Side note: pretty wild how much my anxiety has shifted relatively recently, I wonder how much is due to pandemic vs breakup. Intuition feels like post breakup was super important. Anyway back to it

So that separation of time def created a whole new vibe to the relationship, and I don’t think she really liked it that much. But it exposed me to new ways of having a relationship with someone, even if that ended up being dysfunctional for us 2 specifically.

Next thing was sex. She went through a lot of questioning around the end of our relationship around sex, and I’m not sure how much of that might have been to 1) previous negative emotions about sex from early relationship contexts 2) feeling not as close in our relationship

3) maybe somewhere on asexual spectrum. Either way, talking through that and being exposed changed my understanding of relationships in practice, and allowed me to decouple sex from romance. This combined with un-deified “love” leading me to question the solid grounding of

“Romance” (+personal aro questioning [causality undetermined]) laid the groundwork for RA disposition. During breakup, I proposed (knowing full well she wouldn’t accept) that I’d be fine if she dated other people, or had different people to take her on walks for example, and that

I could be her nice chill agoraphobic boyfriend (cute+need). So I think I already had those ideas floating around for a bit, but those specific applications and proposals had me think a lot more about possibilities I’d be comfortable with