When Love and Attraction Move in Different Directions
- Cat Ferris
- 6 hours ago
- 5 min read
Love and Attraction Are Not the Same Thing
One of the challenges in conversations about attraction is that we often treat love, romance, attachment, partnership, and sexual desire as though they are interchangeable.
They aren't.
Sexual orientation and romantic orientation are not necessarily the same thing. Someone can be asexual and aromantic. Or they can be asexual and homoromantic. Someone can be bisexual and heteromantic. You get the idea.
Someone can experience strong romantic attachment while experiencing attraction in ways that don't follow conventional expectations.
Understanding this distinction becomes particularly important when discussing identities like demisexuality and freysexuality.
Many of us have been taught that attraction is supposed to work in a very particular way. We're taught that if we love someone, we should want them sexually. That attraction should deepen alongside intimacy. That commitment, love, and desire naturally travel in the same direction.
And when our experience doesn't match that story, people often assume something is wrong:
Maybe you're afraid of intimacy.
Maybe you're avoidant.
Maybe you're traumatized.
Maybe you're sabotaging good relationships.
Maybe you're afraid of commitment.
Maybe you just haven't met the right person yet.
Sometimes those explanations are accurate. Sometimes they aren't.
The problem is that many people hear these explanations long before they encounter the possibility that their experience of attraction might simply be different from the cultural norm.
You Are Not Broken
One of the most heartbreaking things I've encountered in my work is how many people spend years being told that their experience of attraction isn't real. I've worked with clients who identify as asexual, demisexual, and elsewhere on the asexual spectrum. Again and again, I hear variations of the same story.
Someone told them they just hadn't met the right person.
Someone insisted they were afraid of intimacy.
Someone suggested they were repressed, traumatized, immature, selfish, broken, or confused.
The details vary, but the message is often the same: "The way you experience attraction can't possibly be real."
For many people, discovering concepts like asexuality, demisexuality, or freysexuality brings an enormous sense of relief. Not because a label magically solves everything, but because it offers language for an experience they have been trying to explain for years.
It tells them they are not alone.
It tells them there are other people whose inner worlds work similarly.
And perhaps most importantly, it tells them that they are not broken.
That message matters, especially for people who have spent years trying to fix themselves when what they really needed was a framework for understanding themselves.
Understanding the Asexual Spectrum
Most people are familiar with asexuality as experiencing little or no sexual attraction. Within the broader asexual spectrum, however, attraction can take many forms.
Demisexuality describes people who tend to experience sexual attraction only after developing a strong emotional connection.
Freysexuality describes a nearly opposite pattern. Attraction is often strongest during the early stages of connection and may decrease as emotional intimacy develops.
What's interesting is that many people have little difficulty understanding demisexuality. It fits comfortably within a familiar cultural narrative. We are taught that emotional closeness creates attraction, that intimacy deepens desire, and that the strongest relationships are those in which love and sexual attraction grow together over time.
Freysexuality challenges that narrative.
When attraction fades as intimacy develops, people rarely assume they have encountered a legitimate orientation. More often, they assume something has gone wrong.
Maybe the relationship is wrong.
Maybe the partner is wrong.
Maybe they're chasing novelty because they don't know how to sustain intimacy.
For people who identify as freysexual, these assumptions can be exhausting. Many spend years trying to fix a problem that may not actually be a problem.
And misunderstanding the experience can have real consequences. If someone assumes that fading attraction always means something is wrong with the relationship, they may end relationships that were otherwise healthy and fulfilling. They may move from one relationship to another, continually searching for a spark that naturally fades once intimacy develops.
They may spend years trying to become a different kind of person instead of understanding the kind of person they already are.
Beyond the Label
At the same time, my work has also taught me that understanding desire usually requires more than a label.
One of the themes that runs through much of my work with clients is the idea of core desires. Not sexual acts. Not relationship structures.
The deeper longings underneath them. The desire to feel chosen. The desire to feel free. The desire for novelty, adventure, belonging, transcendence, power, surrender, connection, or exploration.
When we understand those desires, many of our behaviors start to make more sense.
For years, I carried my own assumptions about attraction. At different points in my life, I wondered whether I was frigid. Whether I was afraid of commitment. Whether there was something fundamentally wrong with the way I experienced desire.
What eventually shifted things for me was not finding a diagnosis. It was beginning to understand my core desires. Again and again, freedom and novelty showed up.
That realization didn't answer every question about my sexuality, but it helped me understand something important: I wasn't afraid of commitment. I was afraid of feeling trapped.
Those are not the same thing.
Intimacy and Eroticism
That distinction changed how I understood my relationships, my choices, and my attraction.
It also changed how I think about conversations like this one.
I find Esther Perel's distinction between intimacy and eroticism helpful here. We often treat them as though they are the same thing, but they are not. Perel argues that while intimacy and eroticism can reinforce one another, they are not the same thing. Intimacy is often associated with closeness, safety, and familiarity, while eroticism can be fueled by mystery, novelty, anticipation, and a sense of separateness. Understanding that distinction can help explain why attraction doesn't always follow the same trajectory as emotional connection.
Neither experience is inherently healthier than the other. They're simply different.
And several very different experiences can sometimes look remarkably similar from the outside.
A person may lose attraction because they are freysexual.
Another may lose attraction because resentment has accumulated in the relationship.
Another may discover that novelty plays an unusually important role in their erotic life.
Another may realize that desire has become tangled up with pursuit, longing, uncertainty, or distance.
The observable pattern may look similar even when the underlying experience is very different.
Curiosity Over Judgment
Understanding that freysexuality exists can be life-changing for someone who has spent years believing they are broken.
At the same time, understanding ourselves often requires looking beyond the label and exploring how our orientation, our values, our core desires, and our relationships interact with one another.
For some people, that exploration may reinforce a freysexual identity.
For others, it may reveal something entirely different.
Either outcome can be valuable. And understanding ourselves gives us more options.
For some people, that understanding may support a traditional monogamous relationship. For others, it may lead to conversations about consensual non-monogamy. Others may discover ways to cultivate novelty, autonomy, and erotic exploration within a long-term partnership.
The goal is not to force ourselves into a cultural script that was never written for us. The goal is to understand ourselves well enough to build relationships that are sustainable, authentic, and aligned with our values.
Most often, it begins with giving ourselves permission to believe that our experience is real.
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