I'm beginning to wonder what romance is as well, after gaining close friends, especially one very close friend, who considers everything I once considered romantic to be just friendly interaction. That was kinda the catalyst for me to start wondering what it is a relationship can even offer me if I can have friends like this anyway.

Ah, don't worry, I wasn't trying to defend myself. More trying to understand my own feelings via comparison. Because I know that for some reason I do still want and enjoy romantic relationships, but I don't know why, since I get so much from my friends. It makes it difficult to know when somebody would be a good romantic partner for me because I don't know what I want from them in the first place, as evidence by the fact that all my exs have ended up making better friends for me than partners.

I think it's a bit of both in my case. I have a lot of popular friends, and that happens to turn a lot of heads my way and make some people insecure around me, but I also act unintentionally rude quite often, which I've been making an effort to fix, and I've been told by some people that it does make me look stuck up until people get to know me and realize I'm not rude, just very autistic.

I do have that resting bitch face (if you can see my profile picture, that's evidence enough.) I also have a habit of being unintentionally rude on account of autism. It causes most people who interact with me to really quickly turn away because I give off the vibe that I don't wanna be around them, even when I am enjoying their company. I end up being unintentionally popular anyway though because most of my friends are very popular, on account of them being so social even my unintentional rudeness couldn't turn them away. And naturally having a lot of popular friends turns heads in my direction as well.

As far as sexual reasons go, I don't really need that myself. I'm not exactly asexual, I'm sexually attracted to people, I just find it's easy enough to take care of that need without a partner.

Losing friends to relationships though, I haven't ever had that happen. I just become friends with their partner too and absorb them into my friend group.

Although I found out that way through some of them that apparently I give off a really intimidating aura. Apparently I give off the vibes of "the popular girl who refuses to associate herself with the peasants" as somebody said. They tend to be pretty shocked I had any interest in being friends with them at all.

I can see that perspective, and maybe subconsciously it is that stability I'm looking for, especially because I've gone through 2 separate traumatic events that resulted in me losing every friend I had, the second, the only person who stayed with me was my ex, who I was dating at the time.

I guess though I kinda feel like I have achieved some level of stability even without a relationship. That ex I just mentioned is still a good friend, and he and his girlfriend talk constantly about trying to move closer to me, because at this point they both consider me more of family than just a friend.

And it's like that for most of my close friends. I've got some that come and go, but my tightknit inner circle seems here to stay at least, at least for a very long time. I can see the appeal of wanting somebody to be there for my entire life though. Granted, the only people I can think of that I want that out of are the friends I already have, but on account of the fact that my friend group is practically composed purely of exs and people who've rejected me romantically already, it seems I'll have to look elsewhere. Although that's kind of a sad prospect to me, that I don't get to choose any of them to stay by my side forever.

The long story short:
Fell in love with somebody, she rejected me, but we ended up becoming very close friends anyway. Now she's going through a medical crisis and has been leaning on me a lot to get through it emotionally. Besides emotional support, I've been reminding her that even as friends I still love her, in fact a lot more than before. Hearing that she says has cheered her up a lot and really helped.
I don't take it her answer will change given her reasons for rejecting me, but I've come to realize I don't need it to as much as I thought I did. It's enough for me that my love for her makes her happy. That's all I need.

So I'd say in spite of everything seeming like it should be going wrong, I'm having a great week, and I'm going to try to keep having good weeks so she can rely on me to help her through whatever she needs.

Don't really need photoshop. It's not all that hard to get a setup like this working with cheap converters from Amazon. It's whether somebody's grandma who refuses to upgrade from a TV that old would know how to do it that's the questionable part, but it's not impossible somebody set it up for her.

The most cathartic moment of my entire life was when I encountered that exact thing in a thread from over a decade ago expecting that to be it and lost all hope, only to find somebody replied calling them out and telling them to share their solution or future googlers were gonna be very upset. They posted their solution and it did, indeed, work.
Don't even remember what the issue was, but the wave of relief was amazing enough that I still remember the feeling to this day.

If that's accurate then I got old way faster than I thought I would. At least I can take solace in the fact that I'm probably on the younger end of Lemmy users.

All therapy I've received thus far has been simple talk therapy. I was supposed to receive CBT at one point, but the therapist ended up needing to drop me because she didn't have enough training in my combination of issues to properly address the problem. I have an anxiety disorder (what anxiety disorder is currently unknown, but GAD runs in the family.) I have schizoaffective disorder, which is well controlled with meds, but still results in me being more irrational than normal sometimes and more depressed that normal others. I might have PTSD, but that's not diagnosed, just something my psychiatrist has brought up multiple times. The same for BPD, which they have difficulty diagnosing because the symptoms overlap extremely heavily with schizoaffective. On the less severe side, but still effecting how effective therapy is for me, I have autism and ADHD. On top of everything else, I've been known to display symptoms of dissociative identity disorder, but not enough to get diagnosed.
Very few therapists can deal with all of those issues at once, so I've had trouble finding any. I currently don't have one, and am on a waiting list to find a new one, but due to my combination of issues it's taking dramatically longer than usual.

My bar for a relationship right now is literally just that they don't flee when I cry about something stupid, and that they don't yell at me when I tell them they're scaring me and triggering traumatic memories. Both of these things would seem like obvious things almost anybody could provide, but when I'm crying constantly or trauma is getting triggered multiple times a day, even the best people walk out, or snap. Because my emotional outbursts are triggered by constantly feeling like I'm reliving old traumas, even when there's literally no reason to feel that way. 99% of people don't have the emotional fortitude to reassure me every day that no, they didn't suddenly decide today that they secretly want to destroy my life. Presented with fears of betrayal enough times, I've never been in a relationship where they didn't finally snap and become convinced that I thought they were a terrible person. My first ex became convinced that they were a terrible person and that must be why I constantly fear betrayal. Another ex ended up calling me a crazy bitch because they thought there was no way I was constantly having these thoughts and didn't genuinely believe them to be true.
The most recent friend I made is the only one I've found who was able to handle it flawlessly. Most times, she found it really easy to simply reassure me it wasn't true, and if I crossed and boundaries, she'd simply tell me I had so I could step back for a minute and reevaluate myself. She never blew up at me. She never fled because my emotions were getting too intense. And most importantly, she never blamed herself for me having irrational fears about her. That's a rare combination to have all in one person.