If I had to try to describe what romantic attraction feels like for me, I would say it's just the desire for intimacy that is both physical AND emotional. Sharing one's heart AND parts beyond, so to speak. It both is and isn't on another level past friendship / sexual attraction.

Speaking personally, I experience extremely strong (and essentially nonstop) physical and sexual attraction to men and masculinity, and zero of the same for women and femininity.

I can be emotionally intimate with women (deep friendship), but am not interested in physical intimacy with them.

It's like saying "I'm not attracted to [insert ethnicity here]"

Like, really? All of them, across the board? Sight unseen?

First question "why?", second question "how?", third question "are you sure you don't just have a lot of internalized racism?"

I can understand slotting INDIVIDUALS into the "would never date/marry but would absolutely smash" category, but assigning that designation to entire categories of people based on sex or gender feels deeply unintuitive to me

For example, if a cis man describes themselves as "bisexual but heteroromantic", is it not possible that it's less that they CAN'T form romantic attachments to men and more that allowing themselves to experience romantic feelings for men feels gayer (and thus more unsafe) than "I'll fuck anything"?

The student didn't cite a single source

IT IS!!

This was from 2002, right around the time that she started appearing on the David E. Kelly show "Boston Public" but well before The Office or Parks and Rec

Maybe I'm being unkind to the writer. In the actual piece he offers the above paragraph as an example of what they could have done and chose not to, less so an example of what they SHOULD have done, but I really could have used a "thank god they didn't, that would have been incredibly boring."

STRAP IN