How I love, and who I love

My love languages

The classic five are a decent starting point, and two of them are squarely mine: acts of service and words of affirmation. I want to be precise about which direction those run in, though, because it's the thing people get wrong about me. Those two are how I give it. They're my output, not my order form.

Acts of service is the one I reach for first, usually before anyone has asked. If I love you, I'm going to notice the task you've been quietly dreading for three weeks and just do it. I'll handle the phone call you've been putting off. I'll take the thing off your plate, and I'd rather you didn't make a fuss about it afterwards, because the point was never to be thanked. The point was to make your day shorter. Doing something for you is easier for me than saying a sentence about it, and it means the same thing.

Words of affirmation is the other one, and I say them out loud on purpose. I'll tell you that you did a good job, that I like having you around, that I'm proud of you, and I'll say it more often than strictly seems necessary, because silence doesn't stay neutral inside anybody's head. It fills itself in with the least generous option available. I know that from the inside. So I say the thing instead of assuming you already know it.

The list doesn't stop at five, though. There are a handful of other things that work as love languages for me, in both directions, even though no book is going to put them on a chart.

That last one deserves a proper mention, because it's the one I get asked about most and can explain least. Vibe is what I call the thing where someone's presence in a room simply works. Nothing has to be happening, and nobody has to be entertaining anybody. You can sit in the same space doing separate things and the silence isn't a gap that needs filling. I've met people who look perfect on paper and felt nothing, and people I clicked with in under a minute for reasons I still can't itemize. So what do I do with that? I've stopped trying to reverse-engineer it and started just trusting it when it shows up.

"You can't manufacture vibe. You can only notice when it's there and pay attention to it, which honestly is most of what I do."

What I'm actually drawn to

Intelligence, above almost anything else. Not credentials, and not the ability to win an argument. I mean curiosity: someone who gets lit up about a thing and wants to tell me about it, even if the thing is completely outside anything I know. Watching a person be excited about something they understand deeply is, to me, one of the most attractive things a human being can do. I'll happily listen to a forty-minute explanation of a subject I have no stake in, purely because of how someone sounds when they're talking about it.

Tattoos, absolutely. I love them. I love the deliberateness of them, I love the ones with a story behind them, and I love the ones that exist purely because somebody thought it would look cool. That's a perfectly good reason.

Beyond that, my taste is wide. I love big personalities, the kind who walk in and change the temperature of the room. I also love small ones, the quiet people who say one thing an hour and it's the best thing anyone has said. Neither is better; they're just different things I like for different reasons.

Physically I'm all over the map, and I mean that as a compliment to everyone involved. Tall, short, fat, skinny; I've never once been able to pick a type and make it stick. Women, fem people, transmasc people. What I respond to is how someone carries themselves, not a set of measurements.

The one consistent line is cis men. They're not who I'm drawn to, and that's just where my attraction sits. It isn't a judgment about anyone and it isn't a grudge, and I'm not going to justify or apologize for it. Attraction doesn't require a defense. Mine just goes where it goes.

The words I use for myself

A handful of labels come up when people ask, and most of them I've never put on this site before now. I'm a grey asexual, demisexual, sapiosexual, polyamorous, intersex woman. I'm also openly trans, and that gets the trans page to itself, because it's its own story. People conflate those constantly, so let me say it plainly: being intersex isn't the same as being trans, and neither of them explains the other. They just both happen to be true about me.

Grey asexual, demisexual, and sapiosexual

Grey ace, in short, means my attraction exists but it's infrequent and conditional. It isn't absent, and it isn't a light switch that flips on when the right person appears. It's more that the circumstances where I feel it are narrower and rarer than the default everyone seems to assume. Asexuality is a spectrum, not a binary, and "grey" is the honest word for sitting somewhere along it instead of at either end.

Demisexual and sapiosexual are the other two pieces of the same picture, not separate ones. Demisexual means the attraction has a precondition: an actual bond has to exist first, and it doesn't arrive on a first meeting no matter how objectively attractive someone is. Sapiosexual means that when it does show up, intelligence and curiosity are almost always what triggered it. That's the same thing I was describing a few paragraphs up, before I had this exact language for it.

Put together, that means a spark takes real time for me and I don't get it on demand, so I've stopped treating its absence on day one as an answer. I'll keep sitting with someone even when nothing sparks right away, on purpose, because for me that's often just what the process looks like before a connection has had room to form. Some of the people I've cared about most started as someone I felt nothing for at first.

In practice this means connection comes first for me, by a long way, and it isn't a warm-up act for something else. That's a real thing to tell a partner out loud, not something to quietly hope they work out on their own. It's one of the reasons I care so much about saying what you need instead of hinting at it.

Intersex

I'm intersex. "Intersex" is an umbrella term for people born with variations in sex characteristics that don't fit the neat two-box model people are taught in school. It's a lot more common than most people think, it's a naturally occurring variation and not a disorder, and it isn't the same thing as being trans, non-binary, or a gender identity at all. It describes a body, not an identity.

I'm not going to detail my own medical history here, and I'd ask people not to speculate about it. Not out of shame. My specific anatomy and my specific paperwork just aren't public information, and a stranger's curiosity doesn't outweigh that. Being intersex is part of the truth of me, and I'd rather state it plainly than let it sit as an omission. That's as far as the public version goes.

Polyamorous

I'm ethically non-monogamous, and specifically more of a relationship anarchist than a hierarchical poly person. I'm not going to repeat that whole argument here, because it already has a home. The polyamory page covers the vocabulary, why non-hierarchical works for me, and the misconceptions I answer most often. Short version for this page: I don't rank the people I love, and loving more than one person hasn't made any of it thinner.

If you want the wider map of how I relate to people, that lives in Personal Dynamics.

Feed me: an unreasonably specific list

Food is a love language for me in both directions, so here's the field guide. Consider it a cheat sheet. There's also a whole page now, with a photo gallery and eleven years of my very real Google Local Guide stats, if this cheat sheet isn't enough for you.

The hotdog isn't negotiable. Mayo, relish, hot sauce, onions, and some ketchup. The word "some" is doing a lot of work there. The mayo is load-bearing and I won't be taking questions about it. Yes, that's five things on one hotdog. Yes, it's correct.

Pizza I'm easy about, right up until I'm not. Pineapple is welcome. Pineapple is fine, it has always been fine, and the discourse has been exhausting for a decade. Where I draw an extremely firm line is everything else in the fruit aisle. Strawberries, blueberries, bananas, kiwi: absolutely not, on a pizza, ever. Pineapple earned its place. The rest of them are trying to turn dinner into a fruit salad and I refuse to allow it.

Then there's the comfort tier: alfredo, tacos, and a good steak. Nothing clever about any of them. They're just the three things I'd pick if someone asked what I actually want to eat, not what sounds interesting.

People are surprised by the green stuff, but I love it. Brussels sprouts, asparagus, and green smoothies, all sincerely and not as penance. I'm also militant about fiber and water, in quantities that occasionally alarm the people around me. It's the least glamorous health advice in existence and it works, so I keep doing it.

Snacks are where I lose all credibility: Clif bars, Poptarts, and oatmeal raisin cookies. Oatmeal raisin is a hill I'll die on. Everyone acts betrayed when they expect chocolate chip, and everyone is wrong.

And then Monster. The footer at the bottom of every page on this site says "too much Monster" and I want to be very clear that this isn't a joke I made for the website. It's a description. Coffee gets me started and Monster carries the rest of the day, and the ratio isn't something I'd defend in front of a doctor.

If you ever need to win me over in a single move: hotdog, built correctly a song you thought I'd like an unprompted Monster say the nice thing out loud

One more thing

None of this is a checklist for applicants. It's an inventory of what reaches me and where my attraction sits, written down because I'd rather be legible than mysterious. Two of the labels on this page are new here, and I've said them plainly on purpose. I spent long enough leaving things as omissions and hoping people filled in the blanks kindly. It's easier, and a lot better for me, to just say the thing.