The Split Attraction Model and My Experience
I’m an ambassador for the brilliant charity Just Like Us. In my role, I go into schools with other ambassadors to give talks educating kids about LGBT+ identities and topics and tell our stories of what it was like growing up LGBT+. In my case, I talk about what it was like growing up asexual as well as briefly mentioning my other identities – queer, aro-spec, gay, lesbian.
As I’m writing this, I have just got home from delivering a talk where I was asked “How can you be both asexual and gay?” It’s a good question, and one I unfortunately fumbled my way through. So, this is how I would have liked to have answered that question…
The split attraction model tells us that sexual attraction and romantic attraction are two separate experiences. For some people, these are aligned or overlap – when you feel romantic attraction towards someone, you also feel sexual attraction at the same time. If this is the case for you, you may never even think about the split attraction model or need to question your identity in this way. But for others, these experiences of attraction can be separate, or you might experience one but not the other. I personally use the labels ‘asexual’ and ‘gay’, with ‘asexual’ indicating my sexual orientation, in that I don’t experience sexual attraction, and ‘gay’ indicating my romantic orientation.
In my story I talk about getting to 24 years old having never been kissed or ever going on a date and being perfectly okay with that (because there is nothing wrong with that!). During my teenage years and early 20s I didn’t experience sexual or romantic attraction. I was aromantic for a long time, but my identity has since shifted and I now consider myself aro-spec and homoromantic, or gay.
As a romantic asexual person, when I experience a crush, it is different from what you see in the movies or read about in books. I don’t feel the ‘sparks’ people often talk about. I don’t feel a physical pull towards my crush or can’t keep my eyes off them. I don’t experience lust or love at first sight, if that’s even a real thing. And these differences can make it hard to identify when I do like someone. For example, before I came across the asexual community and this language, I thought I liked people but never enough to be acceptable, or enough to form a romantic relationship. But I have had crushes before, it’s just been without any sexual attraction. In fact, this is such a common experience among the asexual community that we have another term for it: a squish.
There are other types of attraction, too, aside from sexual and romantic. There is platonic and familial – the types of love you feel for friends and family members. There is also aesthetic attraction when you admire someone’s appearance in the same way you might admire a painting or something pretty. Queerplatonic attraction is when you are drawn to someone in a stronger way than your other friends or you want to form a committed relationship with someone but it’s not romantic. And there are other types of attraction beyond just these ones as well.
Essentially, there are many types of attraction, and these can be experienced separately from each other. Attraction is far more complicated than simply which genders do you like, and many asexual and/or aromantic people find the split attraction model helpful in describing our experiences with attraction.