Unraveling sexual attraction

“Sexual attraction” can honestly be a very difficult subject to grasp.

Romance is complicated, sexual attraction even more so

If you ask twenty different people to define “sexual attraction” off the street randomly, you are guaranteed to get twenty different answers. However, despite this, we always say “(blank) orientation is sexual attraction to (blank)” like we, as a society, have magically always known what “sexual attraction” is.

In my quest to dig into this, I decided to use Merriam Webster’s dictionary website. When defining the two words individuals (“sexual” and “attraction”), we find that according to this dictionary, “sexual attraction” (when we combine the two definitions) means “sexual attraction can be defined as finding sex acts or sexual relationships attractive to yourselves, you feel an innate force/desire to engage in sexual activities with someone”.

While we as a society don’t put overt pressure on knowing “who” you are, there are a lot of hidden social pressures. We see LGBTQ groups (Facebook, social groups in person through clubs like high school and college, etc.), as well as LGBTQ themed merchandise (flags, clothing, pins, etc.) that explicitly show pride in whatever orientation the person is (asexual, bisexual, pansexual, just to name a few). We see blogs all over the internet (Tumblr, Wordpress, etc.) that show pride relating to specific orientations.

This can make a lot of the internet’s younger audience (pre-teens, teens, young adults, etc.) feel a lot of pressure to “figure” themselves out. As a person in their late twenties, I tell my readers to please do not feel pressured to figure themselves out. Many people don’t learn until they’re well into adulthood. It is okay to say “hey, I thought I was XYZ orientation but it turns out I’m actually ABC orientation”.