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Everyone grew up trying to understand relationships. Most humans understood human relationships better; they simply couldn't empathize with trolls in that regard. Similarly, most trolls completely failed to understand how humans didn't feel a particular way.
When you were younger your best friend was a troll. You had known each other for years by the time you started hitting puberty, and you both saw people all around you—humans and trolls both—struggle through relationships.
"What's it like?" you'd asked her one night over a game of Risk at which you were losing spectacularly.
"Kicking your ass? It's pretty great," she responded with a grin, and you rolled your eyes.
"Come on, we were just talking about this, you know what I mean."
Her forces occupied Ukrane and she shrugged, not looking up at you. "We were talking about a lot of things. Remember how you need to remind people what you're talking about before you change the topic?"
"Yeah, yeah, I'm the king of non sequitur, I remember," you grumbled, putting your cheek in your palm and counting out your new troops. There was a pause while she looked up at you expectantly. "… I meant the kismesis thing."
She hesitated, playing idly with the dice. "You know how sometimes you talk to someone and they're the most frustrating thing in the world, and you just want to punch the look off their face?" You nodded, because yes, you knew that feeling very well. "Well it's kind of like that. Except it's also like… you really just want to kiss them so hard they'll shut up, and you want to prove them wrong with everything, and be better at them at everything, and…" she struggled with words again.
"So it's like… being really competitive and not very sportsmanlike."
She sort of laughed a little, awkwardly, and shrugged. "I guess. It's really hard to explain. I don't know if you'd get it." There was a silence, but it wasn't the resigning kind of silence: it was the "I don't think you're done explaining" silence, and you kept watching her.
"… It's your turn, Dave." You just scoffed.
"Come on, you were trying to tell me what it was like."
She blew air out of her cheeks and leaned back on her hands. "… Yeah. I guess it is kind of like being really competitive. But there's something different. I mean, if you want to beat someone at a game or, I don't know, be better at a sport or something, it's different. That's just 'I want to be good at this and you're in my way.' Feeling black for someone is like… 'I just want to see the look on your face when I win and rub it in your face by making out a lot.'" She paused again and then groaned and collapsed on the ground. "That sounded stupid."
You laughed and reassured her. You've got this. You get what she's saying.
She didn't believe you, but the strange thing was, you were pretty sure you really did get it.
You weren't much of a movie person, let alone a romantic movie person, but you started watching them. Movies centered around kismesis relationships—healthy and unhealthy, trying to get a feel for it. You weren't sure if it was just your own conditioning, but before long you didn't have to rely on the summaries or the in-story explanations: when something was wrong with a pair you knew, you felt that gut-clenching feeling of "no no no, you idiot, what are you doing, get out of there." The stranger part of this was that you didn't feel that for all these relationships, as you should. Most humans would watch this and have a hard time really grasping it, but you watched these, the movies with the healthy black relationships, healthy hatred, healthy rivalry, and your chest would twist almost pleasantly.
It wasn't happy, all soft smiles and long deep sighs of contentment, the way you expected love to feel. But it felt… right. Sometimes you would watch those movies, watch the pieces fall into place for a couple, and there was this feeling like "Yes, you finally got it figured out, you've been fated for each other all this time and this is perfect."
You didn't tell your best friend about this, because you didn't want to be labeled a romantic.
You realized with slow dread that that's what you were.
A couple of months after she had first tried to explain all of this to you, the two of you were engaged in a particularly exciting racing game. It went from friendly shouts of discouragement to kicking shins for distraction to practically wrestling while still playing—and you were almost to the finish line and she was just ahead of you, so you punched her.
The action caught up to you a second later, when she was glowering at you with a hand over her cheek, and you're not entirely sure who actually won the race because then you were kissing.
When you pulled away, both wide-eyed, you noticed she had some of your hair under her nails, and you tasted blood that was distinctly non-human.
Someone said "Fuck," and at the same time someone else said "shit," and you distinctly remember running for the bathroom and noticing her running somewhere else.
When you got out of the bathroom she was gone, and you weren't exactly surprised. You didn't talk to her for two weeks.
The two of you finally made up, and explicitly decided not to spend as much time together lest something like that happen again.
Still, the feeling lingered: how it felt biting through her lip and how satisfying it had been to punch her in the face just to win a stupid game.
You knew you just wanted to be her friend, but when she found a kismesis you felt angry and…
Betrayed.
It hadn't been something you had expected to feel, but somehow it seemed like she had been taken away from you. Your other troll friends had found matesprits or kismeses, and you were fine with those. With her, somehow, it just felt wrong.
You're not sure what ever happened to her, because you couldn't bring yourself to be around her after that.
You've tried not to feel that way about anyone since.
No troll will believe you can, and so no troll will ever accept you in that quadrant.
You watch instead. You see the way they interact with each other, see new relationships developing and unhealthy ones straining under the weight of stale hate.
You saw Terezi and Vriska struggling long before they noticed it themselves.
And then you saw the way Vriska started sneering at Eridan, and the way Kanaya looked at them both and kept a strategic place between them at all times.
You saw the way Tavros' big blue-blooded pit crew guy tensed a certain way in the presence of the commentators—they were never apart, you couldn't tell which one he was reacting to—and heard the vitriol in their voices when they spoke of certain riders.
You knew better than to hope they would talk about you like that.
Sometimes you remember your best friend and wonder what would have happened if you both hadn't run away.
You have the feeling it wouldn't have been a particularly stable relationship, but you can't help but pretend it would have been perfect.