If you search “does having a crush mean my relationship is over,” you get a digital avalanche of panic.

Partners write as if noticing another human being automatically voids their mortgage.

But the question is worth asking because most couples have no idea what a crush inside a committed relationship actually means—or doesn’t mean.

A new study in the academic journal Personal Relationships by Lucia O’Sullivan and colleagues finally gives us data instead of hand-wringing.

The researchers followed real couples for a year to see whether crushes (or, in research language, extradyadic attraction) actually reduce relationship satisfaction, sexual satisfaction, or commitment.

Some cultures perfect bread. Some perfect calligraphy.

America, in its eternal improvisational brilliance, has perfected enmity.

We manufacture it, distribute it, and export it globally like it’s a subsidized crop. Enmity is our artisanal sourdough—fermented, shared, photographed, and wildly overvalued.

The digital age merely gave us the industrial kitchen.

But to understand why half the country seems permanently on the brink of a personalized holy war, we have to begin not with the internet, but with the small, neglected psychological fact that people so often behave as if their self-worth depends on having an enemy.

Enmity offers direction. It offers meaning.

And in a lonely culture, it offers a kind of counterfeit intimacy—the connection of shared antagonism.

This is Cultural Narcissism’s latest trick, and it’s a good one.

There are moments in a woman’s life when attraction is not a flutter but an audit.

She notices a man—his posture, his easy laugh, the way he performs charm as if it were a language he learned too quickly—and then she does something many men never see: she listens for the world’s opinion of him.

This is not insecurity.

It is the ancient logic of survival, the recognition that some mistakes cost more than others, and that romance—left unverified—can bankrupt a future.

A new study in Evolutionary Psychological Science embedded beside its name confirms the pattern: women who follow slower, more family-oriented life strategies rely more heavily on social information when judging potential partners.

In the language of evolutionary psychology, this is “mate choice copying.” In the language of women with something to lose, it is caution sharpened into intelligence.

Mate choice copying is not new; it’s older than agriculture, documented across species, including humans, in work such as Mate-choice copying in humans: adaptive utility embedded beside its title.

The principle is simple:
If other women found him desirable, he looks better. If other women fled, he looks like the reason they ran.

But this study asks the deeper question:
Who copies the most—and why?

Universities like to imagine themselves as the birthplace of every serious idea.

According to this charming fiction, knowledge flows downward: first the journal article, then the classroom, then—after several years of peer review—the public.

But the last fifteen years of queer microlabels tell a different story.A truer one.A more human one.

Terms like autochorissexual, aegosexual, fraysexual, lithromantic, quoigender, cupioromantic, and nebularomantic did not come down from the ivory tower.

They came up, from people who had no language for their lives and no patience left for institutions that refused to provide it.

Academia did not invent this lexicon.Queer communities did.

And they did it with more speed, precision, and ethical clarity than any institutional framework has managed in decades.

This wasn’t rebellion. This was repair.

They blush, they thrill, they feel the pulse of something interesting, and yet if you suggest they join the fantasy, they react as if you’ve asked them to perform amateur dentistry.

These are the autochorissexuals.

They should be left in peace.

Autochorissexuality, if we must define it without resorting to interpretive dance, is the experience of being aroused by a sexual scenario in which one does not appear.

The fantasy is vivid, the heat is real, the pulse is unmistakable—but the self remains firmly offstage, lounging in the wings with a drink and a general lack of ambition.

Some might call this detachment.
others call it good judgment.

Most people assume desire strengthens with intimacy.

We treat the romantic arc—spark, closeness, deeper erotic connection—as if it were a law of nature, as dependable as gravity.

Closeness should feed desire. Familiarity should inflame it.

Love is supposed to bring both emotional closeness and sexual momentum, intertwined like two vines growing up the same lattice.

But some people live by a very different internal architecture.

For them, desire rises in the opening act and disappears somewhere around the part where emotional intimacy should add spark rather than siphon it off.

What once felt electric becomes warm, affectionate, and thoroughly unerotic.

The culture calls this a problem. Fraysexuality calls it a pattern.

A fraysexual person experiences sexual attraction most intensely when someone is new, distant, or still partly unknown.

The imaginative charge of early ambiguity becomes the fuel.

The unknown is the erotic engine.

But as the relationship deepens and emotional closeness forms, desire shifts.

The spark that once animated the connection fades almost imperceptibly, like a candle guttering in a room that suddenly has too much light.

This is not fear of intimacy.
Not avoidance.
Not ambivalence.
Not the clichéd terror of commitment.

It’s allegedly the natural tempo of a certain kind of erotic system.

Most people discuss sexual attraction as if they were reading GPS instructions: turn left, merge right, follow the signs.

For them, desire arrives with a direction and a label, sometimes even a justification. But not everyone runs that software.

Some people experience attraction the way early sailors experienced the sea—something you can feel, something undeniably present, but nothing that grants you the courtesy of a map.

That’s nebulasexuality.

Not confusion.
Not indecision.
Not a personality glitch.

Just a different perceptual style: attraction as atmosphere, not architecture.

This guide lays out the terrain—what nebulasexual means, why it exists, how it relates to nebularomantic identity, and why so many people recognize themselves in it the moment they finally hear the word.

You’ll also find a full FAQ and academic references, because even sometimes even fog has a structure.

There are people for whom sexuality is a direct, embodied experience—something that lives in the skin, the breath, the pulse. Desire appears as motion toward another person.

This is the cultural blueprint, the one romance and sex education both assume we’re all using. Wanting someone is supposed to come with an impulse to participate.

Then there are people for whom sexuality refuses to behave like a physical instinct at all. The desire is real. The arousal is real. The erotic imagination is vivid, intricate, and sometimes extraordinary.

But when real-world involvement appears—when a partner enters the picture, when intimacy becomes interactive—the entire erotic system goes quiet.

These are aegosexual and aegoromantic experiences.
And they’re far more common than the culture admits.

An aegosexual person experiences sexual desire primarily through fantasy, imagination, story, or internal narrative—without wanting personal involvement.

Aegoromantic functions similarly on the romantic side: romantic imagination is rich and active, but the desire for participation is minimal, nonexistent, or contextually disconnected.

There is a kind of attraction that blooms beautifully at a distance—fully felt, internally alive, sometimes even intense—until the moment someone returns the feeling.

And then, instantly, quietly, or gradually, it fades.

What was vibrant becomes neutral. What was charged becomes still. The spark doesn’t disappear because something is wrong; it disappears because something changed.

That is lithsexual and lithromantic experience.

A lithsexual person feels sexual attraction toward others but does not want those feelings reciprocated.

A lithromantic person experiences romantic attraction with that same condition: the desire is real, but the partner’s interest disrupts the internal experience rather than enhancing it.

Both orientations revolve around a single, misunderstood truth:

Some partners are drawn to the one-way nature of desire—because that is where desire feels most authentic.

There is a kind of romantic attraction that announces itself loudly.
The pulse quickens, the stomach flips, and the person in question begins glowing in the mind like a stage-lit protagonist.

We are told this is normal, even expected—that a healthy emotional system recognizes interest immediately, like a dog perking up at the sound of its name.

But some people live by a different internal weather system.

For them, attraction does not arrive as an event. It gathers. It shifts. It lingers without explaining itself.

At first, it feels like nothing more than a faint change in atmosphere—a barometric dip, a change in air pressure, something subtle but undeniable.

They know something is happening, but not what.

These folks are often described, incorrectly, as slow, confused, noncommittal, or emotionally inexperienced. The truth is much more interesting: they are nebularomantic.

A nebularomantic person experiences romantic attraction in ways that are gradual, ambiguous, atmospheric, and difficult to label.

Every now and then evolutionary psychology releases a study that lands with the energy of a friend announcing, “I’ve discovered that hydration is helpful.”

This one—published in Evolutionary Psychological Science—declares that women prefer long-term partners who show “personal growth motivation.”

In plain English:
Women like men who grow.

Women prefer men who don’t emotionally stall out at 23.
Women want partners who are actively assembling themselves, not just coasting on whatever personality they downloaded in high school.

Astonishing.

But here’s the thing: this “new finding” slots so neatly into decades of classic research that you can practically trace the genealogy. It’s like watching a family resemblance travel through the literature.

Let’s begin with the obvious: The Age of Disclosure is exactly the kind of film Washington thinks counts as intellectual engagement.

One hundred and nine minutes of retired admirals, intelligence officials, congressional hobbyists, and Marco Rubio (now with added gravitas) sitting in high-contrast lighting discussing “nonhuman craft” as though they’re reviewing zoning regulations for the Blue Army Procession of Fatima.

The film insists on its seriousness by sheer volume of talking heads—thirty-four of them—each framed with the same visual grammar: dimly lit rooms, brushed steel backdrops, and the kind of grave pauses that imply revelation is imminent if you’ll just keep watching.

It’s documentary as congressional catnip.

Dense enough to look important.

Vague enough to avoid accountability