sexual and romantic attraction are NOT the same thing

Quick question. When you say someone is straight, what do you mean? That they're sexually attracted to the opposite sex or romantically attracted to the opposite sex or both? And I think most people would say both because most people never really separate the two.

And for most people, the two just come together and fire together and they're always connected or at least that's how they feel they are. But I recently learned that they are very different systems and understanding that, in my opinion, is very important because it affects how we interact with everyone we know. In 2015, researcher Canton Winer published a study based on interviews with 77 asexual individuals. The finding was something that the asexual community knew for years, but the academia finally started to catch up on it.

Sexual attraction and romantic attraction operate separately. They can align and for most people they do in most cases, but they don't have to align. And this is called the split attraction model. And the concept actually goes back to 1879.

And there was a German writer named I will read this, Karl Heinrich Ulrich. Hopefully I didn't mess it up. He published classifications of attraction that separate romantic with sexual. So, this is not new.

We've just been kind of ignoring it for over a century. So, basically your sexual attraction describes who you're sexually attracted to, men, women, both, neither, but your romantic attraction describes who you fall in love with, who you want to date and who you want to build a romantic relationship with. For most people, maybe for you, they both point in the same direction. You're sexually attracted to women and you fall in love with women.

So, you call yourself straight and you never think about it. But for millions of people, they point in actual very different directions. And when they do, everything just starts getting very confusing unless you have the vocabulary to understand what's happening with you and your relationship. So, let me give you some examples and what real people experience.

These are real experiences. By romantic asexual, that's me. I fall in love with both men and women. I want to date men and women.

I want romantic partnerships, long-term relationships, but I do not experience sexual attraction to neither men nor women or anyone for that matter. You can be biromantic heterosexual. Someone who falls in love with people regardless of their gender. They could develop romantic feelings for anyone, but only experience sexual feelings for people of opposite sex.

Homoromantic bisexual. Someone who only falls in love with one gender, but is sexually attracted to any gender. They might enjoy physical intimacy with people of any gender, but they only want a romantic long-term relationship with the people from their own gender. Aromantic heterosexual.

And this one confuses a lot of people. Someone who experience attraction, sexual attraction to the opposite sex, but doesn't want to be in a relationship with them. And they never fall in love. They don't get crushes.

They don't do romantic things. They just simply are in a sexual relationship. These are not theoretical categories. These are people experiencing real experiences.

I do talk a lot about relationships in my life. And every single one was told by their cultures that they have to pick one label. You're straight or you're gay or you're bi. You cannot be separated.

And none of these labels fit properly because they don't really split the two types of attractions. I think a lot of non-asexual people, allosexual people are in the blind, in the dark when it comes to the split attraction model, but I do think it's kind of a shame. I think it's quite useful. Like understanding that they can be separate even though for you maybe they align is actually a very powerful way to understand yourself.

Have you ever been sexually interested in someone that you had no romantic interest in? That's the split. Your body wanted them and your heart didn't. And I know for a lot of people, for example, in the US this is more or less normal, but in different cultures this is not normal.

You will probably be very confused when something like this happens to you. Have you fallen in love with someone that you're not sexually attracted to at first? Have you ever had a deep, intense, strong relationship of friendship with someone that confused you because you didn't want to sleep with them, but you still felt like they took such a big part of your life and you want them in your life for a long time. That's the platonic and also the romantic attraction operating somewhere in a gray area.

And the split model gives you some sort of a language for that. Most people feel these things and they dismiss them. They say it's weird. I don't know what that was.

I must be confused. Or I'm feeling something very weird. Maybe it's I'm not healthy. But you're not a confused.

You're experiencing something very normal. It's just a natural independence of these two systems that our culture told us that there's just one system. For me, the split is kind of a defining feature of my life, especially romantically, because my sexual orientation is essentially kind of silent. I look at my partner and I see someone who I love deeply, who I'm fascinated by every single day, and who I could have a lot of conversations, and I love his presence.

But I do not feel the sexual pull that most people describe. That magnetic of I want your body. Maybe I want to feel hugged. I want to feel pulled close.

I want to be held, but it's not what you might think it is. And for years I didn't have any vocabulary around that. I didn't know what I wanted. I didn't know what I needed, and I didn't know this relationship would even exist, because I thought love and sexual desire is the same thing, but it's not.

I think understanding this also relates to how you relate to your partners, too, because statistically speaking, chances are that your attractions do not align. Because statistically speaking, a lot of people that are watching this video probably also because you clicked on it means that maybe your romantic and sexual attractions don't align perfectly. And instead of asking yourself, "What do I want?" or asking your partner, "What do you want from me?"

you can ask yourself, "Huh. Maybe my needs, sexually and romantically, are a bit different. And they don't have to be insanely different. They can just be like a tad different that causes the confusion in your life that maybe you haven't really figured out yet.

Instead of, "Are you attracted to me?" it becomes, what kind of attraction do you feel? Do I feel sexual attraction? Do I feel romantic attraction?

And there's also a lot of other attractions that you can feel. And I made a video about that. How do we make sure that both of our needs are met when these different attractions apply? If you do this, and this study also proved that if you communicate clearly what kind of attraction you have and what kind of needs you have, then you're going to be way less likely to start performing an attraction that you're not feeling.

Because a lot of people feel the pressure to perform attractions when they're confused. So, you have a sexual orientation, but you also have a romantic orientation. And they might be the same, and they might not be the same, but this video is just a bit of information and a reminder that you can look into it and see, hmm, maybe there's some differences in there in your life. Anyways, you're not confused, you're just exploring your understanding yourself, and it's better late than never, and it's not your fault because most media do not show us these different types of ways of interacting with people.

And people are so different. We can have so many different relationships with so many different people, and it's sad that we always put relationships in a box. It's either friendship or you're romantically and sexually involved. I hope you enjoyed this video, and if you did, then I'm sure you're going to like this playlist, too.

And if you want to comment down below about your experience and share insights in your life and what you've noticed, then I would love to hear them, and I'm sure everyone else watching this video would love to hear them. So, please, please, let's build a community where we are open to talking about all of these things because if we don't build it, then it's never going to exist. I love you guys so much. Have the best of your life.

Kisses. Bye-bye.