Are there any other terms. I’m just curious
Love begins with a notion; lust, with an image. If you’re sexually attracted to someone, it’s fairly obvious - you like the way they look. Something about their hair, their face, their ass, legs, penis, breasts, vagina, etc. etc. Sexual attraction means you want to be with that body.
Romantic attraction is all about the person in that body. The way they talk, the things they like and dislike, their interests, their goals, fears, little quirks that make them human. You could envision yourself spending a lifetime with this person outside the bedroom. Romantic attraction means you want to be with that person.
There is, of course, room for bleed and considerable or even complete overlap between those two circles - and the circles move. People get old, life happens. People change their minds and move on from old passions to new interests, life happens. Sometimes you find yourself liking someone you couldn’t stand when you were younger. Sometimes, tragically, you grow apart from someone you loved, or they grow apart from you.
What a lovely way to describe the difference. I really liked your opening line 💜
sexual: do you want to have sex with the person? romantic: do you want to have a deep connection with the person? Live with them? Share feelings with them? Listening to their feelings?
As someone who experiences both (…and even limerence unfortunately): It’s different for everyone. It’s tough for me as an autistic person to sort it out. How are you supposed to describe feelings with words when the difference between them is minor, nuanced, and still somehow huge?
Personally sexual attraction is pretty straightforward. Someone’s physically attractive. Might not immediately be WOW I WANNA HAVE SEX WITH YOU but combine a physical presence and, uh, yeah. Sometimes thirsty brain’s gonna thirst.
The trouble with romantic attraction is if I’m romantically attracted to someone, sexual attraction kinda just happens and I wonder if it was already there or not. First time I realized I was bi, it was after years of a crush on a close friend I didn’t even realize was a crush. It was recognizing the sexual attraction that made me realize what it was. What was it while I was filtering that out? I idealized them, I wanted to be more like them and pretty much saw them as a better person than me, being around them and helping them out was emotionally fulfilling. …Then it was still that but also I got the butterflies in my stomach and oh, shit, they’re super attractive actually. Oh, shit, existential crisis bus ride.
Sexual attraction, I want to “sleep” with them. Romantic attraction, no seriously I want to sleep with them regardless of euphemism.
I want to add that I’ve been led to believe that for many people who experience romantic and sexual attraction, kissing someone or cuddling them can start up a desire to “go further,” to add tongue and groping genital areas and eventually end in sex.
I am asexual, but I have experience with romantic attraction. For me, I’ve always been satisfied with kissing and cuddling. It doesn’t cross my mind to maybe start turning the encounter sexual, and I definitely do not want this to lead to sex.
Also, some asexuals are totally okay with and may even seek out sex. The key thing that links all asexuals together regardless of how often we seek out sex or how much we enjoy it is that we don’t experience sexual desire. Think of it like you can not be hungry for food (not experience sexual desire ever), but choose to consume it anyways because it tastes good (choose to have sex because it feels physically good) or because it makes your partner happy. You could accurately say that you like food but don’t ever get hungry (like sex but don’t experience sexual attraction). Except in this case, it’s an actual valid orientation and not a reason to get checked out by a doctor the way you probably should if you’re never hungry.
There are also some of us who do experience a libido, a sex drive, but it still won’t make us look at a person and think “I’d tap that.” We might satisfy it with sex or masturbation, but the key difference is that we don’t feel that same strong impulse to have sex with someone else that other people describe as being so intense it’s a “need” and a passionate longing for their object of desire.
I saw a comment further down where you’re trying to learn more. https://www.asexuality-handbook.com/home.html is a pretty nice resource.
I’ve always considered myself a hetero person, but now I’m a bit curious because I always assumed asexuality was mutually exclusive with physical intimacy. I definitely get aroused by the opposite gender, but the thoughts never lead to full on sex. Usually, I want to cuddle with that person, maybe get a bit handsy, and at most engage in some lightly kinky acts like shibari. When I do have sex, it’s all about making the other person happy. With that out of the picture, it’s no more satisfying than a particularly good jerk sesh.
It’s caused some anguish in relationships. I almost never initiate outside the unspoken context of “Oh we haven’t had sex in a while, better do that before the relationship falls apart.” and it often feels like the juice isn’t worth the squeeze a lot of the time once you factor in how long it takes and cleanup and being all gross and sweaty afterward. The idea of people wanting to go through that trouble more than once or twice a week is unfathomable to me.
I always thought that my lack of sexual desire was some dysfunction from too much porn as a teenager or something, but in hindsight, I don’t think I ever jerked it to anything featuring penetration between two people and I don’t remember ever being particularly interested in it. Even vanilla non-nude pics of fine looking ladies always did it for me way more than any hardcore porn ever did.
I’m wondering if this tracks with some form of asexual better than it does with heterosexuality?
You sound at least somewhere on the asexuality spectrum.
The capacity to be aroused ≠ sexual attraction, although they do often go together (especially if you get aroused at the sight of people instead of needing physical stimulation to make the parts respond) so I wouldn’t completely toss away the arousal data. However, I did read a study about conditioning marmosets to be aroused at the smell of a lemon, so it might be extensible to humans and you might have just conditioned yourself into arousal at the opposite gender. “People find this hot, I should try masturbating to it,” you stimulate yourself into arousal, eventually associate the opposite gender with sexual satisfaction and get aroused at the sight of them. Also, I’m kind of suspicious of this study because after they finished the conditioning, they observed erection rate after exposure to lemon scent, but not erection rate without exposure to lemon scent: sure, the erection rate is high for lemon exposure, but how do we know this is any different from no lemon exposure? However, lots of other similar studies were done that I didn’t bother to check out. And it’s still true that arousal ≠ sexual attraction. They just go together a lot. Even with your arousal at the opposite gender, you might be asexual. I’m just very used to hearing regular arousal at a certain gender as an allosexual experience instead of an asexual one. https://www.asexuality-handbook.com/faq/whats-the-difference-between-sexual-attraction-and-arousal.html
Also relevant that I’m ’strictly’ asexual, I have zero sexual desire, never have urges to have sex with another human, if you think of the asexuality spectrum as a line segment with “asexual, zero sexual desire” at the left endpoint and “allosexual, sexual desire” at the right I sit on top of the left endpoint. I’m as far from allosexual as you can be. But I do experience arousal from a certain trigger that makes me want to masturbate. Not to have sex with anybody. But it’s not from anything sexual at all. It’s something more along the lines of seeing a specific YouTuber teach math, without any desire to see them naked or in any kind of state of undress. It’s not actually that, but you get the idea. Does involve a human, makes me aroused, but aside from that it’s not sexual whatsoever.
I can’t tell you what you are, and to be honest I’m not sure where the desire to get handsy would put you, but to me you don’t sound fully hetero, you sound somewhere on the asexuality spectrum.
sorry, i’m a bit confused- how is arousal at the sight of someone not sexual attraction? what even is sexual attraction then?
Thanks for the detailed response, it’s definitely given me some things to think about. I guess the best way to describe it is that when I see someone who presses the right physical attractiveness buttons for me, I still get some less-than-pure thoughts. It’s just that the specific act of having sex with that person isn’t ever on that list, even when it’s totally on the table.
It’s mostly that I still have that drive to do other things to satisfy my libido that the asexual label never really clicked in the past. Maybe it still doesn’t fit. But definitely good to think about that stuff once in a while.
There are many different kinds of attractions. Some that come to mind:
- Sexual: you want to have sex
- Sensual: you want to touch them
- Emotional: you want to share feelings
- Aesthetic: you like how they look
- Platonic: you like the idea of them
- Romantic: you want to share a deep knowledge of each other
- Intellectual: you want to discuss stuff with them
…and probably some more that I’m missing.
I think it’s important to note that many of these overlap with each other as they are socially defined, as opposed to defined by action. Even among the action defined ones like emotional and sexual, what falls into what people consider “sex” or what feelings are on or off the table because of existing relationships and desires, are all malleable to an extent.
Romantic is the most socially defined among this list, and broadly overlaps with all of these categories. It’s also the category among these I struggle the most with, as I don’t do well with broadly/loosely defined social concepts, especially those that often come from the experience of a feeling (gender is another example of these). It’s less likely that one person’s definition of an intellectual connection/attraction would differ significantly from another human, but much more likely that romantic would.
At the end of the day, language isn’t perfect. It’s a way for us to communicate abstract ideas with some kind of structure. Ultimately you need to ask someone what romance is to them, to understand whether that’s something you’re interested in, and then have a conversation with the person about what kind of romantic connection they are on board for.
Is it possible to just have one type? I have never had a crush, I have never looked at anyone ever and got turned on or thought about sex with a specific person; but I would literally have sex with anyone if they initiated it because I like sex for pleasure. Is that just a sensual type of attraction or just seriously fucked up?
I think they’re just non-exclusive, so any relationship is likely to have a mix of some degrees of more than one kind of attraction, and one can lead to another or change over time.
Communication is definitely the key. It’s hard to convey all the nuance in a single world, or even a set of words. Like, once I saw someone refer to themselves as “bi-sapioromantic”… which kind of answered some questions, but raised others. Another time, a couple people seemed to hit it off… until one of them said “before we go any further, can I see your ankles?.. no, that wouldn’t work, sorry”. I don’t know what their deal was, or whether there even is a word for it, but at least they communicated effectively.
