Copy-pasting my better Tumblr posts to this blog - Part 6 of 8

[everythingisoptional]

I’m annoyed that the word “romantic” refers to such COMPLETELY DIFFERENT THINGS as “romantic feelings” (i.e. crushes, lush symphonies playing in your head when you see a person, etc.) and “romantic relationships” (i.e. having someone be [one of] your “partner[s] in life” either short-term or long-term). It currently seems obvious to me that the disparity between these two senses of the word is quite huge, although the seeming obviousness of this is probably mostly hindsight bias. It took me an embarrassingly long time to even notice the disparity at all, and an embarrassingly even-longer time to notice its hugeness.

(omitting the remainder of the original Tumblr post as it's less interesting)