you have never been sure whether you have felt it.
here is something clean to measure against.

what you’ll work through

1. the clean description. romantic attraction is a pull toward a position, not toward a body. you want to be their person and you want to be chosen back. it turns the future tense on without you deciding to. and the sharpest edge is that it does not transfer: swap them for someone objectively better looking, kinder, funnier, and you want the original back.
2. confound one, limerence. the obsessive stage is not the attraction. dorothy tennov named it in 1979 and its two features are intrusive thinking and an acute need for reciprocation. in 2005 they scanned people who had just fallen in love and what lit up was dopamine reward circuitry, the same machinery as craving. which cuts both ways: having had it is not proof, and never having had it is not proof either.
3. confound two, aesthetic and sensual. wanting to look at someone is aesthetic attraction. wanting to be physically close with no sexual component is sensual attraction. both are separately measurable, both feel enormous, and neither one is romantic attraction. this is the most common mislabel there is.
4. confound three, wanting to be wanted. being chosen is a genuinely good feeling and it is not the same feeling as choosing. it is very easy to feel someone else’s attention landing on you and file it as attraction going the other way. the test is boring and it works.
5. confound four, the obligation. elizabeth brake named amatonormativity in 2012: the assumption that everyone is better off in an exclusive romantic relationship and that everyone is looking for one. so at thirteen everyone had a crush and you were supposed to have one, and you picked somebody plausible. that is not a lie you told. it is a form you filled in because a form was in front of you.
6. the four different answers. people ask this holding one box, and there is more than one true answer. never (aromantic). rarely, or only in narrow circumstances (greyromantic). only after a deep bond already exists (demiromantic). or not at all, while still wanting the relationship (cupioromantic). these are words the aromantic community built because nothing else could hold the distinctions. they are not clinical categories and no study validates the boundaries between them, and i do not think that makes them less useful.