I’m quite young, but personally—I spent most of my childhood thinking a crush was just “friendship I’m embarrassed to want to continue,” so I avoided befriending girls I had “crushes” on just because I thought me doing so would be creepy or clingy. Later on, in high school, I didn’t like that I hardly had friends who weren’t guys, so I was happy to befriend someone who wasn’t, who I’ll call Z, even though being around them made me generally anxious.
When I found out about myself being aro (and ace), it lead to me gaining a furthered interest in LGBTQ politics and being less ashamed in trying to advocate for myself in platonic relationships.
Z also figured out that they were aroace, and we quickly and mostly-accidentally entered an intimate platonic relationship. Which… was a big mistake! I was under the impression that our aroace compatibility made us immune to having a bad relationship, but I ended up really liking their touch and acceptance, and not really liking being around them otherwise. Z wasn’t a bad person, so I didn’t really have a reason to be anxious around them, so I thought it might just go away if I tried hard enough. It didn’t. Just a pretty big personality conflict. Cue several months of feeling bad whenever we did anything non-cuddling, and feeling guilty that I felt bad during those times—which ended up being a lot, because Z stopped enjoying cuddling. I’m grateful to them, though, for being willing to talk to me about it, even if it took us a while to figure out what was wrong.
Since then, I’ve found other cuddle buddies that I feel much more secure around. And it’s still weird and surreal to see people in my friend groups having romantic desires, and dating people. Every time it happens I want to quiz them and be like “are you sure you’re not secretly aromantic and you just haven’t realized??” :P
It’s also probably why I like Lemon Demon and Tally Hall and Will Wood instead of, like, normal music that normal people listen to.
In my experience, the older I’ve gotten as an aro person the more comfortable I’ve gotten with my identity but also the more isolating it’s gotten. Many friendships just kind of fall away over time even when people aren’t in relationships, because many people just don’t prioritize them as much in general. I’ve found myself somewhat by accident in a romantic relationship that I enjoy (it was a 1 in a million kind of thing), and didn’t even realize how much social and physical interaction I was going without until it suddenly was there again. At the same time though it’s still isolating among people in relationships (double dates are bizarre for one…) that I don’t measure my partner against other potential partners, I measure him against how okay I was with being alone, which was very other than the isolation; if we were to separate for whatever reason I’d be upset to lose this relationship in particular but in the big picture totally fine just going back to flying solo.
Basically I’ve just learned to accept as an aro that I’m on a really different wavelength from all the allo people in my life and to try not to put too much blame on individual allo people for the way amatonormativity screws us all over.