Splitting Attraction

“I’m asexual bisexual,” Scott, 37, told me in 2018 as we sat in the Southern California sun.

That summer I was collecting interviews for a project on gay, bisexual, and queer men’s relationships with masculinity. Frankly, Scott’s description of his sexuality baffled me. How could someone be both asexual and bisexual?

It wasn’t until years later when my research focus turned fully toward asexuality that I began to understand: Scott, like many other people under the asexuality umbrella, was drawing on a concept of sexuality often unacknowledged outside of asexual circles. Scott later clarified that his sexual attraction was asexually oriented while his romantic attraction was bisexually oriented. In this explanation, Scott, like many others under the asexuality umbrella, was drawing on the idea of split attraction.

Although this idea is common in asexual spaces, there is (to my knowledge) no research specifically on the split attraction model… until now.

This week, I published a study in Social Currents focusing on the split attraction model. You can read the article, “Splitting Attraction: Differentiating Romantic and Sexual Orientations Among Asexual Individuals,” here.

As an asexuality studies scholar, I cannot avoid encountering the idea of split attraction. Although hardly explored in academic literature, the concept of split attraction is prevalent in asexual communities.

Split attraction models frame various types of attractions/orientations (e.g., sexual, romantic, platonic, sensual, and esthetic) as operating separately from one another. They might “match” (i.e., someone might be romantically and sexually attracted/oriented exclusively to women) or they might not (i.e., someone might be romantically attracted/oriented to women but sexually attracted/oriented to men).

This conception of split orientation stands in contrast to prevailing understandings of orientation. As queer theorist Eve Sedgwick explains, “the common sense of our time presents [sexual identity] as a unitary category” in which one’s sexual and emotional feelings, behaviors, and affiliations should all align. Under this normative framework, which operates both in the heteronormative and queer worlds, knowing someone’s sexual identity also leads us to assume with whom they prefer to fall in love, cohabit, procreate, and form cultural and political communities.

Although social scientists have largely embraced the idea that sexuality is multifaceted—composed of behavior, desire, and identity—far less attention has been paid to how desire and identity can themselves be broken into differentiated parts.

In my research, I draw on interviews with 77 individuals who identify under the asexuality umbrella to define and describe frameworks of split attraction/orientation. I also put my findings and the scholarly literature related to this topic into conversation with community theorizing on split attraction. I argue that this conceptual framework reveals that, broadly in U.S. culture, sexual identity is typically treated as a “unitary category” in which “sexual orientation” and “orientation” are used interchangeably and romance and sexuality are assumed to necessarily be intertwined and aligned.

The concept of split attraction helps reveal and deconstruct sexuality as a unitary category. The concept challenges three core ideas to the model of unitary sexual categories: (1) that “sexual orientation” and “orientation” are interchangeable, (2) that romance and sexuality must necessarily be intertwined and aligned, and (3) that people’s attraction/orientation can and should be described in a single word (straight, gay, asexual, bisexual, etc.).

As a result, I consider split attraction as a helpful framework not only for scholars of asexuality but also for the study of sexuality more broadly.

Is split attraction specific to asexuality?

I suspect that split attraction is prevalent among asexual individuals not because asexual individuals are necessarily more likely to experience split attraction, but rather because prevailing unitary category models of sexuality pose unique challenges for asexual individuals.

When asexual individuals experience an absence of sexual attraction but a presence of romantic attraction, it is difficult to resolve within a unitary sexual category framework. This is particularly true given the lack of knowledge about and invalidation of asexual identities as well as the presumption that all humans experience sexual attraction.

Conversely, when a non-asexual person experiences a “mismatch” between their romantic and sexual feelings, these feelings may be more easily resolved through labels like pansexual and bisexual—or even through concepts like sexual fluidity. Thus, even though the concept of split attraction could be applied to both asexual and non-asexual experiences, the need for the concept of split attraction may simply be more pressing for asexual individuals than for non-asexual individuals.

In other words, as we introduce the idea of split attraction to people outside of asexual communities, I strongly suspect we will find that it’s useful for many non-asexual people too. Splitting attraction opens up new frontiers in the study of sexuality, intimacy, romance, family, and beyond. Let’s embrace it.

Canton Winer is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Northern Illinois University. His research focuses on the relationships between gender and sexuality, with specific focus on the experiences and perspectives of people on the asexuality spectrum.

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