(“Lesbian?” “The other L word.” “Lesbians???”)

To make things brief, you can peep my post history for the full context if you’re truly interested. I’ve (24F) been dating my S/O (27M) for 5 years now, open from the start. We cohabitate, co-pet-parent, and are in a standard “riding the relationship escalator” relationship. It’s going pretty damn great.

I’ve also been seeing Comet Partner (24M) for like 6 years on and off (we meet approx. a couple of times a year), and we’ve been friends for almost a decade. We’ve had our ups and downs, but that dynamic has been strictly FWB, with heavy emphasis on friendship. That’s also currently going pretty well.

Semi-recently, I came out as aromantic (again, see previous posts). I’ve always found it personally difficult to differentiate between “romantic” and “platonic” feelings, and thus I have stopped bothering to do so. Nothing in any of my relationships, romantic or otherwise, has fundamentally changed. Just because I’m aro doesn’t mean I don’t love people, haha.

Anyways, Comet and I have a little meetup coming up. I’d like to be able to better express how I feel about him, if it does come up and he feels comfortable with it, using a certain three word phrase. You know the one. The one with the L word.

Recognizing that this specific phrase has a LOT of (probably unnecessary) societal weight attached to it, I asked S/O well in advance if he’s comfy with me using That Phrase with my other partners. He… is not. And that’s fine! Not my most desired outcome, but it’s workable and it’s also a part of why I bring up potential friction points way before they arise. We had a productive discussion, I was able to establish an exception for weird edge cases (like, if one of us is getting wheeled away in an ambulance or getting sent off to war or something lmao). Plus, I can (and do) express my love for my partners in all kinds of other verbal or physical ways aside from saying That Phrase. All is well.

But then I realized, dear god, what about the extremely unlikely occurrence that a PARTNER says those words to me first??? There are, like, ZERO truly good ways to respond to “I love you” that aren’t “I love you too.” Either I have to hide what I truly want to say to my partner (which is in fact “I love you too”), or I have to have a horribly awkward roundabout conversation about the agreements my S/O and I have set (poor relationship hygiene! mess!), or I can say it to partner and then HIDE THAT from my S/O (fuck no, that defeats the purpose of being transparent and negotiating agreements in advance!!). It’s a lose-lose-lose for me.

After that revelation, I asked about an exception clause for that specific type of scenario and was turned down. On one hand, I’m okay with that and will totally respect my S/O’s personal comfort level with that. It’s not world-ending. Comet is awkward, avoidant attachment AF, and pretty emotionally-closed-off, so the odds of it happening in THAT dynamic are quite low.

On the other hand, I have diagnosed anxiety and just the thought of being potentially in that one specific horribly awkward situation makes me a little bit ill :”) also I have other partners who play a little faster and looser with that kinda mushy stuff. I don’t want to put myself in a corner here.

Idk Reddit, what do you think? I want all of y’all’s opinions, since S/O expressed interest in reading some comments together if I did ask the internet about this. Not to change minds, just to get other perspectives.

[Inb4 “break up”: this is not that serious lolol. I don’t have a huge relationship-ending problem with my S/O having Feelings about specific intimacy/“romance” rituals (especially since I’m otherwise basically given free rein to do whatever the fuck I want), and I’m happy to discuss and negotiate agreements around those feelings. This is just one of those scenarios where we each bring different perspectives to the table, and that causes a low-stakes disagreement since we can’t fully see where the other person’s coming from.]