I mentioned in my last post that my intention was to talk about romance more often, and more generally talk from personal experience rather than making generalizations, so here we go.
What it means for me to "be romantic" is actually kind of a hard question to answer, in spite of how much I've thought about it over the years. I still consider romance to be its own emotion that's distinct from feelings of friendship or sexual attraction, and I don't know how to describe an emotion to someone who's never felt it; all I can really do is hope others have had the same feelings and know what I'm talking about.
But when I think about other feelings it's connected to, or actions I've taken in response to it, I do feel like I can sort of separate it into two distinct periods of my life: Before I actually got together with someone (outside my own head), and after (which also roughly lines up with when I started transitioning, at least in terms of "life proportion").
I guess it makes sense to go in chronological order, so let's start with the period before I ended up with @Princess-Flufflebutt.
So... I was a fundamentally lonely person for a long time. I don't intend this to be a downer post, so I don't want to focus on that aspect of my life too much, but it can't be removed from how I perceived romance, and still do. For me, the idea of being in a relationship was a fantasy used to escape from that fundamental loneliness, and so the emotions I associate with romance are connected with that.
A lot of my old fantasies were about two loners who stumble across each other, immediately like each other, and start traveling together. Or two people who grow up together and run away from a hometown where neither of them fit in. And these are two people who have trouble trusting, but desperately want to trust, and so it's also connected to fantasies of the tension of testing the waters of opening up about their emotions and realizing more and more how they're actually safe with each other and genuinely care about each other.
...I say "two people" like it's just whoever, but obviously one of the two people was always me.
I did fall in love with the idea of a story of two people other than me, though, a couple of lesbians (which I couldn't have been a part of because I definitely wasn't a girl or anything, ha ha). This was still a story about two people who wanted to be with each other and didn't know how to open up to each other, but it was more because they didn't fully understand what it was they were feeling--too caught up in assumptions of heteronormativity to realize that what they were feeling for each other was romantic love (which couldn't have been me because I wasn't in denial about who I was, ha ha).
This wasn't a pair of loners, though. Well, one of them was, but the other one was good at getting along with others and had lots of friends. The friendly one was kind of oblivious to a lot of things, though, so she was balanced out by her friend who was more introspective and thoughtful about things. So while the friendly one knew how to offer a connection, the more reserved one knew how to actually build that connection.
I was self-aware enough to eventually realize that the reason I was so enamored with this story was because I wanted to have a relationship like that... but I concluded it would make more sense to focus on cishet fantasies instead, and that's where I suddenly started struggling to come up with ideas, to my dismay. It wasn't until ten years later where I was already experimenting with my pronouns and such that I suddenly remembered this old life experience, and it did a lot to contribute to cracking my egg all the way over to she/her.
...So it's kinda funny, now, that while I fantasized about being picked up by a gregarious girl to help me overcome my isolated loneliness, I feel that transitioning turned me into the gregarious girl, and now I have a very reserved girlfriend. But I'm also still the main one who's already done most of the introspection and deep thinking about what being in a relationship means, and I did my best to bring that into the relationship once I got together with her.
So it's not what I pictured, but it makes sense to me anyway. I still feel safer sharing emotions with her than with anyone else, because she's so calm and sweet. She's still an oasis in the middle of the arduous desert of people and life in general. In the moments where I recede back to my old emotions, and I feel like I'm alone in this world, I still see her as being there with me--and so we're alone together, just like my old fantasies brought to life. But she still helps me get back to a place where I can connect with others again, too.
That's probably enough for now to provide a starting foundation for my thoughts and feelings on these things. Maybe next up I'll talk some more about how the two of us, specifically, make connections to each other.