the glossary · vocab cards
the words for what you’re feeling
every concept, bias and bit of vocabulary i lean on, defined plainly, in one place. these are the cards that pop up across the field guide.
concepts 15
-
concept
An involuntary, obsessive state that feels like love: intrusive thoughts, a hunger for reciprocation, and a charge that gets stronger with uncertainty and weaker with security.
what is limerence? → read: is it love, or limerence? → Tennov, Love and Limerence ↗
-
concept
Excessive affection, attention and praise early on, used to create emotional dependency. The tell isn’t the warmth, it’s the pacing: too much, too fast, for a person who can’t possibly know you yet.
what is love bombing? → read: love bombing, and why it works → Love bombing ↗
-
concept
Reward delivered unpredictably rather than reliably. It’s the most persistent conditioning pattern known, which is why hot-and-cold treatment is harder to leave than steady coldness.
what is intermittent reinforcement in relationships? → read: love bombing, and why it works → Reinforcement schedules ↗
-
concept
Intimacy plus commitment without the fire, in Sternberg’s model. The calm, chosen, long-haul love people keep mistaking for settling. It’s not the absence of feeling, it’s a different feeling: steady instead of loud.
what is companionate love? → read: is it love, or just comfort? → Sternberg, triangular theory of love ↗
-
concept
comfort · in a relationship
Staying because leaving is harder than staying. It feels calm because nothing is wrong, but nothing is really alive either. Easy to confuse with love, because love is calm too. The tell is direction: comfort is avoiding an exit, love is choosing a person.
what does comfort mean in a relationship? → read: is it love, or just comfort? →
-
concept
The honest sharing of your inner world, the fears and hopes too fragile to say out loud, met by someone who receives it without judgment. It needs both halves: you disclose, and they respond well. Comfort in the same room is not the same thing.
what is emotional intimacy? → read: the five types of intimacy → Reis & Shaver, intimacy process model ↗
-
concept
An attachment style marked by a fear of abandonment and a pull toward inconsistent partners. The obsessive-thought machinery that limerence loves to borrow.
what is anxious attachment? → read: is it love, or limerence? → Attachment theory ↗
-
concept
An attachment style that copes with closeness by creating distance, valuing independence and pulling back when intimacy deepens.
what is avoidant attachment? → read: your type is not your type → Attachment theory ↗
-
concept
split-attraction model · SAM
The idea that romantic and sexual attraction are distinct and can point in different directions, the backbone of the whole field guide.
what is the split attraction model? → read: which orientation combination are you? →
-
concept
romantic friendship
The historians’ name for intense, physically affectionate, openly loving friendship that a culture treats as ordinary. Common between men in the nineteenth century, and understood to sit alongside marriage rather than compete with it.
read: why you never tell your friends you love them → Rotundo, Journal of Social History (1989) ↗
-
concept
A way to spot aesthetic attraction: like a sunset, you want to look and nothing else, there’s no next step, the looking is the whole event.
what is the sunset test for attraction? → read: aesthetic attraction →
-
concept
Sexual desire that arrives in response to arousal or closeness rather than spontaneously. It shows up after you get close, not before. A common pattern, not a dysfunction.
what is responsive desire? → read: sexual attraction vs sexual desire → Basson, 2000 ↗
-
concept
coercive control
A pattern of control built out of pieces too small to report: isolation, monitoring, and rules about ordinary life. Evan Stark called it a liberty crime, because what it takes is your freedom of movement inside your own life rather than your physical safety.
read: emotional abuse that doesn’t look like abuse → Controlling or coercive behaviour, s.76 Serious Crime Act 2015 ↗
-
concept
gaslighting
Manipulating someone into doubting their own account of what happened. Paige Sweet’s argument is that it is social rather than psychological: it works by reaching for a stereotype the world already holds, so the doubt does not have to be built from scratch.
read: emotional abuse that doesn’t look like abuse → Sweet, The Sociology of Gaslighting (2019) ↗
-
concept
DARVO · deny, attack, reverse victim and offender
The three-step move a person makes when confronted: deny it, attack the credibility of the person confronting them, then swap the roles so they are the wounded one. It is why you can go in with a hurt and come out apologising.
read: emotional abuse that doesn’t look like abuse → Freyd, DARVO ↗
biases 3
-
cognitive bias
The wired instinct to repay what we’re given. Excessive early generosity registers as a debt, and repaying it invests you in someone long before you’ve decided to be.
what is reciprocity bias? → read: love bombing, and why it works → Reciprocity (social psychology) ↗
-
cognitive bias
We come to prefer things simply because we’re exposed to them repeatedly. A lot of “chemistry” is really just proximity and familiarity.
what is the mere-exposure effect? → read: why you like who you like → Zajonc, 1968 ↗
-
cognitive bias
misattribution of arousal · the shaky-bridge effect
We mislabel where a bodily feeling comes from, reading adrenaline, nerves or fear as attraction to whoever happens to be nearby.
what is misattribution of arousal? → read: why you like who you like → Dutton & Aron, 1974 ↗
words 12
-
word
limerent object · LO
The specific person a limerent state has attached itself to. Often more of a screen for the feeling than its real cause.
what is a limerent object? → read: is it love, or limerence? →
-
word
When intelligence is a primary trigger for attraction. For a small share of people, a brilliant conversation does what physical appearance does for others, and the reward centres fire in response to how someone thinks.
what is sapiosexuality? → read: the five types of intimacy → Sapiosexuality ↗
-
word
A platonic crush: the urgent, nervous wish to be close to someone with no romantic component at all.
what is a squish? → read: the friend crush & the 200 hours →
-
word
The desire for emotional closeness that is neither platonic nor romantic, something orthogonal to both. Contested, and useful anyway.
-
word
queerplatonic relationship · QPR
A committed relationship that doesn’t follow the norms of romance or ordinary friendship, its own category of closeness.
what is a queerplatonic relationship? → read: alterous attraction → Wikipedia ↗
-
word
Experiencing sexual attraction only after a strong emotional bond has formed. One point on the asexual spectrum.
what does demisexual mean? → read: sexual attraction vs sexual desire →
-
word
gray-asexual · gray-a
Sitting in the grey area of the asexual spectrum: sexual attraction that’s rare, faint, or only under specific conditions.
-
word
aromantic · aro
Little or no romantic attraction. An aromantic person may still feel sexual attraction. Being aromantic and being asexual are two separate things that can come apart.
what does aromantic mean? → read: which orientation combination are you? →
-
word
varioriented · cross-oriented
When your romantic and sexual orientations point in different directions, like being biromantic and heterosexual. Community term from the split attraction model.
what does varioriented mean? → read: which orientation combination are you? → Split attraction model ↗
-
word
When your romantic and sexual orientations line up, aimed at the same people. Most people are perioriented, which is why they rarely notice the two are separate systems.
what does perioriented mean? → read: which orientation combination are you? →
-
word
The desire for non-sexual physical closeness: holding, cuddling, hand-holding, being tangled up with someone. The touch is complete in itself, not a step toward sex. One of the seven types of attraction.
what is sensual attraction? → read: i want to be touched, but not like that →
-
word
Someone who does experience sexual attraction. The word exists so that "not asexual" has a name of its own, instead of being treated as the default that needs no label.
what does allosexual mean? → read: what demisexual actually means →
studies 2
-
study
It takes roughly 50 hours to make a casual friend, 90 to a friend, and 200+ to a close one, which is why adult friendship is so hard.
how many hours does it take to make a friend? → read: the friend crush & the 200 hours → Hall, 2019 ↗
-
study
A set of escalating questions shown to build closeness between strangers through mutual self-disclosure, proof intimacy can be built deliberately.
what are the 36 questions that lead to love? → read: why we should fall in love slowly → Aron et al., 1997 ↗
come think with me
one word a week.
that’s the whole letter. one word for a feeling you’ve had but never got a name for, and the reason it works that way. nothing else in it.
- one letter a week, about a ten minute read
- all nine printable workbooks, free
- the research, with its caveats kept in
- hit reply and it reaches me. i read every one
no pressure, no spam, no gatekeeping. unsubscribe anytime · riadumitrescu.substack.com
all of this is free and it stays free. if it gave you a word you didn’t have, you can buy me a coffee.
if you want to work it out on paper
the words for it
every word here stays free and stays here. the workbook is the same thinking in one order, with ruled space after every question, because the point is not what i think, it is what turns out to be true for you once you write it down. 47 pages, two files, one to read on a screen and one to print.
get the workbook · $12see what is in it
you get the next version free, which is how i can ship this one and keep working on it.