It’s weird, how attraction works when you’re aroace. I don’t really understand it all that well myself. I just know that I don’t work the way that everyone else seems to. Like, I don’t get it. These things I thought were just poetic exaggeration, I guess people truly experience.

I don’t think I’ve regarded another person who exists in the world, and thought, yes, I want to have sex with that person imminently, please. I don’t think I’ve ever looked at someone and fallen dramatically “in love” and had these dreams of being made to feel important by them. People are just… people. They’re just trying to get through their lives. Leave them alone, you know. Why project this nonsense onto them? I don’t want anyone to look at me like that. Gross. What would be the purpose of any of this? It’s so weird, like adults believing in Santa.

I mean, I guess religion is a thing for a lot of people. The unflappable reality of traditions and social order and family and all these power systems that we’re told to regard as gods unto themselves. I just, don’t get power, or desire, or status. Why? Why not be cool? Of course lots of people do know their own minds and seem to make it work for them in their own ways, and live their lives according to these sorts of interests, and sure, okay. We all gotta have hobbies. I like dinosaurs a lot. I could sit down with a person and talk about dinosaurs a while.

Anyway. I say all of this in practical terms, right. These are my dynamics as applied to the physical world. None of this really makes sense to me, and I don’t care if it does or not, really. Things don’t elicit these anticipated responses, and I have other things to think about. But, there are a couple of big caveats here that weird up the whole system. One, we’ve got this whole galaxy of tertiary attractions. Two, we’ve got everything to do with one’s inner life, which in its rules and substance really has no direct correlation to material reality.

Of the two, the harder to get my head around is tertiary attractions. I guess it’s just that hard for me to engage with the real world, right. I never interact with people, and I’m poor at abstracting out meaning from my scant awkward experiences, most of which aren’t even my own. So even here we’re working in this abstract theoretical plane, parallel to the fantasy zone (which, as I have established, is currently screaming). But, well, I guess that’s what I’m doing here to some extent. Trying to hash that out for myself a little better.

You ask the Tumblr crowd, you’ll get a thousand fine-grained ways to break down tertiary attraction, some of which seem built only to baffle or justify one individual’s very specific hang-ups. But broadly, there are a million ways to feel attraction and love besides the “Big Two.” You can enthusiastically appreciate and enjoy how darned pretty people are without feeling any compulsion to bonk them or date them. You can want to be touched and held, without those impulses. And yes, of course there’s the whole teakettle of platonic attraction.

People who are really really into the mythology of sex and romance kind of like to cast any other kind of relationship or personal attraction into this “lesser” or “other” pile they label platonic. But, uh. No, that’s frickin weird in itself, and diminishes an extraordinary thing. Everyone’s going to define things differently, but as I see it, platonic attraction is a deep and meaningful appreciation for the essence of a person: you love and respect and appreciate the fact that they are who they are, that they work the way that they do, as themselves. This isn’t about wanting them for yourself, or wanting them to do anything for you, or even wanting to do anything for them necessarily. It’s not about lust or desire or power. It’s this pure delight from recognition of the nature of another person; this glee over what makes them them.

That kind of attraction or love can exist alongside anything else, whatever other terms you might use to categorize a relationship. It’s what you get in the best of best friends, in the closest marriages, functional families. Situations where people just fundamentally adore each other—which is distinct from this broad sketch we might draw, as adults, of “being friends” with a person. Oh yeah, we get along. We talk about deeper things sometimes. Sometimes we help each other out. We have a good time when we hang out. All of which is super. But you see the significance, right, of just thinking a person is absolutely the cat’s pajamas and appreciating them as a human being, as they are, the way that they’re put together? Of having that degree of faith and trust and emotional investment in the nature of another’s being?

Platonic attraction ain’t no joke, kids. It is, if I may, the Realest Fucking Deal. It is to what a person who actually likes and respects other people as individuals might aspire, and I would imagine how one might most aspire to be regarded by others. It’s not colored by any of one’s personal garbage.

I, uh, don’t want to labor the point, but, lacking the ability to appreciate or on some level frankly fucking accept as real (??) the terms under which most people seem to pursue intimate relationships with each other, I think past partners and I have worked cross-purposes in our apprehensions. Now that I have the language these days, I’m pretty sure my understanding of all my prior relationships was something like a QPR—a queerplatonic relationship, as they’re called. I just kinda thought that’s what close relationships were. My partners all had… other, profoundly different, expectations.

They seemed to all have these stories they wanted to play out, featuring each of us as characters with particular roles and lines and independent subplots, winding around to certain present plot events and… like. I just thought my partners were neat, you know. I liked their minds. I wanted to be around them, appreciate how they did things. Study how they used words. Figure out the how, and the why, of how they were put together. Take delight in their quirks, even and especially the infuriating ones, because I thought I understood where they came from.

But then there were all the complaints about, uh. My failure to put out, I guess. And failing to take initiative to progress this plot that had nothing specifically to do with me or with them, that I could see. Not saying the right lines. All while I adored their every word. I just wanted to be constantly around them, listen to them talk, make dinner with them, do projects with them, maybe cuddle sometimes, I trusted their every judgment, no matter how ill-advised in hindsight. Including and especially judgments about me. I always want to be better.

So in no instance did that turn out well. But, there we have some pretty intense tertiary attractions at work, right. I am capable of rich and close and meaningful intimacy and affection and love for others. But I don’t get these “Big Two” attractions at all. Not a piece of ’em. This kind of an apprehension for what it means to be intimate with another—this seems to be pretty common with aroaces actually. This is why the term “QPR” exists, to describe a certain model of a close interpersonal relationship that… really isn’t accounted for elsewhere.

Someone cynical and just… I feel like, devoid of joy or interest in other human beings, would maybe say, what I’m describing is just a friendship. But, uh, no? Jesus Christ, no. I mean, yes, but, what? No. There is clearly something going on here, right. This all is important.

Again without wanting to labor dead points too much, but for context here, my ex-spouse at one point asserted very strongly that if we weren’t constantly having sex we were no different from roommates. At the time I wondered, dear, are you sure you know what a roommate is? It wasn’t until years later that the other half clicked: did they even know what it meant to love somebody?

So this is me, right—so extremely, innately aroace, before anything else to do with gender or sexuality. Just at my deepest core, we have this set of understandings of how to relate to other people, of what love is, of what affection and attraction are, that don’t map to the world. And dear God, is it lonely. I didn’t really know what loneliness felt like until about three months ago, but I get it now. And gee whiz, this actually does deeply suck.

Anyway. This is just sort of skimming the surface of any of this. But, this is how I feel toward people, when I feel a certain way. It’s so goddamned intense. I love the atoms that make up the cells in their bodies because of the particular polarity of their constituent particles. But, sex? Romance? Uh. I mean. I guess, if I were to feel that way about someone, and they were interested and, I were interested at the same time, then we could do anything together, right? Go on any kind of an adventure. But I don’t understand those things as motivating factors in and of themselves. Just, why?

So take this, and—as I seem to now be able to better appreciate—apply a lack of a real gender filter to the way I feel about people. Historically, whenever I’ve wound up in this scenario—well, there’s that awful misunderstanding, right? Coercion, even, frankly, on their part. Also it’s always been with cis women. But, those were just the circumstances. (And, that wasn’t me. That was the other person.) Both ideologically and just… by the way that I see people emotionally when I can drop all the external garbage and shame, I don’t distinguish by that kind of triviality.

So when I say I’m pan-aroace, that’s what I mean. It sounds like a contradiction when we assemble these discrete terms, but there is a consistent throughline to my perspective, I think, toward other people and what I find meaningful and important, and toward what’s just noise.

At least, that’s the practical end of it. When you actually climb inside my head, where something deep within me and outside of my control determines the fabric of the universe, things kinda, uh, look different. Strictly unto myself for example, divorced from material concerns or the agency and individuality of real people with their own emotional landscapes, yeah, absolutely, fuck town central up in there. Some times are stronger than others. Right now, biologically I’m wired like a 17-year-old girl—and thus does my sensibility abide.

In the midst of this second, exponentially more aggressive, puberty, the clamor is loud and distracting and bewildering to a degree that I am unaccustomed, as familiar as I am with the differences to the worlds inside and outside my skull. It’s wet and sticky and shameless. There are fixations, there are interests. There are feelings. There are physical manifestations of arousal (which gee whiz, works very differently for me than it did for them). But, basically none of this bears any relation to reality whatsoever, to any person who exists. It’s all the raw theory of emotion, if you will, untempered by concerns of practical application. Sometimes it will latch onto some scrap of an anchor, like a fictional character who hits some mix of aesthetic and ideological ideals or fascinations. Or a hypothetical other; some might-be entity who can act in the eternal maybe of my mind.

And yeah, in that realm of the hypothetical, which really has never mixed well with reality in any of my experiences on this planet, and just seems bizarre to me to regard in anything like the same way, those much more visceral attractions also very much occur ungendered—sort of. Which is to say, one will fixate. One will specialize. Different genres of ideas will come and go. And, uh, I think I’ve made it clear enough which specific details are giving my mind its dopamine of late. Those details absolutely are gendered. And, one will have certain lasting favorites.

The thing is, being unable to experience or really understand sexual or romantic attractions for the other doesn’t mean those same impulses can’t reach absurd degrees of resonance inside one’s imagination. Ultimately that’s the home for all of this stuff, to squirt with impunity. From observation, this seems to be pretty common with others on the asexual spectrum. There’s so much going on upstairs all the time, but there’s such a disconnect between that and the outside world, that it’s the perfect cauldron for the most salient and spicy of art.

So that’s the other part to being pan and aroace. Inside it’s just gonzo, profane wonder. Outside, it’s this earnest joy in the being of another—not necessarily chaste, but uninflected by personal desire or expectation. It ain’t about me, right. It’s about how neat they are.

In my case, uh. Yeah, it is chaste. Because in practical terms, sex is gross and upsetting and it makes me want to die. But, that’s beside the point. I don’t even know how much of that is even innate and how much is unresolved trauma, and again I’m not in any real rush to deal with it. It’s never going to apply to anything. I can pick it apart over decades, as I feel able.

So I think, having put it all in order, in so many words, that all makes a lot more sense to me now. What does it mean for me to be pan and aroace? Well, that. It means that. What does it mean for me to be aroace and have these feelings that have been making me melt lately? There’s the start of it, at least.

Almost certainly not the end, though.