the word for the person who is more than a friend and not a crush

You have someone like this. Almost everyone does.

They’re not your partner. You don’t want them to be. When you imagine kissing them, the picture doesn’t resolve, it just goes strange, like a word you’ve said too many times.

But friend isn’t right either. Friend is what you call the people you see monthly and enjoy. This person is not that. This person is the one you’d call at 3am. This person knows what your face does before you know. When something happens to you, good or bad, they are the first thought, before your family, before anyone you’ve dated.

And there is no word for it.

So you spend a while doing what everyone does, which is trying to force it into the two boxes you have. Am I in love with them? You run the test. The answer comes back no, and it comes back clearly, and you’re relieved and then immediately confused again, because if it isn’t that, then what is it, and why is it so big?

alterous

The word is alterous. It came out of Tumblr, sometime around 2015, and it means the desire for emotional closeness that is neither platonic nor romantic. Something in between. Something orthogonal.

I want to be upfront that this word is contested. It’s newish, it came from the internet rather than from research, and if you go into ace community forums you will find people arguing about how it differs from queerplatonic

I’m giving you the word anyway. Because a word doesn’t have to be peer-reviewed to be true, and because when I first read the definition I sat back in my chair and said oh, and I don’t think that reaction is nothing.

what it feels like from the inside

It feels like wanting to be inside someone’s life rather than inside their bed or inside their future.

It feels like the specific ache of watching them get into a relationship, which is not jealousy exactly, because you don’t want to be their partner, but which is definitely something. It’s the fear of being demoted. It’s knowing that the world has one slot for most important person and it is called romantic partner, and you are not eligible for it, and so you will always be the second thing no matter how much more you are.

That’s the real pain of alterous attraction. Not the wanting. The ranking.

Because our culture has decided that the most love you can have for someone is romantic love, and everything else is a lesser version. And when what you feel doesn’t fit that hierarchy, you don’t just lack a word. You lack a position. There’s nowhere for you to stand.

the identity spiral

Here’s what happens to people, and it happened to me.

You feel this thing. You don’t have a word. You reach for the nearest word, which is crush. And then you start interrogating your entire sexuality, because if you have a crush on this person and you’re supposed to want to date them and you don’t want to date them, then something must be wrong with your wiring.

I watched a friend do this for two years. She was convinced she was repressing something. She wasn’t repressing anything. She just loved someone in a way that had no name, and in the absence of a name, she assumed the feeling was a symptom.

That’s the cost. Not the confusion itself, but what the confusion makes you believe about yourself.

you’re allowed to just have this

Here is the thing I most want you to take from this.

You do not have to resolve it.

The instinct, when you find a feeling that doesn’t fit, is to fix it. Turn it into a relationship. Or kill it, back off, create distance, protect yourself. Escalate or eliminate. Those are the two moves, and both of them destroy the thing.

There is a third option, which is to let it exist as it is.

Some people are going to be in your life forever and are never going to be your partner and that is not a failure or a waiting room or a consolation prize. It’s a whole category of love that you were never told about, and it’s one of the best things that will happen to you.

Your person does not have to be your romantic partner. You don’t have to marry them to keep them. It can just exist in the space between, and that is still real, and it is still yours.

up next — the friend crush, and why the science says it takes two hundred hours