"Asexual people are often assumed to “lack” attraction. But in reality, many report rich and varied forms of attraction that don’t map neatly onto sexual desire.
So instead of asking “how does attraction work?,” we asked:
What do people actually mean when they say they feel attracted to someone?" "Drawing on both qualitative and quantitative data, we identified and validates seven different forms of attraction:
- intellectual
- aesthetic
- emotional
- platonic
- sensual
- romantic
- sexual
These aren’t just theoretical distinctions. Statistically, they show up as separate but related dimensions—meaning people really do experience attraction in multiple, distinguishable ways." "Our findings demonstrate that both asexual and non-asexual experience multifaceted forms of attraction.
Put differently, the seven forms of attraction our study identifies are not “ace-specific” categories—they’re general features of human attraction. But starting from an asexual lens helped us see those features more clearly."
"If you only measure sexual attraction, you miss a huge part of how people relate to each other. And that’s true whether you’re working with asexual people or not."
Here's a link to the full published paper!
Basically this study helped the researchers create a tool they call the Multidimensional Attraction Measure (MAM), to measure those seven different types of attraction in a way that can be compared across different people.
I'm gonna include some excerpts from the paper below that i thought were neat:
a common experience among asexual individuals is the absence, rarity, or conditional nature of sexual attraction, which has prompted the community to emphasize the importance of other forms of attraction, such as emotional or romantic attraction, as valid motivators for forming relationships. Importantly, these non-sexual forms of attraction are not necessarily aligned with sexual attrac- tion.
The study of asexuality reveals the significant, frequently overlooked, societal influence of compulsory sexuality, which means that sexual desire is integral to identity. This norm compels all individuals, even allosexuals, to adhere to particular relational frameworks and limits the acknowledgment of non-sexual intimacies as legitimate.