to meet her in person. We talked about nothing too important, and after twenty minutes or so, she decided she was ready to be walked back to her house.

“Great! Crisis avoided,” I thought, until she reached up to kiss me on the cheek before going into her house.

All I could think was, “Why would she kiss a friend like that?” That was the sort of thing you did to someone you dated! Neither of us ever said we wanted to date. The very first serious conversation I ever had with her started with my explicitly saying I didn’t want to date anyone, after all!

Sure, I had talked to her a decent bit after that, but all those calls were just conversations between friends! It’s perfectly natural for women to call and talk to their male friends many evenings, right?! And yeah, I’d driven to her when she was upset, but I literally would have done that for anyone who was upset and I thought needed my support. I’ve been told before I’m a bit excessively altruistic.

And come to think of it, she had started giving me too much praise to the point of making me mildly uncomfortable, just like she always excessively praised all of her ex-boyfriends. And she had called me when she’d had a fight with her mom like I could be a knight in shining armor who could fix her emotional problems, and… Oh, God, she really thought we were dating, didn’t she?!

Yes, okay, maybe I should have picked up on the warning signs sooner, but I was a dumb teenage boy. I had never thought of dating anyone, so it never occurred to me that others could want to date me. I was actually expecting people to be rational and reasoned about dating — clearly something only an aromantic could be stupid enough to expect of romance.

And so, a few days later when she next called me, I asked if she thought we were dating, and she said of course we were! And suddenly, I found myself in the very unenviable situation of having to figure out how to break up with someone I never intended to be dating in the first place!

I reminded her that I didn’t want to date anyone, but she couldn’t fathom the idea of anyone not wanting to date. I tried the old classic “It’s not you, it’s me,” which was quite literally true, and she responded that was only said when it really was the other person that was the problem. It was a long, awkward, hard conversation because I had no clue how to break up with someone, particularly since I still didn’t think we were dating to start with!

In the end, she got over it, and I basically ended up on her list of ex-boyfriends she was still good friends with. She still seemed to think of me as an ex despite my protest that we weren’t dating to begin with. We stayed friends, though I tried to keep an eye out for signs that she was looking for more from then on.

Nowadays, I’m a little older — okay, maybe a lot older — and supposedly wiser. Now, whenever I expect to have a deeper relationship with a woman than mere acquaintances, I always find an excuse to drop the fact that I’m aromantic into a conversation. That seems to help preempt anyone asking me out. At the very least, if I ever have to dump someone I didn’t intend to be dating again and have to use that “It’s not you, it’s me,” line again, I’ll have proof that I warned them about me before that point.