💘 what is 'cupiosexuality'? 💘

QUEER WORD
CUPIOSEXUAL

What It Means:

A microlabel on the asexual spectrum used to describe someone who does not experience sexual attraction, but may still want, enjoy, or seek out sexual relationships or sexual contact.

Let’s Use It In A Sentence:

When Sally came out as cupiosexual, her friends misunderstood completely and gifted her an alarming number of mugs in an effort to show their support.

A Little Bit of History:

Look, I get it.

When you first come across certain microlabels and what they mean, the instinctive response can be to scrunch up your face slightly and stare into the middle distance like you’ve just been asked to solve a particularly complex maths problem.

(Or, at least, mine is, anyway)

So, if you’re struggling to get your head around the concept of cupiosexual, let me share the insight that gave me a bit of an a-ha moment:

Attraction and desire are not the same thing.

They often overlap, of course. But they are not interchangeable.

Sexual attraction is about feeling drawn to a specific person (or people!) in a sexual way.

Desire, meanwhile, is about wanting sex or sexual intimacy more broadly, which often appears alongside attraction, but doesn’t have to.

Once I separated those two things out, cupiosexual started to make a lot more sense.

So Where Did the Term Come From?

Before it was cupiosexual, the term used to describe this experience was kalossexual, first coined by Tumblr user acelyssie back in 2014.

It’s not entirely clear who introduced the now more widely used term, but cupiosexual quickly replaced it and seems to be the version that stuck.

What we do know, though, is that the word comes from the Latin cupio, meaning ‘to desire’ or ‘to long for’ (fun fact: it’s also where Cupid gets his name!).

Which, really, tells you almost everything you need to know.

A cupiosexual person can want sex without experiencing sexual attraction.

In other words, they might enjoy the idea of sex, want intimacy, or actively seek out sexual contact, while still not feeling that particular pull towards another person that we typically describe as sexual attraction.

Of course, as with most microlabels, it’s less about fitting rigidly into a definition, and more about having language that helps someone describe an experience that might otherwise feel difficult to explain.