Couple things:
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I do not think that your sexual relationship has to be your primary relationship: in fact, if you look over most of hte world’s histor,y the evolution of your sexual relatoiship to your primary relationship is a pretty recent phenomenon. My grandparents were not friends. They were lovers, they were co-parents, they were partners in their business, but they were not, from everythin I hear (my grandfather died when I was very young), friends. They grew up in a time and place where gender roles were very strongly assigned and enforced by social pressure, and for friendship they both loked to memebers of their own gender or to their mutual children. It was not a bad relationship, and I am not going to disparage that relationship as being less than my own for all that it is fundamentally different. In fact, in an objective way I can see that seperating the “co-parent” relationship from the volitile “person you most want to please/keep happy” relationship actually has a bit of sense in it, for all that I could never live that way.
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I am also confused by what you mean when you say “romantic”: do you mean lust? Lust was certainly present in the early stages of our relationship (though not from the momment we met: it took some time to grow).
Do you mean feeling like the other person is the center of the world and you couldn’t live without them? We’ve never felt that: in fact, we’ve actively striven to make it clear that in the event of tragedy, the survivor would be just fine: there would be lots of pain and grief, of course, but life would go on, we would recover and eventually even move on to new romantic relationships.
Do you mean that stage of a relationship where you don’t really know each other and everything feels new and unformed? We rushed through that as quickly as possible. We both really wanted to get into the settled in stage as quickly as possible.
Do you mean the trimmings of romantic love? Flowers, gifts, poems, songs, etc? We’ve never gone for romance: my SO has never written me a poem (though he’s a poet), has never given me flowers, has never said he loved me. We got married at the courthouse and told everyone after the fact.
But I’ll tell you something, we have as strong of a relationship of anyone I’ve ever known: the respect, the admiration, the kindness, the caring, the enjoyment and the lust are consistient and mutual. So if you mean all those types of things when you say “romantic”, then yes, we have a romantic relationship. But by most conventional yardsticks we do not and never have had. Thank God.
