As a disclaimer, I'm coming at this from the perspective of someone with a weird and fucked up sexuality that could only be described by words created by the utterly deranged (something along the lines of greyromantic omnisexual). What I mean by this is that from my perspective, sexuality is a really weird and individualistic thing that doesn't really tend to fit well into categories. And even from a philosophical perspective, let's say you have two gay men and they're both very assured in that label. But how can gay man A be exactly sure that gay man B's experience with sexuality is exactly the same? The answer is that gay man A can't really. We can't actually truly ever understand another person's feelings to the extent that the other person feels them, we can only really attempt to do our best with descriptive words. The reason both men call themselves gay is because that's simply the best way they know how to explain their experiences, even if it is not a comprehensive document of their whole life's experience with attraction. To come back to my original point though, this is why I think getting hung up on labels when it comes to sexuality is kind of a not-very-useful endeavor. Especially when it comes to the more "outside of the box" sexualities. If you try to attach your feelings to a pre-made label made to be a "one size fits all", then you're actually denying the intricacies and nuances of what you feel. And the more you try to actually capture those nuances with hyper-specific categorizations (see: greyromantic omnisexual), the more it becomes a fruitless endeavor because most people won't know what the hell you're talking about, when the whole point of attaching labels is so that you can try and communicate your feelings in the first place.
To summarize the previous paragraph, placing more emphasis on the label rather than your own feelings is a bad thing to do to yourself, and trying to hyper-categorize your feelings kind of goes against the reason we place a label on things at all.
So what do I do? Since I'm using myself as an example after all. Well I just call myself a lesbian lmfaoo. "Now hold on a second" I may or may not hear you ask. "Doesn't that go against everything you just said?".
I call myself a lesbian cause it's easy to tell others that I'm a lesbian. After all, I'm a girl (ish) and tend to experience attraction to women. It's far easier than telling others that I:
> am definitely feminine rather than masculine, but am not extremely attached to the construct of being a "woman"
> experience strange bouts of romantic attraction to people regardless of gender, although I am not sure if it is really romantic attraction at all
> experience sexual attraction largely towards feminine people regardless of gender, although I on very rare occasion find myself thinking that a guy looks hot
But I digress. Coming back to my original point, I'm not actually myself hung up on the label I use to describe myself. I call myself a lesbian cause it's a convenient term I can use to quickly communicate an idea of myself to others, but I do not actually believe myself to be a lesbian necessarily. My feelings =/= the term I use to describe them, and that's ok. Because I don't
need everyone I talk to to understand the weird and fucked up intricacies of my sexuality.
But to wrap it all up and bring things back to you, it really is just up to you to decide what label you want to use. If you think that "aromantic" is a good enough label to communicate your feelings, then by all means go ahead and use it. To restate my short answer, it's up to you to decide really. The reason I've written this whole long answer is so that I could hopefully explain to you that the label itself doesn't actually matter too much, and you shouldn't get too hung up on trying to attach your feelings to a word that will never be able to fully capture the entire scope of your experiences.
And btw, when you said
I’ve had problems with mistaking people I want to get to know more with people I want to date. I don’t really get the difference between it and friends
I really felt ya there buddy. I briefly mentioned it earlier but I feel kind of the same way. Which is why I use the term "greyromantic" as a cop-out. It's definition is something along the lines of "experiences uncertain romantic attraction towards others" :haha:. Part of why I like the term in fact, is because it's so vague and does not attempt to really restrict my feelings. Rather, it's just a very general statement that's instead freeing, in my opinion. If you like that word, feel free to take it
