a field notebook · ria · she/her

there’s a word for what you’re feeling. you were just never taught it. attraction, asexuality, love and its counterfeits, friendship and loneliness, the interior life nobody gave you the vocabulary for.

you just
haven’t met
it yet →

i make videos and essays about attraction, asexuality, and the psychology of how we love, want and connect, the interior life nobody handed you the vocabulary for. this is where it all lives: the handful of things i keep circling, the research behind them, and the words that finally fit.

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what i keep circling

five things, really.
i just keep at them.

the premise

most people sort every human feeling into three boxes, friendship, romance, sex. the other four don’t disappear. they just go unnamed.

and unnamed feelings are the ones that cost you: the friend you escalated into a crush and lost, the ache of finding someone beautiful and being told you must therefore want them, the person who is genuinely your person and will never be your partner and has no place to stand.

language isn’t decoration. it’s the instrument you use to have the experience at all. without a word for a thing, you can still feel it, you just can’t hold it.

the whole site is
me handing you
the words.

start here · the flagship

the seven kinds

seven. and you
have names for three.

read the field guide, one chapter at a time →

the research

this isn’t a
personality quiz.

every claim on this site has something under it. this is the shelf i’m reading from, start anywhere.

the seven attractions, measured: 2026, Sexuality Research and Social Policy, 691 people, asexual and allosexual, tested for whether these categories actually hold up as distinct. they do. doi: 10.1007/s13178-026-01340-7
limerence: Dorothy Tennov, Love and Limerence (1979), the name for the state we mistake for love: the wanting that gets stronger when they pull away. the test is on the romantic page.
two hundred hours: Jeffrey Hall, University of Kansas (2019), ~50 hours to a casual friend, ~90 to a friend, 200+ to a close one. why adulthood gets so quiet, and why the friend crush is the fuel.
alterous, squish, queerplatonic: the vocabulary ace communities built out of necessity, words for the closeness that is neither friendship nor romance. contested, newish, and more useful than most peer-reviewed terms.
what asexuality actually is: AVEN, the network where a lot of this language was first worked out. if one of the three boxes is empty for you, you notice the other two are carrying too much.

if you’d rather watch

or skim every video as a card →

a note on who’s writing

i’m ria. i’m asexual, which forced me, early, and out of necessity, to work out that attraction isn’t one thing. it’s several, and most people only ever name a few of them.

so i make videos and essays about that: attraction, asexuality, love, and the psychology of how we connect. i’m usually somewhere else while i do it, tokyo, jaipur, wherever i’ve wandered next. this site is me writing it all down, one piece at a time.

ria