Love at First Sight

Oh! Love at first sight, when you deeply love someone that you just met, is like a fantasy book, a story of love. What a ridiculous thing! I used to think that way. I remember well that since I was in kindergarten everyone talked about falling in love. Of course at that time, it was nothing but a kid’s joke, but over time, in middle school, everyone talked about seriously falling in love. I just couldn’t understand, so I underestimated the feeling and thought it was something stupid, but at the same time, I felt strange. I felt like something was wrong with me because I wasn’t able to fall in love like everyone else. In this blog entry, I’m going to talk about how I discovered that not everyone falls in love in the same way; then, I’ll explain the first time that I fell in love; and lastly, I’ll explain the different ways that people fall in love.

I always thought that everyone falls in love in the same way. That was until I turned twelve and all my friends started to have crushes or relationships. I thought I would fall in love too, but that never happened. I felt really bad because I felt incapable to fall in love. Nobody believed me when I said that I had never been in love. People used to say to me, “You’re just too picky,” or “It’s impossible; everyone falls in love,” and that only made me feel worse. Fortunately, my best friend supported me a lot. With the help of the internet, we discovered the term aromatic, which is a person who can’t experience romantic attraction and for many years I thought I was an aromantic person.

I had given up on love and I believed that I would never experience it. That changed in June 2021. I started to feel something, a feeling that I hadn’t experienced before. Something strange, something new, at that time I wasn’t even able to describe it. The only thing I knew was that every time I saw one of my best friends, my heart would beat so fast. Every time I heard his voice or talked with him, something seemed to awaken inside me. “It can’t be love,” I used to say to myself. But the more I thought about it, the more sense it made that it was love. It was strange because I had known him for almost two years. Why hadn’t I fallen in love with him from the beginning? And I discovered a new thing: I had thought that I was incapable of falling in love, but I could fall in love; only my way to fall in love was different.

I didn’t search for more information; the information came to me through social media. On Tik Tok, I watched so many videos about love and how people experience it. I found a new term, “demiromantic”. It is part of the aromantic spectrum, but it’s different. Being demiromantic means that you can’t experience romantic attraction until you have formed a deep emotional connection with someone. A deep emotional connection is not only being friends with someone; it is so much more. It’s like feeling complimented by the other person. I read the definition and I related a lot. The experience with my friend had been like that. I didn’t feel anything for him at the beginning, but after a long time of talking to each other, I finally fell in love with him. For some people, maybe having these terms is unnecessary, but I like being able to give a name to what I feel. Since I discovered this term and that I am not the only person who experiences love differently, I stopped feeling that something was wrong with me.

To sum up, I always thought that falling in love and love itself were simple things, but with the experiences that I lived through in these years, I realized that love is something really complex. It is not like we watch in romantic stories. There is no such thing as a correct way to fall in love, and indeed, not all people fall in love and that does not have to be a bad thing. Each person experiences love in a different way. When I finally understood this, I could stop feeling bad about myself. There is nothing wrong with me experiencing love in a different way.