iolre replied to your post: emperorirene asked you: Go on, a…

Could asexual attraction be called romantic attraction? That’s kind of what I’m getting from what you’re saying.

That’s one kind, yes.

It’s funny, it’s actually a brain re-arranger for me.  Because if you think about it, here’s this little circle representing sexual attraction…and then this BIG HONKING CIRCLE that contains EVERY OTHER TYPE OF ATTRACTION that human beings can experience.  They can even exist in tandem with sexual attraction!  In fact if you like somebody for sex but also for other things, then the only thing the sexual attraction covers is the sex.  It turns out you’re also asexually attracted to them! ^_^

Funny how big we blow sexual attraction up to be, when you realize how much it doesn’t actually include, isn’t it?

So the upshot is that ‘asexual attraction’ is honestly a super generic term that doesn’t really accomplish much other than excluding the likelihood of sex.

(And that is only to the best of our knowledge; we don’t really know for sure what those guys are getting up to or want to get up to.  We can only conjecture that since we haven’t seen it on screen, probably it hasn’t happened.  Although somebody will undoubtedly point out that John got Mary pregnant and we didn’t see that happen onscreen either.)  

And I’m using it deliberately for that vagueness, because we don’t really know for sure WHAT type of relationship/attraction exactly exists between Sherlock and John.  We just know something is there.

But I’ll refer you to this badass commentary on pair bonding that lunanimal wrote in response to me.  I think it does a great job of framing the issue in a way that’s more precise and less blurrily confusing than what we’ve had to resort to in the past.