Oh My Fucking God Can We Kill The Whole Thing Of “platonic Friends Don’t DO That!” Shut UP Oh My

INFP Problems #1

INFP: *Is comfortable enough with a person to start speaking about their life*

INFP: *Talks for 10 minutes straight*

INFP inside: *Halfway through their rant* Oh no what if I'm boring this person... what if they don't care, what if they think I'm annoying?

INFP: So anyway... what do you think? *nervous laugh*

INFP inside: Please don't hate me.

That ace/aro feel when you're doing on online quiz and then inevitable Sex/Romance Question™ pops up like whelp guess i'll never know what kind of french cheese i am

Ironychan Presents: ten animals that used to be way bigger than they are now. I’ve done a couple of posts (here and here) featuring modern animals that look prehistoric.  This is the opposite: prehistoric animals that look strikingly like their modern relatives, except for the part where they were PANTS-SHITTINGLY GIGANTIC.  (Pictures from all over the Internet, chosen with an emphasis on ones that show just how pants-shittingly gigantic these beasts were.) ALLIGATORS - Deinosuchus rugosus (Late Cretaceous) Looked very much like an ordinary alligator such as you might find in your backyard if you’re unfortunate enough to live in Florida - except that it was about forty feet long and weighed darn near twenty thousand pounds.  This animal literally ate dinosaurs for breakfast, and I can’t think of anything more supremely badass than that. SEA TURTLES - Archelon ischyros (Late Cretaceous) The genus name of this bad boy means ‘king of the turtles’ and I don’t think anybody’s gonna argue.  Built very much like a modern leatherback, Archelon was a good fifteen feet long and tipped the scales at five thousand pounds.  Paleontologists speculate that they ate giant squid, probably because they can’t think of anything else that would sustain a turtle this big. SHARKS - Carcharocles megalodon (Early Pleistocene) Megalodon looked enough like a modern Great White Shark that some scientists place it in the same genus, but it was bigger than any great white outside of an Italian horror movie: sixty feet long with a gape you could drive a car into.  It ate whales, which we know because we’ve found fossil whale bones with giant shark teeth still stuck in them.   CONDORS - Argentavis magnificens (Late Miocene) Lest you think the sea had a monopoly on gargantuan nightmare beasts, I give you the largest flying bird that ever lived, with a wingspan of some twenty-five feet.  Most likely a scavenger, this is a bird that could literally have carried off a human corpse, had there been any humans in South America six million years ago. MILLIPEDES - Arthropleura armata (Late Carboniferous) Do you hate creepy-crawlies?  Don’t go time-travelling.  Arthropleura was a millipede eight feet long.  It was the biggest land-based invertebrate that ever lived, and one of the largest land animals of its time, period.  Scientists believe it was a peaceful herbivore, but should you disregard my advice about time travel, you probably still want to avoid pissing it off. MONITOR LIZARDS - Megalania prisca (Late Pleistocene) The largest living lizard is the Komodo Dragon, which is a pretty gigantic and horrifying animal on its own.  Scientists disagree on how big Megalania was, but most estimates range from twenty to thirty feet, and like its modern relatives, it was also venomous.  Astonishingly, these were around only forty thousand years ago, and the first people to settle in Australia probably saw them.  Even more astonishingly, those people stayed in Australia. PENGUINS - Kairuku grebneffi (Late Oligocene) Penguins are, let’s face it, pretty silly-looking things.  We watch them waddle around in the zoo and laugh at them, while we forget that they also get pretty big - an emperor penguin stands four feet tall.  Kairuku was as much as a foot taller and fifty pounds heavier.  This was a penguin that could kick your ass in a fight or in a diving contest: it could go deeper and faster than any living penguin. BOA CONSTRICTORS - Titanoboa cerrejonensis (Paleocene) Snakes swallow their dinners whole - a good-sized boa can swallow a sheep.  This snake could have swallowed a goddamn hippo.  It probably got to be fifty feet long, weighed between two and three thousand pounds, and was so big around that you couldn’t have given it a hug - although it certainly could have given you one.  I have no idea what it ate, and I suspect that nobody else does, either. DRAGONFLIES - Meganeura brongniarti (Late Carboniferous) At the same time as Arthropleura were rustling through the undergrowth on god knows how many legs, Meganeura was flitting around above the prehistoric swamps.  If your car hit one of these on the highway, the results would be much more dramatic than a splat on the windshield.  With a wingspan of over two feet it was the largest flying insect ever, and probably ate things like fish and amphibians as well as other insects. ORANGUTANS - Gigantopithecus blacki (Pleistocene) Orangutans are already big enough to beat the shit out of you if they want to.  If Gigantopithecus stood on its hind legs it would have been almost ten feet tall, and most likely weighed in at around twelve hundred pounds.  This animal could have tossed you around like the Hulk beating Loki-shaped dents in the floor of Stark Tower.  Some people have suggested that it still roams the isolated woods of the world and is occasionally reported as bigfoot, in which case I humbly suggest we leave it the fuck alone.

Anti anxiety.

the more things change...

Stop normalizing tossing aside friendships when you get in a relationship??? That shit's harmfull??????? For all sides involved??????????

Remember in 1993 when Jurassic Park was like…the end all, be all of special effects?

thinking about my future as an aroace is weird cuz like.

unless you want to live alone or go about your life moving between various roommates, you're generally gonna want to get yourself some kind of domestic partner. maybe two or three if you're polyamorous and especially good at compromising and communicating. this person (or couple of people) is going to be more important to your future plans than anyone else.

even if amatonormativity and expectations of a monogamous nuclear family didn't exist, this would still happen to some degree. like if you decided your top 5 friends would be equally important in your future plans, and each of them gave THEIR top 5 friends the same importance, and so-on, then eventually you'd end up with a "household" the size of a small city and nobody would be able to agree on anything.

people who are alloromantic, allosexual, and monogamous already have this issue figured out for them. generally, (unless you both agree the relationship is more casual) it is assumed that your romantic/sexual partner will also be the one who is most important to you and will be your domestic partner in the future

and the whole idea of domestic compatibility is typically considered SECONDARY to the passion of romance. it's just ASSUMED that if you're dating you're gonna spend your lives together (if you dont break up first). you have that safety net and hardly have to think about it! (though imo, more people SHOULD think about it and question why their romantic partner HAS TO be their domestic partner too, rather than a best friend filling that role instead, but i digress)

so when you ask someone out, the main question is more of "do you want our relationship to get more intimate and romantic?" and then "do you want to spend our lives together?" is secondary, to be figured out later.

but i'm an aroace and building a relationship from that kind of passion is simply not an option for me. some aspecs get into queerplatonic relationships, and those don't have the same romantic/sexual passion of more traditional relationships, but there's still usually an expectation that your qpp will be more emotionally intimate with you than your other friends, alongside the whole "let's spend our lives together" thing.

but im a more reserved person and i wouldn't want to be too much closer to any potential partners than i already am to my best friends. so asking someone to be my partner would basically JUST be me asking "hey do you want to spend the rest of our lives together?"

that's basically just a marriage proposal right there! it feels like i cant just *ask* that of someone right off the bat! especially with how young i am! so i have no clue how the FUCK to ask anyone to be my partner because there is no intermediate "dating" relationship state for me! no middle step between "friendship" and "i wanna spend eternity with you"!

and most of the world is allo so even if i DO figure out how to make that work, my options are EXTREMELY limited.

i COULD seek out other aroaces to have that kind of relationship with, but then i'd be meeting a total stranger, skipping normal friendship, and jumping right into "lets spend time together and become friends in order to figure out if we want to be together FOREVER".

none of my friends are full aroace, so it would either be "you have to forego all romantic/sexual relationships for me" OR "let's do some type of polyamory-adjacent thing, and either your romantic partners will have to come second to me, OR me and your partner have to get along really well and be okay sharing a household, along with some heavy discussions to make sure i don't get third-wheeled by you two"

it's so confusing!!! i dont think i wanna be alone forever but like! all those options have their own drawbacks! what the fuck do i do???

Overly Honest Methods in science.

I remember posts like this being helpful when I was questioning so I thought it might be good to make a checklist of sorts for The Aro Experience:

not picking up on your friend’s crushes

not understanding the appeal of kissing

thinking about your future and being excited to live alone/with friends rather than immediately thinking about marriage

being annoyed or grossed out by romance in the media

alternatively, seeing romance in the media as formulaic, saying things like ‘these two characters will kiss once then break up I can tell from the portrayal of their first interaction’ rather than getting emotionally invested.

choosing not to read/watch something because there is romance

not getting why people say they want a relationship if they don’t have a crush at the time

your ideal romantic relationship being suspiciously similar to your ideal friendship when you think about it

being able to explain your ‘type’ with fashion style, aka caring more about clothes than looks when considering if you find someone attractive

feeling like your views on relationships are more ‘childish’ than your friend’s views are

feeling uncomfortable when family or friends ask if you’re dating/like someone, even if their questions aren’t particularly invasive

assuming other people make up their crushes to fit in or seem cool 

making your own crushes to fit in, or just mindlessly agreeing that  people all your friends like are ‘hot’ even if you don’t think so

feeling out of place and like you can’t contribute when your friends talk about crushes and relationships

thinking people your age are way too young to date, and this view never seeming to change as you get older

This is mostly from personal experience and obviously every aro is different, but hopefully this is helpful.