Relationship

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Asexuals form a variety of relationships to fulfill their emotional needs. Some have adhered to the more common structuring of relationships, whereas others have tried to structure their relationships a bit differently. However, regardless of structure, most asexuals find things such as communication, trust, and affection to be important parts of their relationships.

Attraction

Full article: Attraction

While asexuals do not experience sexual attraction, they experience a variety of other attractions and have come up with names for some of these attractions, including romantic and aesthetic attraction. There is some debate as to whether these definitions are accurate. Most commonly, people identify as romantic or aromantic.

Sensuality

Sensuality is pleasure that involves the senses. Many sexual people interpret the word as only relating to sexual pleasure that involves the senses, but there are other ways of being sensual. Some (though not all) asexuals enjoy nonsexual sensuality with other people. Sensuality often involves tactile stimulation, such as cuddling, kissing, or giving or recieving a massage, but interpretations of visual, aural, taste, or olfactory stimuli as sensual are also appropriate - for example, since the desire to appreciate the sight of a beautiful person involves visual stimulation, it could be seen as sensual.

Community- and Partner-Based Intimacy

Some people reject the romantic vs. aromantic dichotomy. They feel that this model is weighed towards the romantic side, since it is defined by something that a person does; it does not take into account the types of intimate relationships that nonromantic people enter into. Many nonromantic people have a desire for partnership, but don’t think of it in a romantic sense.

One of the models proposed to describe how people structure their relationships is that of partner-based and community-based intimacy. To some extent, everyone has both types in their lives; everyone has multiple relationships with multiple people, and everyone has one or a few relationships that are more strongly developed and have a central role in that person’s life. Therefore, this model is not about labeling someone as either a "partner-based intimacy" person or a "community-based intimacy" person, but about describing the forms a person's relationships might take on. Relevant podcast

Partner-Based Intimacy

In this model, a person fulfills their emotional needs from one relationship with a partner. To build up this type of relationship, people try to become very close to someone and to fill an important role in their lives. A lot of time and energy is spent on this relationship, as the people involved begin to structure their lives around each other.

People who engage in partner-based intimacy usually do have more than one relationship - for example, someone using this model might have several good friends, some family members, and many casual acquaintances as well as a romantic partner - but, out of these, they choose one relationship to which they give some element of exclusivity.

Community-Based Intimacy

In community-based intimacy, a person has multiple relationships. However, since this is a community, these relationships are often a lot more specialized. Instead of having one relationship that is as close and intimate as possible, each relationship fills a different role. Relationships are comprised of different activities and ways of being intimate.

In order to fulfill their needs, a person either finds new people to bring into the community in order to fill specific roles, or they take an existing relationship and build more structure and depth into it. A person following this model is constantly finding new things the community can do to enrich their life. As a person changes, so too do the roles and structures of the individual relationships in their community in order to keep the community tailored to each person.

People are able to drift into and out of the community without it having a harmful effect. As long as the rate of people entering the community is at least equal to the rate of people leaving, the community will essentially remain stable, even if the individual relationships themselves don’t remain stable.

Affectional orientation

Affectional orientation is a term used by some instead of sexual orientation. People who use this term believe that orientation is not just related to a person's sexuality. Some asexuals use this term as a way to describe who they are emotionally or romantically attracted to. [1]

Romantic Friendship

Romantic friendship is a term used to describe close friendships, in which there is a degree of emotional and physical intensity that is generally attributed to romantic relationships. Such displays of affection can include cuddling, kissing, expressing love for one another, among others. These relationships were common and acceptable in Western society until the late 19th century.

Family Models

See Also

External Links