INTERESTED, BUT NOT IN SEX: ANALYSIS AND THEORY ON THE IMPORTANCE OF ROMANTIC ATTRACTION IN UNDERSTANDING THE EXPERIENCES OF ASEXUAL POPULATIONS

Abstract

The research of asexuality, which refers to a feeling of no sexual attraction towards others, has rapidly expanded in recent years to reconsider the foundational elements of attraction. Within the last few years, differentiations between sexual attractions and romantic attractions have become recognized and have increasingly become a standard consideration in such research. This dissertation contributes to this understanding by constructing Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 as qualitative research articles. Each of these will draw from a qualitative dataset of 21 in-depth interviews with participants who identify on the asexual-spectrum of identities. While the sexual attraction of participants ranged from low-to-no attraction, romantic attraction was more varied. This provided for a good comparison of the lived experience of the participants based on romantic attraction. Results from this research further found several points where this differentiation between sexual and romantic attractions was highly relevant for understanding the lived experiences of asexual-spectrum individuals. Feelings of camaraderie with non-asexual peers on topics of dating and feelings of positive affect towards one’s own sexual identity each appeared to vary by romantic identity. Further, the findings of these studies provide possible answers to questions posed by previous research by giving evidence to how asexual individuals may perceive romantic relationships differently from non-asexual populations. It further examines how asexual individuals may perceive dating or marriage on both a level of personal importance, such as comparing the importance of romantic relationships against friendship relationships, and on a level of its social importance, the purpose of romantic relationships as a means to be “normal” by common social standards. Chapter 4 constructs a theoretical model, the Attraction Orientation and Contingent Intensity Model, which builds on the current understandings of the differentiations between sexual attraction and romantic attraction to further account for inconsistencies in the current usage of sexual and romantic identities. In particular, this model will examine sexual identities as potentially bifurcated descriptors, some of which refer to directionality of attractions (e.g., heterosexual, lesbian, bisexual) and some of which indicate intensities of feeling (e.g., many asexual-spectrum identities such as gray-sexual, which notes low-or-infrequent attraction but does not note directionality of attraction). This model gives an answer to a common tendency that has largely existed in asexual research, where individuals note multiple sexual identities and multiple romantic identities, and further works toward a goal of applying considerations of differentiated attraction to non-asexual populations. Overall, these chapters contribute to the growing body of academic literature on asexuality and on understanding romantic attraction as an important concept in understanding the sexual and romantic feelings of a population.