What, Exactly, Is Abrosexuality?

AS TIME GOES on, more people are waking up to the fact that some of our long-held cultural beliefs around gender and sexuality are wrong and neither are, in fact, static. As many queer people will tell you, these categories are fluid and hard to pin down under the guise of one single, messy moniker. However, there are more people who are trying to describe their fluid sexuality in a way that encompasses the reality that change might be their only constant: that’s where abrosexuality comes in.

Just as people who might describe their gender as fluid, meaning they feel as if their gender changes over time, there are people who feel that their sexuality changes over time; the word for that is “abrosexual.” The term uses the Greek root “abro,” meaning “delicate” or “graceful,” to describe the way in which one’s sexuality can flow and change over time.

How do abrosexual people talk about their sexuality?

Several people who spoke to Men’s Health about their own abrosexuality stated that they felt periods of attraction that changed over time, and several people emphasized that the identity can also include periods of asexuality, or feelings of low or no sexual attraction.

Kel, a 19-year-old abrosexual person, told Men’s Health that while abrosexuality can vary from person to person—as many sexualities can and do!—it’s marked by frequent shifts between a vast number of sexualities, “even totally opposite at times.”

“At any given time, it feels like I am, always have been, and always will be my current sexuality, which is what sets abrosexuality apart from being bi or pan,” she said. “For example, if I feel gay, I could never see myself with a man. A few hours later I may feel straight, and I couldn’t imagine that woman I was crushing on earlier as anything more than a friend.”

To put it succinctly, while a person’s sexuality may feel fluid, their abrosexualty is unchanging. Finding the term has certainly been a boon for many people who identify with it, as it has given them a label for what was previously the confusing phenomenon of a shifting sexuality.

“I had been confused as to why it seemed my sexuality would change pretty often,” said 19-year-old Will. “So when I found the label, everything just made sense. I felt like I finally found a name to a piece of myself that I was confused about for a year.”

For 31-year-old Zach, abrosexuality helped them find a label for their sexuality, which “seemed almost constantly in flux.”

“My longest identification was as bisexual, but it always felt not very solid,” he said. “Like sure I could go a few weeks as bi, sometimes leaning one way or another, but then I’d spend decent chunks of time totally uninterested and even turned off by men or woman respectively and I couldn’t really square that even with the “Bi-cycle” concept.”

And how is abrosexuality different from bisexuality or pansexuality?

While abrosexuality might share some traits with bisexuality or pansexuality—which are also slightly different—several people said that the fact that their sexuality shifts differentiates it from bisexuality or pansexuality, which feel like more permanent labels.

“I’ve always had waves of different desires,” Ben, 36, said. “I considered myself bisexual for a long time, but it never quite fit. The truth is sometimes my desires feel completely straight and at other times completely gay.”

“My sexuality changes,” 18-year-old Ronyn told Men’s Health. “While sometimes I am attracted to two or more genders and could occasionally identify as bi or pan or omni, I am much more often just gay (for men) and so I mainly call myself gay and abro.”

Similarly, 21-year-old Eli said that “bi and pan people can be attracted to any gender any time,” but “I just cannot feel attraction to some genders in given moments. Or at any gender at all! I am not ‘stable’ like them.”

One respondent uses the terms bisexual and abrosexual interchangeably, depending on the context.

“Both terms technically fit me,” said Morg, 28. “Bisexuality is a much wider spectrum than what people think and so when I [say] that I am bisexual and then tell them my experience, a lot of people may look at me as if I am confused or making things up.”

OK, but how often does an abrosexual person’s attraction change?

How often and when an abrosexual person’s sexuality might change is, much like the label itself might imply, not fixed or predictable. Most people who spoke to Men’s Health contended that their sexuality changed every few months, with a few citing a couple of months or a year as the longest time that it stayed the same.

However, as with all things, there are outliers: Kel, for instance, said that the longest her sexuality stayed the same was “just a few days” and “definitely less than a week.” Zach has experienced even quicker shifts. “Shifts within a day or one day shifts have happened to me too,” he said.

How old is the term “abrosexual”?

The sexual identity has recently gained more visibility as the term went viral on social media sites such as TikTok over the summer. For example, one video posted in August describing the user’s abrosexuality — and is tagged with the hashtag — has just under 400,000 likes and over 6500 comments.

But talking about abrosexuality online is not limited to this summer and the label itself goes back farther: Zoe Stoller, a licensed social worker, posted a video on social media in 2021 describing the abrosexual flag.

But quite a few sources point to an even earlier coining of the term, with the New York Post saying that it has been in use since 2013, while Women’s Health points out that an abrosexual flag — which is pink, green and white — was created by a Tumblr user in 2015.

Some people who spoke to Men’s Health said they first encountered the term as recently as this fall, while others said that they had become aware of it over five years ago.

Rather than thinking of abrosexuality as new, it might be better to think of it as a term that finally represents how a group of people feel about themselves.

“The label abrosexuality finally gave me the freedom of expressing my changing identity without feeling confined or like a fraud, which I experienced with more concrete labels,” Ness, 21, said.

Of course, a term being new shouldn’t come to discredit what it’s trying to name. Language evolves along with society; for instance, a gay person may not have described themselves as “gay” until well into the 20th century.

If you feel like you may be abrosexual and want to talk about it, there are definitely some communities you can look into, including the Reddit community dedicated to abroseuxality, which currently boasts over 3,000 members, or using hashtags, such as #abro or #abrosexuality to find people creating content around the sexual identity on social media sites such as TikTok.