There are more ways to be drawn to someone

Tertiary attraction is an umbrella term. It covers forms of attraction that are neither sexual nor romantic — and also the ones that can’t be placed neatly on that binary at all.

That’s genuinely all it is. It isn’t a scientific taxonomy, it isn’t a settled list, and it isn’t a set of boxes everyone’s feelings are supposed to sort into. It’s a bag of words that people made because the existing words kept failing them.

One way to picture it is as language that steps outside the categories society already recognises. Platonic and familial bonds are expected to stay on one side; romantic and sexual bonds are expected to sit on the other and eventually outrank everything else. Tertiary attraction names pulls that do not fit that arrangement. Some sit beyond it entirely. Others overlap a familiar category while refusing its usual rules — like best friends who marry, share a home, go on dates and build a life together while still understanding their bond as platonic.

That is an analogy, not a new binary. The point is not to sort every feeling onto one line; it is to notice how much experience the usual line leaves out.

Our sources make one observation that explains a lot about where this language came from: for people who experience romantic and sexual attraction, these other pulls tend to arrive bundled — braided together with romance and sex so tightly that there’s never much reason to pick them apart. For asexual and aromantic people, with one or both of those strands missing, the rest become much easier to see individually. So the vocabulary grew where it was needed most. That doesn’t make it aro/ace property — anyone can find it useful — but it does explain why it grew there.

Six words that get tangled together

Most of the confusion on this subject comes from treating these as one thing. They overlap constantly. They are not the same layer.

• Attraction — the pull itself. Involuntary. It arrives without asking.
• Desire — wanting something to happen. Related to attraction, not identical to it.
• Behaviour — what you actually do. Hugging, dating, having sex, moving in.
• Relationship — the structure you and another person agree on.
• Identity — the words you use for yourself, if you use any.
• Preference — the kind of connection you’d like to have, which isn’t always the kind you feel pulled toward.

You can’t reliably reverse-engineer any of these from the others. Having sex doesn’t establish sexual attraction. Dating someone doesn’t establish romantic attraction. Enjoying a cuddle doesn’t establish anything except that you enjoyed a cuddle. People do things for all sorts of reasons — curiosity, love, obligation, loneliness, habit, because it was Tuesday.

Popular culture has one story about how closeness works, and it runs in a straight line:

Every step is supposed to imply the next one. Going sideways is “not getting anywhere.” Stopping is a failure. And whatever you feel for the people you don’t do this with is, by definition, the smaller thing.

It’s a tidy story. It also leaves an enormous number of people with no way to describe their actual lives. One kind of attraction simply doesn’t imply another. They’re neighbours, not rungs — some of them sit right on top of each other, some of them never meet, and none of them is the top.

Here’s the part that looks like a list, with one warning attached before you start: these are descriptions, not requirements. The little quoted bits are hypothetical — one way a feeling might show up, not a specification you have to match to qualify. If yours sounds nothing like the example and the term still fits, the term still fits.

Some of this vocabulary is widely used and well documented. Some of it exists in a corner of one community and has never been standardised by anyone. We’ve said which is which as we go, because pretending otherwise would be doing you a disservice.

Sometimes, yes — and that was never the insult it’s usually meant as.

Let’s get the important part out of the way first. Friendship is not the lesser thing. A platonic relationship can be central, committed, lifelong, intimate, affectionate, domestic, financially entangled, emotionally enormous and entirely life-defining. People build families out of friendship. People raise children inside it, buy houses in it, grow old in it. The idea that it’s what you have until you get a real relationship is a cultural habit, not a fact, and it’s worth noticing how much of this conversation that habit quietly ruins.

Our sources have a name for the habit: amatonormativity — the assumption that romantic partnership is the natural goal for everyone and is worth more than every other kind of tie. Several of the writers in our source set make the same sharp point about it: we had to invent the word “queerplatonic” mainly because ordinary culture refuses to accept that deep friendship can be a foundation for life partnership, living together, and building a family. The gap in the language was never about the feelings. It was about what the surrounding culture was prepared to count.

So what’s the actual difference?

Often it isn’t intensity. A squish can be as consuming as a crush; a friendship can be more committed than a marriage. The difference these words are reaching for is one of two things:

• The texture of the pull. Wanting to look at someone, wanting to be held by someone, wanting to be guided by someone and wanting to build a household with someone are four genuinely different wants. “Friendship” doesn’t distinguish them. Sometimes you need to.
• How the people in it understand it. Two people can do identical things and mean different things by them. Our sources are firm that an outsider doesn’t get to assign the category — if the people in a relationship say it isn’t romantic, it isn’t, no matter what it looks like from the pavement.

And sometimes the honest answer really is “it’s a friendship, and I just needed a better word for how much.” That’s a completely legitimate place to land.

But queerplatonic does not universally mean “friendship premium.” For some people a QPR is an intimate friendship or a platonic bond given partner status. For others, queerplatonic attraction is a separate attraction that does not feel like friendship at all. That distinction matters particularly for aplatonic people who experience queerplatonic attraction without experiencing platonic attraction. The people in the bond get to say what kind of bond it is.

Platonormativity: the pressure to need friendship

Platonormativity is the assumption that everybody wants friends, experiences platonic attraction and needs friendship in order to be fully human or live a complete life. It can turn into pathologising aplatonic people — treating a lack of interest in friendship as proof that someone is broken, disordered or in need of fixing.

It works beside amatonormativity, not as its opposite. Amatonormativity says romance is the relationship that ultimately counts. Platonormativity says friendship is universal, necessary and supposed to follow a recognisable script. Both erase people whose bonds, priorities or lack of attraction do not match the template.

Alterous attraction gets its own section because it’s the one that’s hardest to explain in borrowed language, and the one most often explained badly.

You’ll frequently see it summarised as “halfway between friendship and romance.” That’s one of the things it can be — and our sources are clear that it’s not the only one. Alterous attraction can sit in the grey area between platonic and romantic. It can also exist as a framework entirely separate from that binary, which is a different claim altogether: not a point on the line, but a thing the line doesn’t measure.

“I know this is more than the way I feel about my friends. But calling it romantic feels wrong too — not modest, not shy. Just wrong, like being handed the wrong coat.”

It’s flexible in how it’s used, too. Alterous works as a description of the attraction and as an orientation in its own right — people use bi-alterous, homo-alterous, demi-alterous, or just alterous on its own. It can happen alongside sexual attraction, completely separately from it, or at the same time as it. An alterous crush is sometimes called a mesh or a hush, though neither word is in heavy circulation. Light blue is the colour most associated with it, and there are terms — a-alterous, analterous, nonalterous — for people who don’t experience it at all.

A piece of history worth keeping

The term appeared around 2015. From 2016 onwards, some of the definitions in circulation drew criticism from within the community for an unintended implication: by positioning alterous feelings as “stronger than platonic but not quite romantic,” they framed non-romantic and platonic feelings as inherently weaker. Which is exactly the hierarchy this whole vocabulary was built to get out from under.

That argument hasn’t fully resolved, and you’ll meet both framings in the wild. We’d rather tell you the disagreement exists than hand you one version and call it settled.

The Split Attraction Model, usually shortened to SAM, is the idea underneath all of this. At its core it says one thing: a person’s romantic attraction and their sexual attraction are separate, and don’t have to point the same way.

That’s the whole core premise. Someone can be homoromantic and bisexual. Someone can be panromantic and demisexual. Our sources call that state varioriented, and the matching state — where the two line up — perioriented. The umbrella for all of it is cross-orientation.

The model is commonly extended outward from there to cover the tertiary attractions: platonic, sensual, aesthetic, intellectual, emotional. That extension is where this page lives.

It’s older than the internet

The name is recent; the idea isn’t. Our sources trace a line back through three moments:

• 1879 German writer Karl Heinrich Ulrichs set out early classifications of split orientation — distinguishing people with passionate feelings toward both men and women from people with tender feelings toward one gender and “in love” feelings toward another. The scheme was too complex to catch on at the time.
• 1979 Dorothy Tennov, in Love and Limerence, named “limerence” — that intense, obsessive crush state — and recognised that sex wasn’t its primary focus. Her term “non-limerent” is treated as an early ancestor of “aromantic.”
• 2005–2015 Aromanticism emerged as a concept around 2005. The phrase “split attraction model” itself was coined by asexual and aromantic online communities around 2015, to explain something people were already living.

And it isn’t compulsory

This matters enough to say on its own. The Split Attraction Model is a description that helps a lot of people. It is not an obligation, a developmental stage, or a sign of self-awareness. Nobody has to dissect their feelings into separate labelled strands. Plenty of people find that the dissecting makes things blurrier rather than clearer — and stopping is allowed.

Worth noting: one study in our source set found that mismatches between romantic orientation and sexual attitudes show up in allosexual people too, not just a-spec ones. Split attraction isn’t a minority-only phenomenon. It’s just that a-spec communities were the ones who needed the words badly enough to make them.

If you take one thing from this page, make it this: “little or no romantic attraction” and “little or no sexual attraction” are statements about two specific pulls. They are not statements about whether someone loves, needs people, wants to be touched, wants a partner, wants a home, or has a rich interior life.

An aromantic person can be fiercely devoted. An asexual person can want to be held every day of their life. An aro-ace person can have a partner, a household, a shared mortgage and an emergency-contact form with someone else’s name on it. The assumption that aro or ace means lonely, cold, immature, unfinished, or incapable of love is just incorrect — and it’s the assumption that makes this vocabulary necessary in the first place, because without it people get read as having nothing rather than having something the reader doesn’t have a word for.

Our sources point out something neat about how this works. For allo people, these attractions usually arrive braided together and never need separating. For aro and ace people, with one or both of the headline strands missing, the others become far easier to see on their own. The clarity isn’t a consolation prize. It’s just what happens when the loudest signal isn’t drowning out the rest.

Some aro-ace people who experience tertiary attraction use the terms oriented aroace or angled aroace for themselves. Fair warning: the two aren’t used in exactly the same way everywhere — one of our sources treats “angled” as describing people sitting on the aro or ace spectrum rather than fully at the end of it. If precision matters in a given conversation, ask what the person means.

The aplatonic spectrum

The aplatonic spectrum — apl-spec for short — covers platonic orientations marked by an absence of, or a significant deviation from, conventional platonic attraction. Apl-spec people don’t experience the “standard” amount or style of platonic attraction that alloplatonic people do.

It runs independently of everything else. An apl-spec person can hold any sexual or romantic orientation at all — ace-spec, aro-spec, allosexual, alloromantic, any combination. It’s its own axis.

Aplatonic does not automatically mean friendless, uncaring or incapable of maintaining friendships. Attraction, action and relationship are different layers here too. An apl-spec person may have friends, care deeply about people, prefer other forms of closeness, or want no friendship at all. None of those possibilities needs to be repaired.

Friendship is also a relationship rather than a status one person can assign to another by assumption. It is reasonable to ask what a connection means, what each person wants from it and whether both people understand it the same way. Language such as solaic attraction can help some people describe wanting deep, safe closeness without wanting friendship.

The spectrum has its own vocabulary: identities including aplatonic, aplflux, aplspike, demiplatonic, frayplatonic, greyplatonic and laimoplatonic, plus microlabels like apothiplatonic, cassplatonic, myrplatonic, cupioplatonic, iculaplatonic and preaplatonic. There’s also a separate set of words for attitude rather than attraction — plato-favourable, plato-repulsed, plato-indifferent and plato-ambivalent — which is a genuinely useful distinction. How much platonic attraction you feel and how you feel about platonic relationships are two different questions.

We’ve listed those microlabels rather than defined them, because our sources name them without explaining them, and we’d rather leave a gap visible than fill it with a guess. If you want the detail on a specific one, the apl-spec community is where to look.

Attraction and relationships are related the way weather and plans are related. One informs the other. Neither determines it.

You can feel an attraction and decide not to act on it — because it isn’t mutual, because the timing’s wrong, because you simply don’t want to. You can take part in something without feeling the attraction culturally attached to it. And you can build a relationship around whichever forms of connection actually matter to the people in it, in whatever combination, regardless of what the labels would predict.

Friendship. Romantic relationships. Queerplatonic partnerships. Chosen family. Committed platonic partnerships. Sexual relationships without romance. Domestic partnerships without sex. Creative partnerships. Relationships nobody has bothered to define and nobody needs to. All of these are real structures that real people live in.

What QPRs are pushing back against

Our sources name three assumptions specifically:

• Amatonormativity — that romance outranks every other kind of tie.
• Erotonormativity — that real intimacy must be sexual.
• Couple-centric monogamism — that the two-person romantic couple is the only legitimate shape.

This is also where QPRs overlap with relationship anarchy: declining to rank relationships by category, and negotiating the terms of each one with the people actually in it rather than inheriting them from a template. Our sources note substantial overlap between the two ideas, and that “queerplatonic” has become a recognised term in writing about consensual non-monogamy and polyamorous communities as well.

Which all comes down to talking to each other

You can’t derive a relationship from an attraction label, and you shouldn’t try. Two people who’d describe their attraction identically might want completely different lives. The useful questions aren’t “what am I?” — they’re “what do we want this to be?”, “what are we promising each other?”, and “what would hurt if it changed?”

Those conversations are awkward. They’re also considerably less awkward than the alternative, which is two people quietly running different software and finding out in about eight months.

This bit is optional, and it is deliberately not a quiz. There’s no score and nothing at the bottom tells you what you are. These are just questions that have been useful to other people — things to turn over on a walk, not criteria to satisfy.

If a question doesn’t apply, skip it. If the honest answer is “I have no idea,” that’s a real answer and you can stop there.

These aren’t mutually exclusive. Most people feel several at the same time toward the same person, in combinations that don’t resolve into anything tidy. Three hypothetical people, to show the range:

Language exists to help you understand yourself and explain yourself to other people. When it stops doing those two jobs, it’s just admin.

You are entirely within your rights to:

And one thing worth stating directly, because this corner of the internet can imply otherwise: knowing more microlabels does not make someone more queer, more self-aware, or better at this. Precision is a tool. It’s valuable exactly as far as it’s useful to the person holding it, and no further. Someone who says “I love them, it’s complicated, next question” understands themselves perfectly well.

This page was written from a briefing document compiled for Rainbow Circuits on non-romantic attraction frameworks, the Split Attraction Model and queerplatonic partnerships, together with a community infographic on tertiary attraction. Later community review added material on aplatonicism, platonormativity, solaic and alteraffectis attraction, checked against the community references linked below.

The works below include the sources cited by those documents and the community references used for the later additions. We’ve grouped them by what they are and said briefly why each might be worth your time. We haven’t independently verified every underlying coinage, so treat this as a reading list rather than a definitive bibliography.