a field notebook · ria · she/her
there’s a word for
what you’re feeling.
you justhaven’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 seven kinds of attraction, the research behind them, and the words that finally fit.
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 isme handing you
the words.
the seven kinds
seven. and you
have names for three.
- sexual wanting sexual contact. one of seven, not the main event.
- romantic wanting to build a life with someone.
- aesthetic you find them beautiful and you want to do nothing about it.
- sensual wanting to be held with no interest in where it leads.
- intellectual you want their mind, not their life.
- platonic the friend crush. everyone has them. nobody names them.
- alterous closer than a friend, not a crush, no word for it until now.
pinned from the channel
-
7 types of attraction most people don’t know exist (from an asexual) 177K views -
how to know it’s not love, in 76 seconds 176K views -
what the world looks like without sexual attraction, in 3 minutes 45K views -
how to tell if you like someone or just want to be their friend 23K views -
sexual attraction and romantic attraction are NOT the same thing 11K views -
3 feelings you’re confusing for love, in 90 seconds 11K views -
my boyfriend thought asexual meant I couldn’t be touched 6.3K views -
asexuality: the video I wish existed when I was 15 5.3K views
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.
what i keep thinking about
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. i’m writing a book about all of it, called Not the Same Animal.
— riathe correspondence
one letter a week — the words as i find them, and the essays on the way to the book.
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