A celebration of the diverse spectrum of love.
Originally published in Klipsun
One of eight selected for the Winter 2022 print edition of Klipsun
Sierra Andersen and Talia Demich are life-long partners, best friends, soulmates.
“It’s as if God had one little glob of human cells and accidentally cut it into two,” Talia said.
After meeting at 16, the women are spending their twenties traveling in a van, never staying anywhere past a few months. The two write poetry together, go to raves and longboard for miles on end.
“I absolutely love longboarding,” Sierra said. “It’s exhilarating. I get to practice pacing myself, and taking time to feel the wind go through every crevice of my body. It stimulates my brain at the perfect pace.”
Love is a core part of the human experience: love for a romantic partner, a child’s love for a parent, self-love, love of a beautiful sunrise.
For millenia, humans have labeled different types of love and valued some types over others. Mainstream American culture prioritizes romantic and sexual love.
From ancient history to modern times, people have pushed back against mainstream narratives and found joy and meaning in every kind of love. Like everything else about gender and sexuality, love is on a spectrum.
Western philosophy of love
Type “Greek types of love” into a search engine and hundreds of articles come up, listing up to nine different types.
However, the ancient Greeks only really split love into two: eros and philia.
“[Eros] is sexy,” said Melissa Funke, assistant professor of classics at the University of Winnipeg who has auburn curls and a love for teaching about love. “It’s the emotion you feel when you want to be with someone.”
Conversely, philia is about mutual protection and care. “You can have philia between city-states … but it’s also the kind of feeling you have between a parent and a child, or friend to friend,” she said.
Other words from those lists came from Christianity.
“That doesn’t mean they’re not historical, and that doesn’t mean they’re not Greek,” Melissa said, but words like storge, familial love or loyalty, and agape, selfless love, were uncommon before the New Testament was written in Greek.
Agape is the most important, aspirational form of love in Christian philosophy, according to “Christian Love” by Bernard V. Brady.
In contrast, more secular thinkers like the notorious Sigmund Freud said sexual desire was the primary form of love.
For him, all love, including love between parents and children and love of objects and abstract entities, was about sexual pleasure and reproduction, wrote Gerasimos Santas in “Plato and Freud: Two Theories of Love.”
Modern psychology has a more complex model of love. Love is about reproduction, but also belonging and helping each other survive, according to “Social Psychology and Human Nature” by Roy Baumeister and Brad Bushman.
Still, romantic-sexual love is often thought to be what determines who a person loves most and who they will live their lives with.
Love and attraction
However, not everyone experiences romantic and sexual attraction.
In the early 2000s, the asexual and aromantic (a-spec) community created a framework to talk about their experiences with love and attraction more accurately.
Currently, this framework names roughly five basic types of attraction: platonic, romantic, sexual, aesthetic and sensual.
Still unsure what type of attraction is being felt? Visit What the Heck Type of Love is This??? for a more in-depth version of this flowchart with more questions and descriptions.
“The a-spec community is very good about minute labels because we understand how complicated attraction is. To make ourselves understand it better and make things feel better, we label it,” said Kayla Kaszyca, one half of the duo behind the podcast Sounds Fake But Okay.
College friends Kayla Kaszyca and Sarah Costello started the podcast to discuss questions Sarah texted Kayla about things she didn’t understand as an asexual and aromantic person, like why people like dick pics. Sounds Fake But Okay now has over 200 episodes and discusses love, relationships and sexuality from an a-spec point of view.
Some people think the spectrum of attraction is too complicated, but Sarah said people can use it if it helps them and leave it alone if it doesn't. Sarah works as an assistant in Hollywood with dreams to go into TV writing.
Kayla started identifying as demisexual during the early days of the podcast.
“Questioning really sucks,” said Kayla, who has a partner, two cats named Gnocchi and Billie, and likes Dungeons and Dragons. “For some people, the way out of that is knowing exactly what you are and finding really specific labels. For other people, it’s just leaving it super vague.”
These terms don’t just apply to a-spec people.
“Everyone could use these words and these terms if they wanted,” Sarah said. “The reason that they’re so prevalent in our community is because we’re forced to think about these things.”
Having a model separating types of attraction is important for many, but it’s not necessarily the same thing as love.
“I wouldn’t say [attraction] equals fulfillment in the way that love does,” said Nik Hampshire, a straight, aromantic, cisgender man, who has a series on YouTube called “Being Aromantic (while not asexual).”
Nik described himself as a 35-year-old black kid and a creative type. It shows in his artfully wild curls and the tattoos decorating most of his body, including a Mjolnir tattoo on his right hand. To him, love is about connection.
“[Attraction] is like ‘Oh, there’s something I would like to have, or like to connect with,” Nik said. “Once that connection has been established, it could be love depending on … how fulfilling you find that experience, connection, person.”
Partnered love
Sierra and Talia have a deep connection.
“You can find love in so many ways, shapes and forms. You can find it in a person, you can find it in an experience,” Sierra said. “I know I love Talia specifically because I enjoy the experiences when I’m with her.”
They often get asked if they’re dating but they respond, no, they’re best friends. In fact, the pair still date other people, mostly for fun.
“When we do go on dates with people … we tell them we’re not looking for a relationship but it’d be cool to hang out for a few months,” Talia said. “Long-term relationships just aren’t our thing.”
Wanting to differentiate between romantic and platonic feelings goes back to eros and philia. Traditionally, exclusivity and deeper emotional communication are main differences between romantic and platonic relationships, according to Flemish religious thinker Vander Kerken in “Loneliness and Love.”
But these are more guidelines than rules, and the lines between these sorts of affection are blurry. Like queerness generally, this isn’t new.
Numerous civilizations had room for unions other than traditional marriages.
In 16th-century France, affrèrement — which roughly translates to “brotherment” — was a legal designation that provided social and financial support for non-nuclear households of many types, according to Allan Tulchin’s article “Same‐Sex Couples Creating Households in Old Regime France: The Uses of the Affrèrement.”
These unions were used by siblings, same-sex pairs and others, and had many similarities to marriage, including swearing before witnesses to share “one house, one hearth, and one purse.”
In modern times, we look at those relationships and wonder if they were gay or in a queerplatonic relationship. A queerplatonic relationship is platonic at its core but can have many of the elements of a traditional romantic relationship, like exclusivity or sharing finances.
However, part of what makes affrèrements extra cool is that any pair could have legal benefits based on their connection and commitment to each other, regardless of labels or attraction.
Unpartnered Love
It is also becoming more normal to live a love-filled life without partners.
Nik has dated a lot of people and even tried a queerplatonic relationship, but now just wants family, friends, passions and maybe a pet.
“Something about having a partner, even one that wasn’t requiring romantic love from me, felt restrictive,” the aromantic man said. “I couldn’t quite nail down exactly what it was, I just knew I wasn’t particularly comfortable with it.”
Nik said pursuing his passions is a form of self-love.
“When there’s another person involved, I feel like it can be complicated because how you want the love might not be how they can give it,” Nik said. “When you’re pursuing your interests, it’s exactly on your terms. You can get exactly what you want … that is a version of self-care.”
In English, we use “love” to talk about everything from our regard for pizza to the deepest bonds between people.
Rather than separating which things we’re supposed to like from which we’re supposed to love, maybe we should think of this aspect of love as being on a spectrum too — simple liking on one end and loving that gives life meaning and joy on the other.
Take video games. Many people enjoy video games, but for Oakley Powell, they are more than a fun pastime.
“[Video game design] is part of my identity at this point,” said the 20-year-old. “I think ‘married to my career’ has never been a more accurate description of a person.”
The tall, blond, non-binary individual identifies as asexual and aromantic.
“I just don’t get attraction on any level,” Oakley said. “I’m like, okay, sure, that’s been explained to me again, but I still don’t understand.”
Oakley thinks society’s ideas about love are silly, but not everyone else agrees.
“Dad’s favorite line is, ‘Well, the old hormones are going to kick in’ and I’m like, ‘Okay, you’ve been telling me that since I was eight, when are they going to kick in?’” Oakley said with a perturbed laugh.
In addition to video games, Oakley loves family, a rescued German shepherd/husky mix named Finney, and trail riding.
“We just always inevitably have a good time,” Oakley said. “That’s definitely a big form of self-love for me, saying ‘yes’ when [my friend] asks if I want to go on a trail ride.”
The future of love
Oakley thinks people can find acceptance for having a “nonconventional, non-stereotypical romantic arc, or lack thereof” in their own life, but that it’s a lot harder to find acceptance in the world at large.
“It’s tricky … to have anything except for the very standard socially acceptable [situation],” Oakey said, then joked in a robotic voice: “Man-and-wife have children and picket fence and love each other so much, 40th anniversary coming up tomorrow, be there or be square.”
Living outside that mold is hard for practical reasons as well.
“The world financially is built around the nuclear family,” Kayla said, pointing out that being single as an adult has tax, medical and housing disadvantages.
“[Housing] is a big thing that I see a lot of a-spec people worry about as you get older and you don’t have friends who are going to room with you anymore because they have significant others,” Kayla said. “How am I going to live and survive?”
Nik said he wants a future where more people are exposed to different ways of thinking about love.
“There’s a ton of self-reflection and shame and policing of your own behavior to figure out how to operate in a world that doesn’t quite vibe with your vibe,” Nik said. “If everything was presented upfront, you wouldn’t have to unlearn anything to be who you are.”
Deconstructing society’s expectations about love will help more people find its joy and meaning in their life.
“Just because I don’t fit into your puzzle exactly like you expect me to … doesn’t mean the way I’m doing it is wrong,” Sarah said. “[It] doesn’t mean that I’m not a happy person, or fulfilled person, or a loved person.”
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