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Topics: Dating trends, Sex and Relationships, Community
Anish Vij
Topics: Dating trends, Sex and Relationships, Community
While many people experience romantic and sexual attractions regularly, others find themselves in the 'gray areas' of these spectrums.
Grayromantic and graysexual are two terms that help explain how some individuals experience attraction, under specific and often different circumstances. Although both sets of people face two key components - romantic and sexual attraction.
The difference between the terms, however, are important to be aware of when identifying which one best suits an individual.
After all, feelings towards sex and attraction are a very personal thing, and can mean different things to different people.
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Over the years, sexual identities such as 'demisexual' and 'aromantic' have come to our attention, but when it comes to grayromantic and graysexual, they both fall under the asexual spectrum.
Graysexual refers to people who experience sexual attraction rarely, under limited circumstances, or with low intensity.
Buddy, a graysexual man, explained to Vice last year said he's had sex a lot but only for the benefit of the other person.
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"I have had sex quite a bit, though, because I developed the mentality that if you don’t sleep with people, they won’t like or love you," he said.
"So if I wanted to have relationships, I had to bite the bullet and go through the motions, whether or not I enjoyed sex, to make sure my partners were happy."
So, being grayromantic is when individuals rarely experience romantic attraction, and only in specific contexts, often with weak intensity.
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It sits between aromantic (little to no romantic attraction) and alloromantic (typical romantic attraction) on the spectrum.
An easy way to think of it is grayromantic people have rare or conditional romantic attraction, whereas graysexuals have rare or conditional sexual attraction.
“Graysexual describes people who identify somewhere between sexual and asexual on the sexuality spectrum,” Keygan Miller, Public Training Manager at The Trevor Project, told Seventeen.
Ted Lewis, Youth and Families Director at the Human Rights Campaign, added: “The asexual, graysexual, demisexual [identities] is a great example of different degrees of the same concept.
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“But that doesn’t have to do with the person or the gender of the people that you’re attracted to.
“So someone can be both graysexual and gay, or graysexual and heterosexual, or graysexual and bisexual.”
I'm a Celeb fans might remember when Tulisa came out as demisexual, where people rarely experience primary sexual attraction.
She explained: “I’m not an overly sexualised person.
“For me, it’s all about the connection and the emotions that I feel with someone and then wanting to express them in that way.”
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“If I do it, I feel like the man’s got to really make me want to have kids and set the tone in an environment that makes me go, ‘Ok, I like this’. I really would need a 50/50 partner,” she added.