A nice idea, because often, more often than you’d think, our experience of attraction (who and what we’re attracted to) is not this simple.
Our experience of attraction is affected by many different external sources, such as the culture we grow up in, the religious landscape of our home and family, the media we consume, the friends we make, the political climate of the time, the type of education we’ve had access to, and many other things that shape how we see and experience ourselves throughout our life.
When we’re just starting to dabble in the world of dating, sex and romance, it can often feel like an overwhelming web of feelings, sensations and urges that are hard to make sense of right away.
To sum it up, we’ve got big feels that we don’t always know exactly what to do with.
Since there often isn’t many places we can bring our experiences, questions, and curiosities to, we look to the representations of love, sex and romance we have access to, which largely live in media (social media, TV, movies, books, ads, porn etc).
Media plays such a large role in our experience of attraction because the media can offer us some examples of what things should look like when we’re just starting to try and figure it all out.
We’ve got these fuzzy new feelings bubbling up, and we can make sense of them a little better when we’re able to relate them to what we see online or on TV - we can place them in some way.
This can be very useful for helping us make sense of our feels, but it can be quite difficult to get a sense of true attraction when we’re striving to feel seen in a space that only offers some examples of what things can look like and not the full spectrum of what is possible for us. The media can be useful for making sense of ourselves, and it can also be limiting.
Representations of love, sex and romance that sit outside the cis-het mainstream have only started to become more available in the last decade, and are still quite difficult to find amidst
What comp-het in media does, is give us something to go by when we’re confused in all directions, but it also doesn’t allow much space for prompting us to consider experiences that exist outside of this one experience of attraction we’ve been sold.
Comp-het doesn’t just exist in media, it exists in most every area of our lives in some way.
The values of our culture, religion, family, friends, school-systems, political systems, and most all other spaces we exist in, have some connection to valuing heterosexuality over all other forms of connection. It’s no wonder then, that we might find ourselves going for years without ever questioning this experience as true or not for ourselves. If we’ve never seen examples of sex and romance that cause us to question our own experience of attraction, we rarely do.
This often means that we end up identifying with one experience of attraction because we’ve simply never been prompted to, or shown how, to consider anything that might be more authentic to us.
You might very well be straight, but to learn this through having abundant options offered to you and choosing what feels best is very different than having one option shown to you and going with it because you don’t really know what other options you have or where your true attraction comes from.
If this has been similar to your experience, one of the main reasons your sense of attraction might feel like it’s changing is because you might simply be learning more about the world and what types of love/experiences of attraction are available to you.
When I say true attraction, what I’m referring to is an experience of attraction that feels authentic in your body. One that comes from some amount of self reflection and introspection, and has been weighed against the impositions of comp-het in a way that allows you to see your experience of sexuality and attraction away from what you’ve been taught.
Our experience of attraction is also largely impacted by how much we’ve been able to develop a relationship with our own emotions and desires. How much we actually know ourselves plays a major role in how we experience attraction, which is also a large part of why our sense of attraction might change, because we’re always growing, changing, and evolving based on our experiences and what we learn/discover along the way.
We’ve been sold this idea that our experience of attraction is finite, static, and linear, because, let’s be real, it makes us easier to understand and categorize if we’re singular and definable. The truth is that we’re always changing, and so is our attraction, so the best way to remain connected to your own true attraction is to develop a practice of being in ongoing conversation with it.