I’ve always had a difficult relationship with, well, relationships.

Specifically, I’m talking about ‘relationships’ in the sense that first pops into mind for most people when they hear the word in a vacuum: some kind of committed dating relationship between people. As something of a late bloomer myself, I didn’t actually date anyone in high school. Or in college. By the time I was done with school I knew that I was gay, and so finally in my early twenties I got into my first real relationship with another person.

It didn’t work out. There were a number of different reasons for this, which aren’t worth getting into now, nearly two decades after the fact. Suffice it to say that it wasn’t a nasty break-up or anything—nobody cheated on anyone, there were no fights or abuse, nothing like that. It was, as they often say, one of those things that just didn’t work out. The two of us are, to this day, still very close friends.

My next relationship didn’t really work out, either. I remember trying so hard to make my boyfriend happy, and how much it never seemed like I was good enough at it. It was a long-distance thing, and when he finally came to visit, things were somehow worse than before. He dumped me at the airport right before flying home, after telling me he was taking life in a different direction. I took things pretty goddamn hard.

Speaking of taking that break-up really goddamn hard, most of my close friends were extremely confused, in large part because barely any of them had even known I’d had a boyfriend. It wasn’t a secret relationship or anything like that, either; I’m just a really private person when it comes to my personal life, and I guess it just never occurred to me to share what was going on with people.

My next several relationships followed a very similar pattern to my first: make an awesome new friend, develop a really strong bond, get into a relationship, ultimately break up because I was constantly miserable about the relationship, and then winding up better and stronger friends after splitting up.

Because that was the thing: my problem was never with the other person—it was always with the relationship itself.

It baffled me. I knew that relationships were about compromise, but no matter how much I gave and gave, it never felt like enough. I was constantly anxious over my every decision and whether my boyfriend would be happy about it; I was so uncertain as to whether or not I deserved satisfaction from making someone else happy; eventually I’d start to feel resentment over the fact that none of the positive emotions I got back from the relationship made up for even a fraction of the constant misery being in that relationship made me feel. I knew I meant it whenever I told them I loved them, so...why?

I was the one who cut all these relationships off. It’s difficult to describe exactly how awful it feels to break up with someone when you still love them and they haven’t done anything wrong. It was even more difficult for me to understand why I needed to do it, but whenever I did, everything got so much better, for me and for the other person (eventually, at least).

And so the years went by. I never really figured out what the deal was with all my past relationships, but I knew that as I was growing and learning as a person, I was also learning how to establish bonds with people on my own terms. People who were special to me, who I wasn’t dating, but who I loved (and love) all the same. Sure, I had no plans to get into long-term relationships or get married or anything like that, but I at least knew that, even if I didn’t know why.

In the mid-2010s, my depression got really, really bad. I won’t go into details here, but suffice it to say, it was a pretty dark time for me, but my friends eventually helped me turn things around and I went to get professional help. Just before that was starting, I’d begun to question whether or not I was asexual. I certainly hadn’t been asexual earlier in life, but I was older now, and people change in lots of different ways, their sexuality among them. I had no libido, and I knew I didn’t want to be with anyone; I just started to accept that maybe I was done with all that.

Well, long story short, getting treatment for depression was a godsend for me, and with my depression and anxiety receding and under control, my libido came raging back to the forefront. Definitely not asexual, then. Which was confusing, but I didn’t think too hard about it at the time; I was just happy to be feeling like my old self again. Over the next several months I forged some very nice connections with close friends of mine. Some of it was sexual; some of it wasn’t. Therapy had taught me to accept myself and my life on my own terms, and the personal relationships I had with people grew so much more naturally as a result.

And then Pride Month hit, and I felt a strange lack of commitment on my own part. Something didn’t feel right, still. And then, one night, while chatting with one of the people closest to me, a word popped up in the conversation that set off a cascade effect within me and my thoughts:

Aromantic.

It seemed almost too silly to consider, at first. It’s not like it was the first time I’d ever heard the term, obviously, and I knew what the concept was. But to have it pop up in that conversation, describing him, and then describing me... my brain wouldn’t let go. For days and days, I kept asking myself, “Am I? Am I? Am I?”

The fact that I couldn’t stop thinking about it told me everything I needed to know, though. It was something I’d always known, at least on some level. I’d thought about it in other terms at points in the past—that I was ‘wired wrong,’ that I just made for a shitty boyfriend, that relationships with people just weren’t important to me. But now, suddenly, I had a word and a concept that encapsulated what I was so clearly and concisely that I didn’t have any real doubt that it applied to me.

I did my due diligence over the next week or so, reading up on materials every day, seeing what other people had to say about the aromantic spectrum, the aromantic experience, and all that. I’m still figuring it all out for myself, what it means for me, and for the people in my life, but I’m writing this now, feeling like the last twenty years of my adult life finally make sense in retrospect when I look at it through this lens. As Princess Leia famously said to Luke Skywalker in Return of the Jedi: “Somehow, I’ve always known.”

I am aromantic and, as far as I can tell, I always have been. I’m okay with this. I am not broken, I am not wrong; I am simply different, and other people out there are different in the same or similar way.

I’m gay. And I’m aromantic. I still experience attraction and affection and passion and all those other wonderful emotions. There are people in my life that I share an incredibly strong bond with. Sometimes it’s emotional. Sometimes it’s sexual. Sometimes it’s both. The important thing is that I’m not lonely or sad or lost or incomplete because I don’t have or want a boyfriend.

I still love people, and I’m lucky enough to have people in my life who love me back.