My first male friend was a boy named Bailey. We met as ensemble cast members in our middle school's production of Beauty and the Beast. He towered over his peers and had a bizarre sense of humour that I, as the school's resident "weird girl", vibed well with. Prior to our newfound friendship, I had never sought out companionship with any of the boys in my class. This was due in part to the fact that post-elementary school, they all decided I was a brown nosing crybaby with mockable interests - which is a fair assessment of ten-year-old me - but I also knew of the assumptions people would make of any platonic male-female union they saw me as a part of. As theatre brought Bailey and I together, however, I grew determined not to care. We were friends. It was an irrefutable fact and I was not going to let anyone suggest otherwise. Inevitably, the day came where a decent friend approached me on a school field trip, after witnessing Bailey and I talking at a barn. I don't quite remember the look on her face, but for  storytelling purposes, pretend she had the smugness of a child who was convinced her answer was correct. She was trying to be casual when she approached me and said something along the lines of:

"I want to ask you something."  

Instantly, I felt my stomach flip. Despite being a particularly naive sixth-grader, I knew exactly what she was going to ask next. I'd seen TV shows. I was an avid reader. In every piece of media I consumed, it happened time and time again: the female protagonist's close male friend would inevitably become her love interest. When scriptwriters managed to avoid this fate, they shoehorned the side characters together. Friendships in children's media exist in trios. There is an unspoken rule that at some point, all parties involved must be paired off.  

"Are you and Bailey . . . together?"  

I balled my hands into fists. My entire body boiled with rage I had no idea I'd been building up. This rage, from an eleven-year-old girl afraid to hear the words "hell" and "damn" in songs, amounted to nothing more than a hot face and an in-eloquent response: "NO! We are just  friends!" That was that. 

This inescapable, perceived truth about society loomed over me throughout my entire childhood. One car ride on the way to elementary school, I concocted an elaborate scheme in which a friend would dress as a man to "trick the priest" so I wouldn't have to marry a man. Other options included the only boy back then that I actually enjoyed spending time with: my cousin. The nasty implications of this line of thought were lost on me because I'd always  assumed the husband was just a placeholder. We would, once again, fool everyone into thinking we had a valid romantic relationship worthy of marriage and then immediately live out our lives platonically. It did not once occur to me that there was a much simpler option because nobody had told me otherwise.  

A fixation on "marriage-as-validation" did provide me with a defence: I was a kid, and marriage was for adults. Therefore, it did not matter that I didn't like boys, because we were too young to know what romance is. That was the conclusion I reached after attending one group sleepover. The previous one I'd attended involved a specific point where we all had to whisper about our crushes. We were fourth-graders and I was bewildered. As I watched girls crawl over each others' sleeping bags, whispering boys' names as if they were classified government secrets, my heart pounded with dread as I wondered if they'd make me talk. I had nothing to say. It made me, at that point in time, boring. It was too much to bear.  

Alright, I'd thought to myself. I have to pick someone. That'll be my crush for the next sleepover.  

The boy I picked was the most well-behaved kid in class. I did not know him, nor have I ever had a conversation with him. He liked soccer, and that was all I knew about him. When I was focusing on the teacher, I'd have to redirect my internal monologue: you're supposed to like Nick. Shouldn't you stare at him or something?  

Miraculously, I was absolved of all feelings towards this boy when my turn in the time honoured sleepover ritual came up next. It was much less eventful than I'd perceived it to be. One friend just said "I like him, too". I took that not as a threat but as a sign of solidarity. You know, I don't have a crush on Nick, I told my diary the next day. I'm WAY too young for boys! This argumentative sword was double-edged. After the sleepover incident, it alleviated my "fear of missing out" to a degree but it also meant I could cling to it for far too long. My therapist reassured me that I had nothing to worry about, because those kids in relationships didn't go further than texting each other. My friend had a "boyfriend" on Club Penguin "for practice". Though my initial reaction to that was "should I have one, too?" I managed to avoid feeling too  hurt when it did not come into fruition. TV shows, movies, and books continued to betray me. I  continued failing to put two and two together.  

In 2009, my family moved from Connecticut to California. My new friends there were far less concerned with boys and romance, which meant we could focus on important things like writing Percy Jackson fanfiction. Instantly, questions of dating and romance loomed over me less. It was also then I began to learn about LGBT+ identities and experiences. (It also pains me  to say that this revelation started with Glee, but we need not discuss that further). Though I did not have romantic feelings for girls, either, I felt myself drawn to gay romances in fiction, presumably because it wasn't the same tired tropes I was used to seeing. Suddenly, friends-to lovers didn't hurt as much, because it wasn't dictating that all people with same-gender attraction could not have same-gender friends without catching feelings. Unconsciously, there was something I recognized in the experiences I'd read about. People on blogs wrote about how they wondered when they'd be attracted to boys, or vice versa. Dreading the question "so, are there any boys you like"? emerged as a commonality. The country at the time was embroiled in the fight for "marriage equality". Instead of wondering which of my friends needed to dress in drag, I wondered if I could just marry a girl to fulfill the romance quota. After all, my best friend was already a butch lesbian. Maybe I was secretly in love with her, because we were so close. While the latter realization was quickly disproven, it still took a few years to realize I didn't have to marry anyone at all.  

I was about to turn 16 when I finally examined the sum of these experiences and pieced together what they meant. A casual conversation with one of my friends turned hostile in the presence of a boy who hung around us. The exchange went something like this: "You know, I've never had a crush on anyone." Enter the eavesdropper.  

"Never? That's bullshit." 

You don't know me! It was a turning point; as a child, I would've assumed there was something wrong with the way I existed. My next thought proved I officially knew better. You haven't lived my life! 

And yet I wondered. That one seed, rudely shoved into the earth, began to germinate over the course of two weeks. It was May, and I was about to be a sixteen-year-old who never felt  romantic or sexual attraction in my life. All media I'd consumed suggested that this was impossible. I started to wonder if there was some truth to that fact.  

I was initially hesitant to identify as asexual. The label fit perfectly; it took the summation of my experiences and filed them into a neat manila folder, stamped with the ace of spades. I was misinterpreting it as encompassing aromanticism by default, a fact I later learned is not necessarily true. As not all rectangles are squares, not all asexual people are aromantic, and vice versa. The distinction did not matter at the time because the label fit regardless: I finally felt free. My heteronormative lens of the world finally cracked. Realizations came in like a flood: I don't have to marry. I don't have to have a romantic partner. I don't have to lose my virginity. It was a relief and a more anxiety-driven time than people give it credit for. Flouting societal expectations aside, accepting a new sexuality involves reinterpreting your concept of self. I thought I was straight for sixteen years. Overnight, I had to process that I wasn't, and that I was something that most people thought was unheard of. My biggest challenge, I knew, was that people would not believe me. My trusted double-edged sword would edge towards me: they'd say I was too young to know. That I hadn't met the right person. That it would change.  

That didn't matter. I was asexual now. In a frenzied state, I typed up a Word document and e-mailed it to my best friend. She called me shortly afterward. Our co-written stories grew to feature less and less heterosexual romances emulating the ones forced onto us throughout our childhoods. I came to know love as the way I felt opening a freshly written update of our story, hours-long plot discussions over the phone, and sleepovers that were mainly just character building exercises. Creating together. That could be love for me. It was more than enough. Love became redefined even further. I saw it in more contexts than ever: it was my dad immediately buying all the college merchandise he could when I got accepted into my dream college, playing made-up games with my sister until we both grew too old for it, my mom caving into my sisters' and my pressure to get Starbucks after school, my parents consoling me after last-minute pre-college anxiety. Love is the way I feel when I have a successful conversation with a native ASL or French speaker. Love is the way I support my friends - who in turn, listen to  my long tangents about linguistics or writing or shows they've never watched. Love is discovering a new place, trying new things, taking a chance on moving abroad. I am a huge sap. I believe in the power of love. Life without love is, indeed, not worth living.  

But my love is not romantic love. It is no better or worse than romantic partnership. Soulmates can be platonic, long-distance friendships can be just as painful as LDRs. Friends can be any two people who understand and support each other, regardless of gender. I wish that had been fully demonstrated to me as a child. I wish children today could grow up without the pervasive messaging that boy-girl friendships will inherently turn romantic. I know they are not,  because I have seen these relationships continue to get shoehorned into otherwise groundbreakingly LGBT+ positive children's shows. It is rare that this aspect of myself, my aromanticism, is truly and explicitly shown in media. It is rare that I look at a character and feel seen.  

My favourite movie of 2019 was Greta Gerwig's Little Women because that finally happened. I saw my struggle to realize myself in a world centred around women's relations to men reflected in Gerwig's interpretation of Jo March. I left that theatre euphoric, having just witnessed a girl like me attempt to see herself romantically with her childhood friend and realize: no, that isn't it. But what I saw as an aromantic coming-of-age story was seen differently by my  mother:

"I think she really did love Laurie," she said, as we emerged from the dark theatre into a bustling December crowd. I felt myself return to sixth grade, to my friend's unwarranted interrogation of Bailey and I. Time has allowed me to try this confrontation again more rationally.  

"No, I think they really were just friends."