I believe I may have hit a breakthrough. And perhaps I might adjust how I identify based on this. What?
Previously, I have discussed the difficulty in separating out romantic and platonic. There is no universal demarcation. But I did specify that I would want to have a romantic relationship with somebody only if I literally wanted to spend the rest of my life with them.
Similarly, there is some difficulty separating out the romantic and the sexual spectrum. To some people, they are the one and the same; to some they are completely separate; to most, it is probably something in between.
I’m going to try to tie the romantic vs. sexual and romantic vs. platonic together as I try to fully unpack my orientation.
I have always known that I am not aromantic because I have had crushes, I have had infatuations, and I have been in love. I haven’t considered myself demiromantic because there have been instances when I have been eager to develop emotional intimacy. I knew I was asexual, because my crushes and infatuations have not been sexual in nature. Now the question is whether my crushes and infatuations were romantic or platonic in nature. (I could generalize and say a platonic crush is a “squish”, a term used by the ace community.)
The answer is that it was a mixture of both. I have had many intense infatuations with people whence I was giddy around them, I thought about them a lot, I went out of my way to spend time with them and do things for them; but despite all of that, I didn’t necessarily wish for a future in which I could spend the rest of my life with them. So it’s not quite in the romantic camp. But I don’t know if I put this in the platonic camp either. I usually don’t associate this feeling of giddy infatuation with platonic connections. I have plenty of strong platonic relationships in which I love the person and would go out of my way to help them, but I am not actively impatient to spend time with them. So, these crushes and infatuations are somewhere in between romantic and platonic; I don’t have a word for it, so this is where I will bring in the term squish. I will call them squishes.
Now I will address gender. There is a strong gender correlation when it comes to crush vs. squish. I have had infatuations for people of both genders to various extents. But I have generally had crushes only on males and squishes only on females. Generally. I have had squishes on males. And there is one particular female I have felt I would be happy to spend the rest of my life with. So it’s not a perfect r=1 correlation, but I imagine, the r is rather high.
So, when it comes to males, what causes me to have a crush vs. a squish? I don’t know… what causes me to have a crush vs. not or a squish vs. not? There’s no model to predict that. I can hypothesize all I want, but I will not find very strong correlations here.
It has been clear to me for quite some time that I am much more comfortable in non-romantic contexts rather than romantic ones. That is why I tend to be much more comfortable around straight women and gay men, or married men. (I have not had the chance to spend too much time with gay women, unfortunately. It actually is rather unfortunate, because I have a friend who is a lesbian, but we just have not had the chance to spend much time together since she has been publicly out.) Around single straight men, I get very anxious because I don’t know what they are thinking and if they make romantic gestures I get extremely uncomfortable.
This has confused me in the past, especially in cases where I have had a squish on a male person. Somehow I had not considered the fact that I had a squish rather than a crush and I couldn’t understand why I wasn’t receptive to romantic attention. Now it’s starting to make sense. The women on whom I’ve had squishes were never romantically interested, so I have had a much easier time developing emotional intimacy; but with men, developing emotional intimacy takes a long time.
So perhaps I am demiromantic. I would need to have a strong emotional connection before I can develop romantic feelings for someone. And my crushes and squishes and infatuations are NOT romantic feelings. My romantic feelings are whether or not I want to spend my life with that person.
Next, I can question whether I am demisexual or not. This one is tougher because I have exactly one data point to work with. All I can say from that one experience was that romantic feelings were not the one and the same as sexual feelings, but the romantic feelings paved the way towards sexual feelings. I have no way of knowing whether any future romantic feeling will also naturally lead to sexual feelings. This one person may have been a special exception in my life for all I know. Just because I have felt sexual feelings for one person in my life does not mean I am no longer asexual. This may have been the exception rather than the rule.
I will conclude that perhaps I’m mostly asexual and a little bit demisexual; but I am probably very much demiromantic. However, at the same time, I can form close emotional ties that are platonic in nature, or somewhere in that gray zone between romantic and platonic. Emotional intimacy is easier to achieve in non-romantic contexts; but in rare circumstances, they can also form in romantic contexts.
As you have noticed, I have not arrived at any definitive answer. Yet, I feel so liberated. Somehow subconsciously I was expecting to fit a mold such that I could perfectly predict my behavior, but now I realize that I can’t because Nature Is Random! I don’t need to worry about trying to figure out whether my feelings are romantic or platonic or get confused when they are somewhere in between. And I am just not going to worry about whether I can ever develop sexual feelings. I will know what to expect on average, and I won’t freak out if I happen to deviate from that average. And when I Know, I will Know.
Tushmit's Stream of Consciousness 
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When you talk about having “crushes” on males and “squishes” on females, are you using “crush” to mean “romantic infatuation”? Or are you still not sure whether “crushes” are romantic or not? What’s the difference between a “crush” and a “squish” in this context?
Excellent questions! This post is part of my (still) evolving thoughts about what is the difference between romantic and platonic. I write one every time I think I’ve figured it out, but I inevitably get confused again pretty soon thereafter. In this post, I was indeed thinking of a crush as a “romantic infatuation”, or more specifically, as I figured out later in my “Romantic vs. Limerent” post, I was thinking about limerence.
I think the difference between a crush and a squish to me could be the presence of absence of “limerent glimmers”. Before I was aware of the term squish, I used to get confused between these two types of feelings because they were similar yet different in ways I didn’t have words for. When I learned the term squish, it was helpful to have a way to distinguish them, but I was also confused about which ones were crushes and which ones were squishes. Discovering limerence helped with that distinction somewhat; but I’m still exploring.
Currently, I’m thinking that instead of trying to draw generalizations between crushes and limerence, it might be helpful for me, in the future, to think about them as “limerent” vs. “non-limerent” crushes. However, this is still an evolving thought process, so we shall see!
Okay, thanks. I’ll keep reading.