It’s April! With enough thought, you’ve decided you’re ready to meet someone new. But who exactly do you find attractive? And on what spectrum do these feelings correspond to? We typically identity as either straight or in the LGBTQ+ community, which is then used to understand our range of attraction. But what many people haven’t considered is that romantic and sexual attraction can very much be different and vary for everyone. This idea came from the asexual community, which separated the two to describe how they still experienced attraction, but on different levels. Let’s look at each:
Romantic Attraction: An emotional response that most people feel, and often results in a desire for a romantic relationship with the person that the attraction is felt towards.
Romantic Orientations: Heteroromantic, homoromantic, biromantic, panromantic, aromantic, etc.
Sexual Attraction: Attraction on the basis of sexual desire or the quality of arousing such interest. Sexual attractiveness or sex appeal is an individual’s ability to attract the sexual or erotic interest of another person, and is a factor in sexual selection or mate choice.
Sexual Orientations: Gay, lesbian, bisexual, queer, pansexual, asexual, etc.
Other Useful Terms to Know:
Demisexual/demiromantic: Describes someone who usually doesn’t experience attraction until a strong emotional bond is formed. It pertains to either sexual or romantic attraction.
Gray-A: Describes someone who doesn’t experience attraction often, but may experience it sometimes. It pertains to either sexual or romantic attraction.
One important thing to know when familiarizing yourself with these levels of attraction is that one can find themselves in different areas, which is completely normal. Your understanding of your romantic attraction doesn’t have to correspond to your sexual attraction. Someone can be asexual and panromantic or bisexual and greyromantic. It all varies and depends on what makes the most sense to you. And understanding your levels of attraction on each spectrum will be beneficial in communicating your feelings to a potential partner and coming to better terms with your own personal identity.