askchapo

(TL;DR: It's a load of nonsense imo)

If you ask me, words for emotions are a trifling matter. There are so many words for "untranslatable emotions", such as toská, Schadenfreude, or whatever, but we don't actually need to have words for these concepts to understand what they refer to, right? They aren't "untranslatable" so much as they just aren't translatable in one word or three. That's how these words ultimately end up in our vocabularies, anyways.

So having words for emotions can be helpful, but I don't think it's a prerequisite for having emotional literacy.

And this applies for romantic versus platonic love, too. In my experience, the main difference between these two emotions is honestly just a matter of... you know, social status. Being a really good friend to someone isn't seen as this sacred thing, and it hence doesn't have these associated rituals, right?

Platonic versus romantic love is a spectrum, and which end of the spectrum you're actually on with someone honestly depends... well, mainly on what you yourself want to call your emotions. Most people still buy into this idea of romantic love being somehow sacred, though, and most people also just have less trouble with labeling their own emotions. This is why most people just don't really like admitting how arbitrary it actually is to distinguish one form of love from another — so they make up any number of conflicting ad hoc definitions that only make things even more confusing.

So I say the best thing to do is to just focus on what's immediately present in your emotions, instead of feeling the need to sort your emotions into neat little boxes, which weren't created with people like you in mind. If someone is like a puzzle to you, where the aim is to make thon smile, then does it really matter if it's platonic or romantic? It's good in any case that you care about another person's well-being. If someone is so cute that you can't stop looking at thons hands, then does it matter if it's platonic or romantic? If you aren't being creepy about it, then it's just flattering for that person. And so forth.

Eventually as your emotions grow and mature, you may or may not decide on a label for them that just "sounds right" for what you feel. If that label is "romantic love", then people aren't gonna go around policing what is or isn't true romantic love just because you didn't feel this particular emotion in this particular way, or didn't do that particular ritual in that particular way. There are no checkboxes to fill in for something to actually count as romantic love. Rather, you call your emotion "romantic love" in order to "sanctify" that emotion, as it were, by evoking the particular and vague idea that is romantic love.

That's how I feel, at least.

PS: this is why my favorite romance series is Love, Chunibyo and Other Delusions (yes, I am a weeaboo, sorry).