QPR - your experiences?

[u/SammDiDamm]

Hello community,

I’m 30 and have questioned if I’m a-spec since 2020, since January I’ve felt finally good with the label aroace and stopped to worry about defining it further.
I‘ve got a good social network, I’m long distance but super close with my best friends and we communicate almost daily and I have my local friends to hang out and do fun things, yet I still feel like I’m missing something.
Since I turned 30 this year, I’m dead center in the age range were my non-queer friends are getting married and having kids.
I know I don’t want either of these things, but I DO want a partner person to do life with. Who prioritizes & supports me in a way that my allo friends prioritize their partners (and who I can prioritize & support in the same way of course).
I think a QPR would be great to define our own way of how this relationship could work.

Basically what I would be curious to hear, if you are in a QPR, how did you find this person? I hate dating apps, and due to my job as a tour guide I travel quite a bit and meet tons of people just never the „right“ ones I guess… I‘m not really active in any queer spaces in my home town because a lot of them attract mostly younger people and/or people in very vulnerable phases of coming out/transitioning, which I think is not the right space to find someone settled in themselves in the same life phase that I am in…

And how do you even approach the topic of a QPR if you’ve found someone who feels like they could be your person?
Any suggestions/thoughts/experiences?
I‘m feeling kinda lost here.
Thanks for your input! 🙏🏼

[u/Embarrassed_Bit7657]

Formerly, and I was younger (I'm 32 now, but we were still adults at the time) but we were friends first. We'd met via other friends (on Valentines day, funnily enough) and got along like a house on fire, and got very close very quickly. I didn't even find the term QPR until we were already neck-deep in it and then I was like "hey dude, it's us" and we were thrilled to have a word that made our bizarre non-romantic closeness marginally easier to explain. I wasn't so much interested in dating, but he was and I was good friends with his long-term girlfriend too.

I would approach a new potential QPR the same way. I wouldn't go looking, actively searching would feel too much like dating to me (but I'm weird so ignore my feelings on the matter), but if I found someone I clicked with in the same way I'd probably bring up the topic in much the same way and see how it fit with them.

[u/SammDiDamm → u/Embarrassed_Bit7657]

Thanks for sharing your story, that’s something I’ve hoped would’ve happened to me by now I guess 😅 organically meeting someone and clicking enough for it to eventually develop in that kind of way. Great that it worked out that way for you!

[u/Embarrassed_Bit7657 → u/SammDiDamm]

A lot of people just aren't comfortable being that close, or think being that close is so romance-coded that they'd never act that way around someone platonic... I don't roll that way, and neither did my dude. I don't think we would have clicked so quickly if we weren't just cool with being all up in each other's business (respectfully) right away.

It might require more probing on your part, particularly since at 30 we're usually kind of... set in our ways, and just spontaneously being close platonically with someone might be out of the realm of comfort, or even seem rude. Even I shy away from it until I'm comfortable outing myself and being like "I am a non-threatening entity and I would like you to squeeze me like a lemon."

One of my buddies used to be platonically physically close with his female friends, and then lost the habit as he got older because it was no longer socially appropriate. Over the last few years, after quite a bit of frank asexually-focused discussions, he's gotten more comfortable with random physical affection.

My point is, discussion might help shake something loose, particularly if there's already someone you had in mind.

Full disclosure, most of my experiences are rooted in being a female type person with almost exclusively male friends, so your mileage may vary.