Coyote

On that note -- do we know when that term itself got popular? It seems new to me, but I'm not really sure when or where it came from. Partly, yes. My thoughts are still forming and I'm still kinda figuring out what I want to say about that, but I think it's both the name and how the name has been getting used. So, first, there's just the choice of words for the phrase itself -- calling it "split" attraction, as if attraction is, to continue the fruit metaphor, a banana that I cut down the middle, normally one whole but here being artificially split apart (as opposed to just... being different things in the first place). But also, there's people's repeated, repeated, repeated implicit and explicit assumption that "splitting" attraction = splitting romantic from sexual = using orientation language for each kind = having two different/differing orientations = having a romantic and a sexual orientation. So that involves assuming that 1) the point of identifying attraction is to incorporate it into "orientation" language, 2) the main type of attraction that people separate off from sexual is "romantic," 3) differentiating types of attraction means having a romantic orientation. As a quoiromantic who differentiates between types of attraction, I register this as an unwarranted centering of romance. _________ They were defining "split attraction model" as the universal application. This is what I mean by agreeing with @Apathetic Echidna that the statement "my own concept of SAM is probably much different from the original SAM definition" must be true, based on what's been already said. YES!! Just like I said on my very first post on this topic!! Okay. I take issue with that. If "orientation" means "mere pattern of attraction, not necessarily identity," then that means that I, by virtue of experiencing aesthetic and sensual attraction, necessarily "have" an "aesthetic orientation" and a "sensual orientation," regardless of whether or not I label it as such or use that language for myself. This is what you are saying? We were doing that and talking about that already, though. Before this term was imposed on us. I do think that the term is adding something somehow, just... not that. To the extent that aces and aros have found the term useful, it seems, I'm thinking now, to be in the context of rejecting/negating/positioning themselves apart from it. This makes its utility less about a rejection of the pervasive model of composite/unilateral attraction & more about a disidentification with certain intracommunity norms among aces and aros, where a lot of people talk like having two separable orientations is normal for us. For instance, this seems(?) to resonate with what Bananaslug wrote earlier: _________ I agree! I don't think it's particularly sensible either. And yet people are doing that anyway. They're doing that in this very thread. On that note, I have compiled some more thoughts on this. Some of that post is just rehashing things we've already gone over, but here's the part that I think is maybe(?) most relevant for this thread -- trying to draw a few different circles around ways of relating to the concept of "orientation": What do y'all think? Is that enough groups, too specific, too broad?

Yes. Yes, it definitely emerged in the context of the asexual community, (initially) among people who all identified as ace. It's not exclusive to aces by any means, and anyone who tries to police it like that would be wrongheaded, but yes, those roots are something I would acknowledge. What I meant by "mixed" -- I should have clarified -- was "mixed" as in "not all sharing a romantic orientation," i.e. not all "aro ace" specifically. It was more a mix of types of aces. Calling them all "aro aces" would be reductive and contrary to how some of them identify. That's not exactly accurate of them then. Yes, that was some anachronistic wording on my part. For the curious: the "chaste" or whatever use of "platonic" apparently comes from a 1600s interpretation of the Symposium because of "the kind of interest Socrates took in young men, which originally had no reference to women." ...Yeah. I haven't read the Symposium, but I have read the Phaedrus, and... for one thing, Socrates is flirting with another dude the whole time. But also? Plato's ideas expressed there about "love" (eros, so kind of a sex-romance composite) are not at all aro- or ace-friendly. Not mutually exclusive, but sure. Sounds like a good topic for another post.

I wonder if these terms might be better described as "aro ace vocabulary" since they appear to have been coined prior to there being a separate "aro community" without any obvious input from allosexual aros. I'm not convinced. Queerplatonic has a mixed history, not a specifically aro ace history. Squish was actually originally coined with somewhat amatonormative language by someone contrasted them as less intense than crushes. It's not clear to me though how that person identifies. The term 'queerplatonic' appears to have ended up with multiple meanings. Around the same time period 'platonic' has also acquired multiple meanings. Some of them, potentially, mutually exclusive. Oh gosh the word "platonic" has always been a mess. Best I can tell, the original use of it (in the 1600s or so) was basically a big "no homo," deliberately ignoring the homoerotic implications of Plato's writings. I can get into this more if people want but it's a bummer. I'm wondering if there are factors such as trying to explain things in terms alloromantics understand or 'respectability politics'. If so, I don't think it's working very well. Even if there's different affordances there, I'm wary of this kind of talk, because it sounds like it's getting into the territory of aro elitism (i.e. allormantics are inherently shallower etc.). ...It also sounds like you're splitting the world into aros and alloros here, which is a false binary. One way I've observed this is the idea of "friends first" where there's an expectation of friendship, be it platonic or sexual, is expected to be a step (on the escalator) towards a romantic relation ship. Which can get very messy where such an allo encounters an aro who actually wants this long term. Here's a post Jo wrote on the Relationship Escalator, sounds related.

! hm. That's fair. It also seems like people are defining SAM in terms of multiple (not "separate" but "separable," like aromanticism & asexuality are theoretically separable) different meanings, such as "having distinct orientations," "having distinct sexual and romantic orientations that don't match," "distinguishing between romantic and sexual attraction," and "types of attraction can be different." Some of those and not others could apply to one person, creating equal ambiguity in referring to another person as "SAM-using" or "non-SAM." At this point I'd also like to point out that we weren't dealing with this particular issue back when we weren't using this term (that is, the term creates the issue) -- even though it also helps to highlight or expose other issues, and in particular here I am thinking of... to use your term from the other thread as a placeholder for a sec, aspezzas and greyspezzas, for whom the sexuality/romanticism distinction is irrelevant or even troublesome. Oh gosh. I'd want to update it and make it accurate, myself, so I can imagine feeling really torn in your shoes ('cause that kind of visual orderliness appeals to me too). But anyway -- for now, I'm thinking the mini profile solution (ideologically, if not visually, RIP your triangle) would be a singular line that just says "orientation(s)." Thoughts? Oh most definitely. For reference, just as a historical note (and I use the word "historical" lightly), here are some of the antecedents and earliest uses of the phrase "split attraction model" that Belowdesire found and shared with me on Pillowfort: "i got a prollem w ppl splitting a complex sociocultural influenced ting like attraction into only two distinct experiences that ppl present as inherently unrelated all the time." (approx March 25, 2015) "stop this hyper-progressive (romance and sexual attraction are completely different so lesbians can still date men!!) shit which just circles riiiiight back to being your run-of-the-mill bigot" (approx April 23, 2015) "in the past few days i have alluded to the idea that the split attraction model plays into homophobia and particularly lesbophobia but i have not explained that in depth. i have discussed in the past how 'allosexual' is an alienating term and how it potentially hurts non-ace gay/bi people who are already hypersexualized, particularly sex-repulsed gay/bi people (me!!!). but i dont know where these posts are and my position on this is also not fully developed i think." (approx May 10, 2015) (note: this user says tumblr user medicine "is smart af and has definitely talked about split-attraction model before" -- I believe user medicine is the same person as user pure, up in the first link I've listed here) "the split attractions model encourages the maintenance of internalized homophobia" (approx June 24, 2015) "Again, the split attractions idea does apply to some people. But the model in which sexual and romantic attractions are intrinsically different is not. That difference does not apply to everyone. Trying to apply it where it does not exist is harmful, and reflects many types of homophobia." (approx June 24, 2015) "split attraction model is the idea that every single person experiences romantic/platonic/sexual/aesthetic/sensual attraction entirely separately and identifies every single LGBT+ person using that as a guide " (July 22, 2015) So the "original" uses of the words "split attraction model" were to say that 1) the "model" applies itself universally, as "inherent" and applying to "every single" person (i.e. the model is bad because the model itself involves doing that), and 2) the "model" -- and before that, even "romance and sexual attraction are completely different" -- was being called homophobia and bigotry. Note that even these definitions all from the same year are slightly different from each other in terms of whether they're talking about attraction being split into two (romantic/sexual) or more than two. From what I can tell, though, it was mostly responding to the idea of romantic orientation. Obviously I have to infer here that people started responding by saying "well you've got a point except it doesn't have to be applied to every single person though," while retaining/reclaiming the same name ("split attraction model") to mean something else, but I don't know of a particular post that discusses that shift as an intentional reclamation at the time. This kind of stuff is very hard to dig up again owing to the Tumblr format. _________ Hi, Elizabeth. I'm so sorry. I thought quoting your comment as an example made sense at the time -- I wouldn't have done it if I'd known it was going to turn into that big headache of a mess. Ty, and I think I have, yeah -- but for quick ref again, "squish" was introduced in 2007 (cw for amatonormative language), although I could only find "platonic attraction" as a phrase as far back as here, in 2014. Queerplatonic meanwhile comes from 2010. I still strongly feel this. The name "split attraction model" seems very intentionally coined to positioned romantisexual as a default and the idea of differentiating types of attraction as "splitting" a larger whole, which to me is like referring to the concept of apples and oranges as "split fruit." _________ Yes (that is orientation in terms of pattern of attraction, not identity or label you choose)  So you're using "orientation" and "pattern of attraction" to mean the same thing, and "orientation" and "identity label" to mean something different from each other? I'm seriously... speechless, we're on an aromantic forum. We've been over this time and time and time and time again, talking about how aro spaces don't equal ace spaces. And if you missed that, then you're uninformed. So uh, not to butt in here, but so that I don't make the same mistake you're identifying... can you explain more? Is the issue that Elizabeth used "ace community"/ace concepts to refer to romantic orientation & differentiating types of attraction? Is it the phrase "ace/aspec"? Or is it something else? If it was about that, then I don't think a lot of people understood it, with coyote asking  Talking about the name and how to apply that name is what I am interested in talking about, yes. The way that I think and speak, asking "what does it mean to you" and "is it useful" and "does it fill a lexical gap," plus the notation on when it seems to have been coined (plus the nigh constant use of quotation marks, around "split attraction model") are how I express curiosity from a language vantage point, as opposed to "what is it" and "what does it mean" and "how does it work" (and much less use of quotation marks, i.e. split attraction model), which would have been the questions I would ask if I was thinking only of the concept itself as a thing. It failed to occur to me, at the time of creating the thread, that there was ambiguity there. I apologize for my role in causing confusion. Fortunately this point of confusion has been raised and addressed, and now we are on the same page, yes? We have identified several definitions that people have used and ways that people have used it, as a name, or string of words, to apply to different and overlapping and intertwined concepts, and I would like to talk about the semantic work that the phrase does or does not perform, i.e. how it is and is not useful -- starting with the classification of individuals into "SAM" and "non-SAM."

Was recently pointed this direction off of another thread, so I hope folks don't mind me sharing some thoughts here. ...While I don't know that the words themselves are implying anything (although there's a case to be made there, for some of those, I think), I can point towards where I think some "aro vocabulary" (none of this is aro-specific vocabulary it looks like, but I'll borrow your category term here) is being defined in ways that are amatonormative. That's why I posted this post on different definitions of "friendship" right after my series on definitions of queerplatonic, for instance. On the one hand, I don't think "queerplatonic" has to be an amatonormative word (although I personally dislike its two components). But definitions like "more than friendship"? Yeah, I think that's worth taking a second look at, at the very least. Based on some similar issues that have cropped up around definitions of alterous and so on, I'm... inclined to say there's still work to be done in how nonromantic relationships are talked about even by people you'd expect to know better.

Oh uh, wow, this got a lot of replies suddenly. Neat. ...I feel like I can only address a few things in a reply at a time, though. I will do my best here. ! So, is it right or wrong to interpret this as meaning that "SAM" & "non-SAM" mean multiple things/can be used in multiple ways, for you? Before you mentioned it, I hadn't really given it much thought. I think that could be chafing to some folks, yes. While it's fine for me as an individual, because I have the communally-established language to say "no, romantic orientation doesn't apply to me" in more condensed shorthand, there isn't yet comparable shorthand for the sexual-and-romantic-as-combined-unit orientation folks to express that in this format, nor is there space to list any other kind of orientation. Also, thank you for pointing me toward that thread. I might go post on it after I finish this uhhh mammoth of a post. This is something I am interested in talking about. While I don't want to get sidetracked into talking about Plato just yet, stick a pin here to indicate that I have thoughts (so, we can talk more about that if anyone cares). Would you mind -- for definition purposes -- laying out examples of a "true/reflective" definition & a "misuse"/"narrowed down" definition? I want to see if we agree about which uses are bad/nonstrategic/unfair/unwise/whichever thing you'd like to call it. We don't have to keep talking about that if you don't want, but to address this (implicit) question(?), that would be because her comment included sentences like "I have to admit, before Coyote made this post, I was rather confused about 'SAM' and where it came from." ______ Oh, um, that wasn't quite what I meant to be explaining -- although I do agree with that too. That's all good. Let me try another question. Does having a romantic orientation entail differentiating romantic attraction from other kinds, and does differentiating types of attraction entail having more than one orientation? _______ No. ...Well -- maybe? It depends on what you're using that to mean. As I've stated, the term "split attraction model" itself doesn't come from aces, and it was coined within the past five years, on Tumblr, not AVEN. So -- I guess it depends on what you're specifically using it to mean. What idea or concept specifically are you thinking of, Mark? I've been looking into this for a while, so I might be able to pull some links for you, depending. Oh boy. Her? ....Somebody might have to tell Siggy that The Thinking Aro's influence on the aromantic community hasn't quite been left behind. Fun fact, I'm in the field of rhetoric and a lot of our early theoretical tradition engages with Plato (unfortunately...), so I have a lot to say about that dude & how come I've got complaints about the word "platonic" from all sorts of angles, but that may be a topic for another day. In terms of its contemporary usage apart from the dude himself? I've seen it used to mean nonromantic, nonsexual, nonromantic-nonsexual, nonromantic-nonsexual-casual... all sorts of things. It's kind of a mess, and I don't like the other associations it has for me, so on a personal basis I mostly just stay away from it. While I can't really speak to anything going on with wikis, if you're interested in how people define the latter there, you might be interested in this Genealogy of Queerplatonic, which I also made a thread for here. It talks about the origins of the term and also some examples of how it's been used differently by different people over the years. With that said, I also agree with you and @Apathetic Echidna that "more than friends - but less than romantic" is questionable/bad wording and deserves to be addressed. This could be veering off topic though, so that's a conversation we could maybe take to that other thread? In case this thread starts feeling any more unwieldy than it already is, I mean. ______ No. I'm not sure. ...And I don't mean "I'm not sure" as in "I disagree with you," but "I'm not sure" as in "I'm not sure how to answer that yet." I will explain a little bit more about what I am thinking. In one respect, I can't answer that question because I made this thread to find out more about how other people are using the term. I don't know that I can take a position on what "SAM" itself is or isn't, in relation to this conversation or otherwise -- and so I don't know how that influences how I should answer your question. What I will say though is this: I'm coming at this from something of a linguistic/rhetorical/language perspective, if that makes sense. I am thinking about names for things, and I am thinking about things and names for things as sometimes distinguishable. I do not really believe in "true" names or absolute essential meanings that "inherently" match up to a word (or that things can "inherently" mean things), just trends and tendencies. For example, if I call a spade a spade ♠️ and you understand me, that's not because a spade "is" a spade, it's just because we happen to share an understanding of what the letters-spelling-out "spade" (as a word-symbol) refers to, as its referent. I don't think I can say right now what this discussion "is" about. I can say what I'd like it to be about, though, and what I'd like it to be about is the idea of "split attraction model" as a name or phrase that people are making a choice to reclaim and use on things -- "split attraction model" as a symbol for an idea (or set of ideas), not the ideas themselves.

So are you saying my statement was wrong, or... something else? Like are you saying what I said was incompatible isn't actually incompatible, or are you saying that Elizabeth doesn't count as a person who finds it confusing, or are you saying that she would have understood it eventually if I hadn't failed to explain it to her right? I should have clarified, sorry: I was talking about hypotheticals. Like "if a person thinks of their experience as [...] then which category applies?" but, very well. Set aside that idea then. On that note, I'm glad to hear that neither of you believes in applying "sam" or "non-sam" to people without their say in it! Because that was a big part of the impetus to this whole thread & the whole previous post -- Laura referring to quoiromantics as people who don't split attraction, i.e. referring to a group I'm a part of in a way that I don't subscribe to and in fact find invalidating. Ah! That's a different statement then. Right now, it sounds like you're switching to talking in terms of overlap or subcategories. For instance, it's comparable, perhaps, to saying that aromanticism and asexuality are different things. That doesn't mean there aren't people who fit both or that they're contradictory, just that you can have one without the other -- "aromantics" can be a bigger category that includes people who are asexual and who are not, and "asexuals" can be a bigger category that includes people who are aromantic and who are not. When I say "romantic orientation" and "differentiating types of attraction" are different things, this is the kind of nesting/overlapping category idea I am thinking about. Is this the same for your thinking or is it different?

I'll quote the specific lines I was thinking of, from here: I… don’t know about this. I mean yeah, you could say that, if you wanted and feel that it fits, but… I have to say, if you just said that you’re “non-SAM” without any of the context of this conversation where you’ve just explained what that means to you, I would honestly have no idea what you meant by it. Because as you said, it does have multiple meanings. So would it really be that useful as an identifying phrase? Would it actually be able to stand alone? I have to admit, before Coyote made this post, I was rather confused about “SAM” and where it came from. I don’t bother with Tumblr so I missed all the flamewars where this apparently originated, so from my perspective it was just sort of… suddenly all over the place? And it’s difficult to figure out exactly what people mean by it. To me, Elizabeth saying "I was confused about this" and Siggy & Elizabeth saying "it has multiple meanings" is incompatible with "nobody finds its actual meaning ambiguous or unclear." __________________ I don't understand how this isn't the same idea...?? That's an example of what I'm talking about then. I'm not sure whether or not I should approach this by asking you questions so you can explain your own thinking more, or by giving examples of how the two meanings can contradict each other when applied to individual people. For reference, though, the post I linked up top has the start of an explanation for why I object to using "split attraction model" to mean the same thing as "romantic orientation." I'm not sure whether you read that or not, but right now in context it isn't super clear to me why you'd see the two as interchangeable/indistinguishable. So here's what I'm thinking at this juncture: if "the split attraction model" means one thing only, not more than one thing, and is always consistent with itself across iterations, then I can give you 3+ plus examples of individual narratives, and you can tell me whether or not "the SAM" applies to those people or not and how. Does that plan work for you?

Ahh okay, gotcha, for some reason I was thinking of "platonic attraction" strictly in terms of "emotional attraction" -- somehow it also completely slipped my mind that some experiences of physical attraction can rightly be described as platonic. But anyway. Yeah! Those are also experiences I relate to and it's valuable to me to have separate names for. I just call it differentiating between types of attraction (and then the specific names, as applicable/relevant). I'm, uh... feeling a little unheard here. I just provided you with a link to exactly that: someone saying that it was confusing to them. That's another example of the ambiguity. There's the "there's more than one or two types of attraction (ex. 6, as in your example)" idea, which you're acknowledging here, and there's the "romantic orientation can be different from sexual orientation" idea, which is what some others here in this thread are reiterating, and those two aren't the same thing (not least of which because I don't see people acknowledging 6 different orientations). Attraction isn't the same as orientation, you can experience a type of attraction without conceptualizing it in terms of its own orientation language, nobody here has even mentioned sensual orientation, etc. When people conflate the "there's more than one type of attraction [sexual/sensual/aesthetic/emotional/romantic/queerplatonic/who knows what else]" idea with the "romantic orientation as distinct from sexual orientation" idea, people are treating romantic & sexual like the only types of attraction anyone cares about distinguishing between, the only types that anyone conceptualizes as orientations, and the only types that even count as attraction in the first place. Because of that, I am beginning to conclude that the way people talk about "the split attraction model" is amatonormative.

@bananaslug Gotcha. And thanks. Can you say more about distinguishing between different types of platonic attraction? That sounds like that might relate to some other concepts I've been looking at lately, but I don't know whether you would use the same words. @eatingcroutons While I can't speak to prevalence in any way, I only have one orientation (gray-ace, no romantic orientation), and I find differentiating between types of attraction extremely useful and important. That was a big part of my process of questioning and coming around to identifying as ace. Hoo boy. I had to get up and walk around for a moment at that one. There's some talk about its ambiguity here, in the comment section, about its multiple meanings -- for instance see Elizabeth's comment.

@bananaslug Huh. Just as frame of reference -- I've also seen it used to mean more generally(?) any kinds of invalidation/attacks on an identity or concept, regardless of whether it's about "who's lgtb+ or not," so I wouldn't have thought to guess that specific topic. Are you one of the mods on the server, or do you just know from talking to them that that's what the rule is meant to mean? Oh absolutely. Sorry, I figured that by the "anti mogai discoursers" (?) you might've been referring to tumblr users, in particular with the mention about deleting your posts. As I explained in the post up top, conflating the two causes problems for me as someone who doesn't have a romantic orientation yet does differentiate between types of attraction. Like I said to Siggy -- I don't want to be classified as Schrödinger’s SAM user. So this is not just a historical reflection to me. It's about (as I linked as an example, in the post) actual cases of people speaking over my words and my identity in ways that directly eclipse and invalidate my ways of describing myself.

Thanks for the answers, y'all! Anyone else with thoughts, please do share 'em. @Apathetic Echidna Interestingly enough, the word "aromantic" is about a decade older than the phrase "split attraction model." So I guess you're referring to, more generally, the idea of multiple orientations? Sorry, can you elaborate on that? I don't think I follow you. Are you saying that individual people only have one "orientation," in the singular, and can't have more than one? @bananaslug Oof, in "non discourse" ways... You'll have to forgive me, but in my field "discourse" just means "talking," so in a lot of cases, jsyk, I'm not super clear on what exactly other people mean by it. In this case I'll assume you were referring to my bullet point/summary of its origins, with the anti-ace hostility. I just want to note here that not everyone uses the word that way (it seems to be a pretty niche Tumblr thing?), and a lot of the times, even with an awareness that people have tried to redefine it over there, in specific cases it's still really confusing to me what exactly people are trying to get at. (Fun fact -- I did try checking out the site discord server earlier, but... when I saw the "no aro/ace discourse" rule and how it doesn't elaborate on that at all, I figured it would be easier to just leave quietly than ask for clarification.) Since I only watch small parts of Tumblr, I had no idea that was happening. Sorry to hear that. :C It does seem like Tumblr is an especially unworkable environment for hosting these kinds of discussions... A couple of thoughts... One, in your workshops, have you been introducing it under that name, specifically? ("the split attraction model") And also... I don't think it's that "model" that did that, because wtfromantic was coined in 2011 -- in reaction to the overdetermined assumption that all aces had a romantic orientation -- four whole years before the term "split attraction model" had even surfaced. I do think that there's a prevalent assumption that all aces have "two orientations" (a romantic one and a sexual one), but that's not necessarily a given of just separating types of attraction at all, so to me those are two different things going on. With that said, I previously had just been thinking about the "everybody has a romantic orientation" assumption in terms of how that impacts people who don't, like wtfromantic and quoiro people... You and Siggy are some of the first folks I'm hearing from who feel at conflict with the multiple-orientations idea in a different way. So this is good to know for thinking about how to reconceptualize these things.

ETA 4/29/2020: It's still relatively common for people to use this term without knowing where it came from/what it entails ideologically, so in the interest of helping with that, I'm updating this post with some more condensed notes The term "split attraction model" is no older than 2015 comes from outside the ace and aro communities comes from the same crowd who thinks "allosexual" is a bad word is linked to anti-ace, anti-aro, and anti-bi ideologies For more detailed info, see here and here and here If you're looking for alternatives, ask yourself what you're actually trying to get at For orientation stuff, consider: aro quoisexual, unit aro, aro neu, varioriented, etc. For attraction stuff, consider: attraction subtyping, differentiating types of attraction, etc. For treating attraction as the same thing as orientation, don't For continuity' sake, below is the previous/original text for this first post. *** Since recently posting Romantic Orientation and the "Split Attraction Model" are not the same thing, I've been doing some more thinking about the issues it raises, and I wanted to solicit more info/perspectives. Some things from that post: The earliest use of "romantic orientation" as a term I've found in ace contexts dates back to approximately 2005, give or take, although it seems like it may well have been in use prior to that. (Outside of ace or aro contexts, the older term is "affectional orientation.") The earliest use of "split attraction model" as a term I've found dates back to approximately 2015, and although I can't tell exactly who coined it, it seems to have come from people who are under neither the aro nor ace umbrellas and started the discussion as part of a (renewed) reactionary movement against ace tumblr, which expanded into attacking aro tumblr as well. In the comments of my post, you can find some of us discussing the concept of labeling a "split attraction model" and how useful it is or isn't as an umbrella term & in what ways. Some questions I have for y'all: What have you seen people using "split attraction model" to mean? What does it mean to you? If somebody says that they use it, what does that mean to you? If somebody says they don't use it, what does that mean to you? Do you usually think of "split attraction" correlating with "having more than one orientation," or no? Does anybody have a source dating it back prior to 2015? Any other thoughts on the dilemmas raised? Does it fill a lexical gap? Does it have multiple meanings? Is it useful? [ETA 7/13/19: repurposing this old thread as a more general invitation to talking about where the term came from. Right now, the oldest uses I can find are from people on Tumblr in 2015 using it as a name for something bad, specifically in conjunction with calling ace community language homophobic.]

@Apathetic Echidna Good idea, makes sense to have that in the timeline. And that would be coined by Elizabeth Brake in Minimizing Marriage (2012), I believe.

@Mark I partly disagree. The general concept of different types of attraction is older, true. In that reply there, I was responding to HotRamen's interest in the term "aromantic" becoming a thing, so I was focused on that particular coinage, but also -- I haven't found any instances of people using the phrase "split attraction model" that early. Looking at that link you provided, I suspect it was mostly cribbed from this tumblr post, which I am currently in the process of writing a criticism of. In both of those, the "history" timelines provide some really good related information but all of them stop short of talking about any instances of the use of "split attraction model" as a phrase, which has its own history not being accounted for.

I know Sennkestra already has some stuff on this so you might consider this to be spoilers, but the last time I asked folks for input on the origins of romantic orientation, they commented with these observations -- including an early use of "aromantic" on the Haven for the Human Amoeba group. Yahoo won't let me actually open the link though. On AVEN, which was technically founded later, the first use I could find of "aromantic" was in 2006, here ... and if search results are anything to go by, it looks like it started picking up more (or at least, appearing in forum posts more frequently) in 2008.

Glad to see I'm not the only one who gets skeeved by couples getting kissy in public hallways. Another thing that goes along with that, for me, is when it's otherwise quiet and you can hear them doing this intense quiet whispering thing that goes along with kisses. It happens to be a kind of sound that I find difficult to tune out, and it's really unsettling.

*casually revives old thread* I only skimmed, but -- has no one brought up Paul yet? Dude's a flaming aro ace. (edit: Oh okay, now I see where he was brought up. D'oh. Oh well, I'll leave this here anyway.) "Now to the unmarried and the widows I say: It is good for them to stay unmarried, as I do. But if they cannot control themselves, they should marry, for it is better to marry than to burn with passion. " --1 Corinthians 7 He's literally like "not being married is best, but if you can't stand it, then go ahead, I guess." Logically, if people can be cool with him saying something like that, then they should be cool with modern aro Christians too. ...Unfortunately, people can be pretty stubborn about the arbitrary value they place on nuclear family. Just popping in to say, that has to have been a more recent development, not something that's actually embedded in the Bible. Feel free to point that out if the occasion arises.