the field guide · a book in progress
everything i think about,
in chapters.
the channel, organised into a book. each chapter has the research under it and the videos, books and podcasts beside it. start anywhere, it loops back.
part I
the seven kinds of attraction
the core of the whole thing. seven, and you have names for three.
- 01 sexual wanting sexual contact. one of seven, not the main event.
- 02 romantic wanting to build a life with someone.
- 03 aesthetic you find them beautiful and you want to do nothing about it.
- 04 sensual wanting to be held with no interest in where it leads.
- 05 intellectual you want their mind, not their life.
- 06 platonic the friend crush. everyone has them. nobody names them.
- 07 alterous closer than a friend, not a crush, no word for it until now.
part II
asexuality
the vantage point the rest of the book is written from.
- 08 what asexuality actually is little or no sexual attraction, and why that forces you to notice the other six kinds. plus a big pile of resources.
- 09 which orientation combination are you? you don’t have one orientation, you have two: who you’re sexually attracted to, and who you fall in love with. for a lot of people they point in different directions, and the split attraction model is the map. this is how to find your combination.
- 10 sexual attraction vs sexual desire attraction is a target, your brain pointing at a person. desire is an engine that can run without going anywhere. most people fuse them into one word, which is why the honest answer to "do asexual people masturbate" confuses everyone. it shouldn’t.
- 11 dating an asexual person for the partner who isn’t. their asexuality is not a verdict on you, it predates you, and the word tells you almost nothing until you ask them the rest. the skill that makes it work is one every strong couple needs anyway. you’re just learning it sooner.
- 12 am I asexual, or autistic? autistic people identify as asexual at much higher rates, and that scares people into thinking one cancels the other out. it doesn’t. the research shows co-occurrence, not cause, and a reason for a feeling has never once made the feeling less real.
- 13 what demisexual actually means you only feel sexual attraction after a real emotional bond forms. no bond, no attraction. that is not taking it slow and it is not being picky, it is demisexual, a spot on the asexual spectrum. here is what the word means, the three things people keep confusing it with, and how to tell if it is you.
- 14 compulsory sexuality nobody voted on it, but everyone gets graded by it: the rule that every normal person wants sex, and that not wanting it means something in you is broken. it runs your life whether you are ace or not, and once you can see it, you cannot unsee it.
- 15 how to tell if you have never felt romantic attraction every description of romance you have been handed comes pre-mixed with sex, so if you are trying to work out which half you have, the vocabulary is useless. here is romantic attraction described with the sexual part taken out, the four things that get mistaken for it, and why "never felt it" and "never met the conditions" are different answers.
- 16 a nun in 1691 wrote down what i wanted in 1691 sor juana ines de la cruz wrote down why she entered a convent, and it was not a calling. she wanted to live alone, study, and have nobody making noise near her books. what she had that you do not is a word that ended the conversation instead of starting a longer one.
- 17 why am i with this person? take sexual attraction out of the equation and you have to answer, at the start, the question most people only reach at year three. why this one. what do they add. here is what the answer sounds like when it is about them, and what it sounds like when it is about you.
part III
love & its counterfeits
the feelings that look exactly like love and are not love.
- 18 is it love, or limerence? there is a specific kind of wanting that feels exactly like love and isn’t. it has a name, a timeline, and a tell, the feeling gets stronger when they pull away. this chapter is how to run the test.
- 19 3 feelings you’re confusing for love relief, familiarity, and dependency. three feelings that wear love’s symptoms and lead you somewhere love wouldn’t. this is how to tell each one from the real thing, and the single test that catches all three.
- 20 love bombing, and why it works it feels like being chosen. that’s the design. the psychology underneath love bombing is the same machinery that makes slot machines addictive, and once you can name the parts, you can see it coming.
- 21 emotional abuse that doesn’t look like abuse he never hit you, there was never an incident, and you have started rehearsing sentences in your own house. this is the pattern you were never taught to see, why it is made of pieces too small to report, and the one question that tests it.
- 22 is it love, or just comfort? comfort and love can look identical from the inside. one is the absence of discomfort, the other is the presence of something. the difference is which question you’re actually answering: do i want to leave, or do i want to stay.
- 23 the five types of intimacy when someone says intimacy you think of one thing, and that’s the whole problem. there are five: physical, emotional, intellectual, experiential, spiritual. most relationships have one or two, and the missing one is usually the thing that feels off but won’t name itself.
- 24 your type is not your type the pattern in who you fall for is usually older than the people you fall for. attachment, and the wound doing the choosing.
- 25 why we should fall in love slowly against the vertigo. what it means to let closeness accumulate instead of detonating it.
- 26 why you go back to your ex you know it was right. so why is your thumb hovering over their name at 11pm. going back is not love, it is withdrawal, and your brain runs a handful of quiet tricks to make the craving feel like a reason.
- 27 what love actually is everyone tells you what love isn’t. this is what’s left once you strip out the noise: it calms your nervous system, it makes you want to know the person, and it survives an ordinary boring tuesday. the three quiet signs, and none of them feel like the movies.
- 28 you’re not in love, you’re lonely if you only want them at 2am, when the apartment is too quiet, it might not be love. love is specific, it wants this person. loneliness is general, it wants the silence to stop. here is the 2am test, and the fear that actually keeps you settling.
- 29 you’re in love with their potential you’re not dating them, you’re dating who they’d be if they changed. you stay loyal to the finished version in your head and keep excusing the real one. that’s not love, it’s a renovation project. the difference between seeing the best in someone and inventing a person who isn’t there.
- 30 why you say yes when you don’t want to there are two reasons to say yes to something you did not already want. moving toward closeness and being wanted, or moving away from a mood, an argument, and four days of being punished. they produce the identical word, and since 2005 the research has measured them as two separate dimensions that barely correlate.
part IV
friendship & loneliness
the attraction with no cultural script, and what its absence costs.
- 31 the friend crush & the 200 hours friendship has butterflies too, and a number attached: about 200 hours to a close friend. the science, and permission to act on it.
- 32 how lonely adulthood actually is why the friends stop happening after university, and why that’s structural, not a flaw in you.
- 33 platonic life partners are the future your person doesn’t have to be your romantic partner. the case for the relationship our hierarchy has no slot for.
- 34 i want to be touched, but not like that sensual attraction is the want to be held with no interest in where it leads. why our culture has no room for it, and why the lack of it is making everyone lonely.
- 35 alterous attraction & queerplatonic relationships there is a person you love in a way that is too much for “friend” and is not romance. the feeling has a name, alterous attraction, and the relationship you can build from it has one too, queerplatonic. the space between the two boxes was never empty.
- 36 when you fall for someone’s mind intellectual attraction is the pull toward how someone thinks, not how they look. the science that says it is its own channel, and why the sexiest mind is one that meets you, not one that outranks you.
- 37 finding someone beautiful without wanting them aesthetic attraction is finding someone beautiful to look at, and nothing more. no pull, no wanting, no next step. the brain science that says beauty and desire are two separate systems, and why mistaking one for the other quietly ruins relationships.
- 38 why a relationship does not fix loneliness a study of 55,000 people found the exception to one of the safest findings in relationship science: for the 1,443 asexual participants, being in a relationship was not associated with lower loneliness at all. what that says about what a relationship is actually doing when it works, and why the thing that predicts it is your whole network rather than whether somebody lives in your house.
- 39 why you never tell your friends you love them there are photographs of men from the 1800s sitting in each other’s laps, in portraits they paid for. across a century the affection drains out of the pose. this is where that went, how well the history actually holds up, and what the research says about the four seconds of awkwardness you have been pricing higher than the friendship.
part V
attraction & the self
the part of attraction that turns out to be about you.
- 40 why you like who you like sometimes the attraction isn’t about them at all, it’s about who you get to be near them. how to tell the difference.
- 41 the psychology of craving validation when the wanting is really a hunger to be chosen. where it comes from and what it’s standing in for.
- 42 why you’re single the reasons are mostly not about your face or your worth. they are a browsing mindset the apps trained into you, an ache you keep mistaking for a green light, and a bar for one partner that no single person could clear.
- 43 the deadline nobody set at some point you set a deadline for your own life and you do not remember agreeing to it. by twenty five, by thirty, by the age your mother was when she had you. and when you pass it, it does not release you, it moves.
- 44 being the understanding one being the understanding one is a job and you do not remember anybody hiring you. you say it is fine before checking whether it is fine. and if you always explain other people to yourself, nobody ever has to learn your language.
- 45 the fear of being known all the way you say you want to be known, and then you keep a little back. it comes from watching a song wear out and deciding you are also a thing that can be played too many times. you are not. a song cannot do anything new.
part VI
feelings & the body
the moods that come from your nervous system, not your life.
- 46 why you feel sad for no reason a wave of dread on a normal day, sadness with no story attached. the feeling is real, but the reason your brain hands you is invented after the fact. usually it is a body running on empty, an old feeling with no picture, or the stress of a hard week finally arriving now that you are safe.
- 47 the social hangover you had a great time and got home feeling hit by a truck. it is not introversion and it is not the people. it is the tax of performing a warmer, smoother version of yourself for hours, plus an attention system that ran flat out the whole time and now needs to recover alone.
- 48 why you absorb everyone else’s emotions you walk in fine and leave heavy, carrying a feeling that was never yours. it has a name, emotional contagion, and a mechanism: we automatically mimic the people around us and drift toward feeling what they feel. the fix is not going numb, it is learning to feel with people without turning into them.
more chapters landing as i write them.