I was thinking and doing some reading about this recently and want to share my thoughts (which I hope is alright given the inactivity of the thread).

I don't remember when I started to identify with the term; I initially identified primarily with asexual, but didn't feel like it adequately captured my interpersonal preferences. After doing some reading on the types of love, I noticed that the type of affection I feel leans toward compassionate love, rather than romantic or passionate.

Interactions with people I feel inclined toward involve comfortable self disclosure of both parties and general exchange of ideas. I like learning about people, I like to be considerate of their wants and needs, I want to see them to grow into their own person, and I want to provide a safe interpersonal environment where they can feel valid with their thoughts and feelings and safe to explore them. This is the extent to which I want to connect with people I consider friends.

Some people conflate these things with the intimacy of romantic attachment, but while a romantic relationship may include these things, they aso may not. Rather, from what I've come to believe after reading about romantic attachment, the differentiating characteristics of a romantic relationship involve exclusive feelings and behaviors toward the object of romance that may go beyond logical cognitive reasoning. This may extend to the following:

• special treatment of the romantic object
• comparatively intense feelings at its presence( proximal or otherwise) or absence( i.e. longing)
• a sense of of possessiveness of the object with more restrictions of behavior( such as not flirting with other people)
• a sense or desire of interpersonal enmeshment into a single unit

Aromanticism, then, involves the lack of these behaviors, and committed aromantic relationships, aka queerplatonic, are defined mainly by their high levels of trust, loyalty, and emotional connection ( as a sidenote, I feel really frustrated on how rare it is to see this type of elevated friendship in media nowadays, or to have it construed into something romantic).

These are all personal musings based on limited personal research into the subject and experience, however, and I'm sure that I've missed some amount of the finer differences between the romance and aromance.