Abrosexuality: A 30‑Year Journey to Embracing Fluid Attraction
Attraction doesn’t always fit neatly into one category. For some people, it shifts and evolves over time — a fluid pattern known as abrosexuality. Writer Emma Flint shared in a personal essay how over three decades she grappled with confusion about her changing feelings before discovering the term that felt right.
Flint described years of shifting attractions: at times feeling sure she was a lesbian, then noticing attraction to men, and sometimes experiencing little to no attraction at all. She said discovering “abrosexual” online at age 30 was a turning point: “Finally I felt seen.” Her story illustrates how language and representation can validate experiences that otherwise feel isolating.
What Is Abrosexuality?
According to Healthline, an abrosexual person’s attraction fluctuates in direction, intensity, or gender focus over time. These shifts are not about “changing your mind” but reflect genuine changes in attraction. An individual might feel attracted exclusively to one gender at one time, later feel attraction to multiple genders, and at other times feel little or no attraction. The prefix “abro‑” means “delicate” or “graceful,” which evokes the concept of movement and flux.
Abrosexuality differs from identities like bisexuality or pansexuality in that it emphasizes change over time, not just the genders a person is attracted to. It also may overlap with parts of the asexual spectrum, since some abrosexual individuals might experience periods of little to no attraction.
How Abrosexuality Manifests & What It Highlights
Everyone’s experience is unique. Shifts in attraction may happen over days, weeks, months, or years. Some may identify with different labels at different times — for example, feeling more aligned with bisexuality for a while, then later with asexuality or another identity. These changes can bring challenges in relationships: partners may need ongoing communication and understanding as attraction evolves.
Flint emphasizes that while explanations are often demanded by others (“pick a lane”), abrosexuality is a valid experience even if it doesn’t conform to fixed labels. She hopes that, through visibility, others who have felt “lost” will see that their identity is real and deserving of respect.
