“What we call love is, in fact, a profound but illusory sense of recognition: we have encountered someone who seems to complete the gap we carry.”
Attraction as gravity. Desire as mass. Every person is a planet. The orbit depends on values, tempo, standards, and so does everyone else's. Not all orbits are compatible. Some are beautiful from a distance.
Every framework for understanding attraction begins with the same problem: attraction is not chosen. It arrives. It acts on you. The question is what kind of thing it is, force, lack, chemical, drive, ascent toward beauty, or something the brain does before the mind catches up.
Newton's law of universal gravitation states F = Gm₁m₂/r², force is proportional to the product of both masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance. The analogy holds philosophically: attraction is not one-sided. It is a function of both bodies. The pull you feel toward someone is partly a function of your own mass, your values, your clarity, your desire. Someone with no defined mass (no self-concept, no values, no desire) exerts almost no gravitational pull and is pulled by almost nothing.
Fisher's neuroscience confirms the involuntary dimension: the dopaminergic reward circuit activates before conscious evaluation. You feel attraction before you decide to. This is what Plato meant by Eros as a daemon, not a choice but a force that moves through you. What you do with that force is where agency enters.
Spinoza's conatus unifies both: desire is not a departure from your nature, it is your nature pressing outward. The A·E·R·S model maps which dimensions of that outward press are active for any given person toward any given other. For asexual people, the Sexual circle carries little or no charge, the other fields (Aesthetic, Emotional, Romantic) may be fully operative, exerting full gravitational force. The system is not broken. One dimension of the field is simply oriented differently.
Four axes of attraction: Aesthetic (A), Emotional (E), Romantic (R), Sexual (S). Their overlaps produce 13 distinct non-empty combinations, the full combinatorics of four sets. Fisher's three brain systems map directly onto three of these axes. The fourth (Aesthetic) is Plato's first rung on the ladder. Click any combination to see what it means.
Every person is a body in space with its own gravitational field, its own mass, its own orbital velocity, its own temperature. Compatibility is not about finding someone "perfect", it is about finding an orbital configuration that is stable. Click a preset to see different orbital dynamics.
Every gravitational system has an escape velocity, the speed at which an object leaves orbit entirely and doesn't return. In relationships: the point at which the energy required to maintain connection exceeds what either person can supply. This isn't failure. This is physics. Objects that reach escape velocity don't fall back. They find new orbital systems. Some travel for a long time through open space before finding the next body with compatible gravity. That time is not wasted.
Fisher's three systems and Diamond's sexual fluidity research both confirm that attraction is not a binary property. "Little to none" describes a range, not an absence. And Diamond's longitudinal data showed something further: the combinations of attraction types a given person experiences can be more complex than any static diagram captures, new dimensions becoming legible as experience accumulates.
Diamond's 10-year longitudinal study documented exactly this: that the model of one's own attraction expands as experience expands. Desire is not a fixed quantity, it is a field that may have dimensions not yet activated or recognized. That is not confusion. It is what an honest map looks like when it's still being drawn.
Diamond's finding that romantic love and sexual desire share oxytocin pathways, meaning either can trigger the other, explains the demisexual sequence neurobiologically. Three stages: two people with minimal overlap → bond forming, emotional connection deepening → full romantic and sexual attraction arriving only once the bond is established. For most people the sexual/romantic attraction arrives first and the bond (maybe) follows. For demisexual people, Fisher's attraction system simply has a different activation condition: bond first, always. Attraction is downstream of trust.
In a dating culture that prioritizes immediate physical chemistry, demisexual people are routinely misread, as cold, as slow, as not interested, when they are simply on a different timeline. The attraction is real. It just requires conditions that take time to build. This is not a deficiency. It is a different orbital configuration: you don't feel the pull from a distance. You feel it from proximity, over time, after trust.
Foucault argued in The History of Sexuality (1976) that the idea of sex as the deepest truth of the self, the thing you must confess, excavate, identify yourself by, is a modern Western invention, not a biological constant. The question "is the human body inherently sexual?" has a Foucauldian answer: the body is not inherently anything. The meanings we attach to it are produced historically. This is why the same body can be experienced as non-sexual (nudism as natural appreciation) and sexual simultaneously, these are different perceptual frameworks applied to the same matter.
Foucault: no, the sexual meaning of the body is a cultural and historical construction, not a biological given. Fisher: the lust system is one of three distinct brain systems, and it can be absent or muted independently of the other two. These two answers converge: Aesthetic attraction to a body (finding it beautiful, interesting, pleasing to look at) is entirely separable from Sexual attraction (wanting sexual contact with that body). Nudists experience the body as natural, non-erotic. Many asexual people experience strong aesthetic attraction to bodies with no sexual component at all. The two are different axes in the model, A and S are separate circles, and one can be fully present while the other is absent or minimal.
Discomfort with physical contact while experiencing strong aesthetic appreciation: this is precisely what Fisher's model predicts for someone whose Lust system operates at low intensity while Aesthetic perception is fully operative. In the A·E·R·S diagram: large A circle, small or absent S circle. Consistent with the sex-neutral or sex-adverse positions. Not a malfunction, a configuration.
Gender, biological sex, and sexual/romantic orientation are three independent dimensions. Anne Fausto-Sterling's biological research established that biological sex itself is not binary, intersex conditions affect approximately 1.7% of the population, and the dimorphic model is a cultural simplification of a biological continuum. Sandra Bem's gender schema theory (1981) demonstrated that gender identity is a cognitive framework, not a biological readout. Each dimension is its own sphere. Their intersection for any given person is their specific configuration.
Because for most people in most cultures, biological sex, gender identity, gender expression, and orientation are expected to align in a specific pattern (male → masculine → masculine-presenting → attracted to women). De Beauvoir: this expectation is not nature, it is a social structure that produces subjects who mistake conditioning for essence. Foucault: the compulsion to organize sexuality into identity categories is itself a historically specific power operation, not a neutral taxonomy. When the expected pattern holds, no one has to think about the dimensions separately. When it doesn't, for any of millions of reasons, the dimensions become visible as distinct. The confusion is the normative expectation mistaken for natural law.
The "split attraction model" or "orientation cake" is one of the most useful visual frameworks for understanding how attraction layers. Each layer is a separate dimension, sexual, romantic, aesthetic, sensual, emotional, platonic. You can have frosting without the cake. You can love the cake and not the frosting. The layers are separable.
🎂Plato said Eros is constituted by lack, it is always reaching toward what it does not yet have. Fisher showed that the dopaminergic reward circuit fires before conscious evaluation, you feel it before you decide to. Spinoza said desire is not something that happens to you: it is what you are, pressing outward. These three accounts are not contradictory. They describe the same phenomenon at different resolutions.
The A·E·R·S model, four circles, 13 combinations, spectrums not switches, time as a dimension for some configurations, is more precise than most frameworks people use. Aristotle would recognize it as the distinction between pleasure-based, utility-based, and virtue-based attraction, now decomposed into their constituent axes. Fisher would recognize it as her three brain systems plus aesthetic perception, mapped in combinatorial space. De Beauvoir would note that which combinations are legible in a given culture, and which are treated as problems, is never politically neutral.
δ = 0.013643 · The comma between what you feel and what you can say about itSpeculative. Not claims. Invitations.
[1] Plato. (c.385 BCE/1951). Symposium (trans. Hamilton). Penguin.
[2] Fisher, H. (2004). Why we love: The nature and chemistry of romantic love. Henry Holt.
[3] Bowlby, J. (1969). Attachment and loss, Vol. 1. Basic Books.