noncon romance. is this anything.
Confessions on the brink of death a character accepts out of kindness because it won’t matter soon anyway, but then the other person doesn’t die, the other person expects them to carry through on their promise to love them and gets angry when they try to back out. Blackmail held over someone’s head just to force them to flirt and make romantic advances on another person, so it looks like they wanted this relationship. Talks about marriage and happily ever afters together as a threat. “I love you, I love you, I love you” as a violation that you’re expected to smile at and be grateful for, because you’re supposed to want to be loved. noncon romance.
adding to this: feeling love against your will. love forced on you by some power beyond you. love that you know you wouldn’t feel if you weren’t blessed (cursed) by it. love that you don’t want and is ruining you and that everyone keeps praising you for feeling. love that everyone around you gets mad at you for rejecting anyway. love that’s made so overpowering that it wipes out any semblance of “you” that there is to make way for a thing that will love someone back.
funniest part of this post is how many people reblog it tagged something like “this sounds aromantic” or “op not to derail but aromanticism” and like well guys you’re never going to believe why i find forced romance such a horrifying concept-
as someone who’s probably mostly aromantic in terms of real life, and has stayed in real relationships much longer than I wanted to…. and has also fallen in love very hard and very suddenly, several times, with fictional characters….
The first example (feeling like you have to act like you’re in love because you said it once) is very very often how real relationships go for a long time. because the actual feelings often fade pretty fast but they’re supposed to last forever according to society
And I am pretty sure the second example (“feeling love against your will”) is how love always works when you do actually feel it
like, you can arrange circumstances to try and encourage or discourage a feeling… but I can’t imagine a scenario where it’s possible to Make yourself feel an emotion, or stop feeling an emotion, through pure will
(The only person I ever knew who seemed to be able to do this, and used to get annoyed at me for not being able, recently had a breakdown and now says she has several dozen DID alters that were trauma-generated by putting them in charge of repressed feelings)
Sometimes the part about how it’s “ruining you” and making you unhappy is true and sometimes it isn’t, but that’s ALSO not something you control
(society sure as hell loves to pretend it’s all in your control though. And that every time they don’t like anything about what you’re feeling, or not feeling, it’s Completely Your Fault.)
(Which is why people fake feelings so much, but that’s also considered a Bad Thing To Do so you better not ever let them find out, lol)