There is a relatively famous Seinfeld episode—and aren’t almost all of the episodes famous now?—in which the main character, Jerry, develops a romantic, but not a sexual, crush on a major league baseball player he meets (Keith Hernandez). The humor of the episode emerges from the fact that Jerry begins to behave toward Keith as he might toward a female romantic partner (e.g., infatuation, jealousy, feeling spurned). The episode illustrates how humans have the capacity to decouple romantic from sexual attraction. It also illustrates that one’s romantic inclination (e.g., to a man) may, in fact, be in contrast to one’s typical sexual orientation (e.g., to women).
This distinction between romantic and sexual attraction may seem clear, but the two kinds of attraction are, as most people realize, also intricately related, and they often overlap. After all—Jerry’s romantic fling with Keith Hernandez notwithstanding—one’s romantic attractions (e.g., to men) are usually the same as one’s sexual attractions (e.g., to men). So, if I lust after Bob, I very well may also have romantic feelings for him; indeed, I may even love him. This is partly because these two attraction processes influence one another, so a sexual infatuation may ultimately turn into a romantic bond lasting a lifetime, and a romantic bond may lead to sexual attraction. Lisa Diamond (2003b) suggests that this latter sequence—love followed by lust—is more likely to occur in women than in men.
You may be thinking, The complex relationship between romantic and sexual attraction is interesting, but what does it have to do with asexuality? Well, nearly everything, actually. One of the main definitions of asexuality is a lack of sexual attraction. In the first study examining asexuality in a large national sample, which I conducted in 2004, asexuality was defined as never having felt sexual attraction to men, women, or both (Bogaert, 2004; Bogaert, 2006b). AVEN (Asexuality Visibility and Education Network), the largest website devoted to asexual issues, also defines asexuality as a lack of sexual attraction. So, many asexual people have no sexual attraction to others, meaning that there is no “lust lure” for others.[4]
Does this mean that asexual people are not romantically attracted to others? The answer to this question—“not necessarily”—should be clear, given our discussion of the distinction between romantic and sexual attraction, and the fact that they can be decoupled. As mentioned in chapter 1, a lack of sexual attraction is not the same as a lack of romantic attraction, and asexual is not synonymous with aromantic. Some asexual people demonstrate that you can have one without the other. So, if one defines asexuality as a lack of sexual attraction to others, one should also be aware that it is not necessarily defined as a lack of romantic attraction to others. As also mentioned in the opening chapter, asexuality allows us to understand sexuality, and the distinction between romantic and sexual attraction is a good example of this. Sex and romance are often linked, but not inextricably so.
I often get media requests a few weeks before Valentine’s Day to discuss sexuality research. A discussion of human sexuality makes for an interesting news story, generally speaking, but it is pure gold on February 14. In early February 2010, I had a slew of reporters asking about the distinction between romantic and sexual attraction, and how it relates to asexuality. Can there be love without sex? And vice versa? For some reason, that year the media requests were all from Spanish-speaking countries—Spain, naturally, and a number from South America. I did one telephone interview for a national radio show in Colombia, using a translator. I was asked whether the decoupling of sex from love was a modern phenomenon. I suggested that, although it is not a new phenomenon, its manifestation (or how this decoupling plays itself out in human behavior) may take different forms, depending on the time period and the culture. As an example, I explained the relatively modern Western trend of people hooking up and maintaining “sex-only” relationships. To describe this trend, I used the rather indelicate but often-heard phrase fuck buddies. The interview ended very quickly after that, my assumption that this broadcast was not a live one (and thus could be edited, if deemed necessary) being, evidently, incorrect.
The distinction between romantic and sexual attraction is important, but its full implication is not recognized. For example, some definitions of sexual orientations not only include a sexual attraction component but also a romantic (or equivalent) one. Take the well-used textbook on sexuality, Understanding Human Sexuality (Hyde, DeLamater, & Byers, 2009). This text defines sexual orientation as a “person’s erotic and emotional orientation towards members of his or her own gender or members of the other gender” (p. 431). This definition goes beyond “erotic” or what would be termed “sexual” attraction and includes an emotional component, suggesting that romantic attachments are important to how we define a sexual orientation. In some sense, this type of definition is a broad description for one’s “gender” orientation for love, sex, or both. And it is true, as mentioned above, that romantic and erotic attachments are often closely linked. But including an emotional/romantic element in the definition is also problematic, because (as mentioned above) these types of attraction are separate phenomena, and some people don’t have sexual inclinations that match their romantic inclinations.
In fact, I think that people often use their romantic inclinations to guide their self-identifications about their sexual orientation. So even if they do not have sexual attractions to one sex or another, their romantic inclinations toward one sex or another determine whether they self-identify as homosexual, heterosexual, or bisexual. I think this is often the case for asexual people, particularly if they are not “out.” Young and/or closeted asexual people may still self-identify as, say, heterosexual when asked on an anonymous questionnaire about their sexual orientation, even though in a vague sense they may not feel that this label fully captures who they are as people. Again, in some sense, such people may understand “sexual orientation” more broadly to include their love/gender orientation. If so, the true number of asexuals (i.e., those lacking in sexual attraction) may be underestimated (Bogaert, in press-a; Chasin, 2011). From my perspective, these “romantic” asexual people don’t have a (traditional) sexual orientation, although they do have a romantic orientation. Interestingly, many contributors to AVEN, who are privy to and often discuss the latest scientific work on sexuality, have recently picked up on the romantic/sexual distinction, and have begun to self-identify in the complex way that this distinction engenders. So, for example, it is not unusual for an asexual person to say that he is asexual but biromantic, or that she is asexual but heteroromantic.
Let’s move on to the other A: arousal. This usually refers to the physical aspects of one’s sexual response, or what happens in the genitals when sexual stimuli are encountered (e.g., stroking of the inner thigh, or imagining a sexy scene). So this aspect is less psychological, at least in comparison to attraction, and more physical, referring primarily to bodily responses such as erections and vaginal changes (lubrication). Because these physical changes are detectable, there has been a tradition in sexology of researchers measuring psychophysical sexual arousal. The man who pioneered the technique in the 1950s was Kurt Freund (sounds like Freud but isn’t), a Czech/Canadian who was primarily interested in seeing if men were gay or straight. Later he used this technique to measure deviant arousal in male sexual offenders. The original device used to measure physical arousal was a specialized elastic tube placed around the flaccid penis, which measured changes in blood flow as a man gained an erection. Still later, in the 1960s, a psychophysical device—a tampon-like cylinder inserted in the vagina, also measuring genital blood flow—was developed for women. Today, these techniques, or modern variations of them, are relatively widely used (at least among sexologists!) to assess sexual arousal in men and women in a variety of circumstances.
4
For someone to be considered asexual, I think the lack of sexual attraction should have endured over a long period of time. For example, in my original study, a person was defined as asexual if he or she