Attraction — or the way a person feels drawn or connected to others — does not always follow a straight, understandable, or predictable path. For some people, it is far more fluid, complex, and often appears in different forms during different periods of life. Feelings can shift, quiet down, reappear, or transform entirely, and this is not unusual at all, even though very few talk openly about it. This experience of changing attraction has a specific name: abrosexuality, an identity within the LGBTQ+ spectrum that describes people whose orientation shifts over time.
“She thought she was a lesbian”
To understand more clearly what abrosexuality represents and why it matters, it helps to look at the personal story of a writer who lived this reality for more than three decades. Her experience not only helped her understand herself but also brought greater visibility to a term still unfamiliar to much of the public.
In July 2024, Metro UK published an article by writer Emma Flint, where she shared her emotional and mental journey toward identifying as abrosexuality. Her story unfolds sensitively and honestly, revealing how, for 30 years, she tried to understand why her attraction toward others changed so often — as if it followed the shifting seasons.
Flint, who was 32 years old when she wrote the article, recalls believing for many years that she was a lesbian. That identity seemed right… until suddenly she found herself feeling drawn to men. Then, in another period, she felt no romantic or personal interest toward anyone at all. And then, unexpectedly, her feelings returned toward women. This cycle repeated again and again, with no stable pattern and no explanation that made sense to her at the time.
For many years, she says, she lived with a deep sense of uncertainty about who she was:
“I wasn’t sure who I was,” she admits. This uncertainty followed her everywhere. It felt as if she were “lost, out at sea,” without a compass to show the way. Meanwhile, every time she spoke with loved ones, she felt a strange sense of guilt — not because she wanted to deceive anyone, but because her identity seemed to shift every time she tried to express it.
“It wasn’t that I couldn’t make up my mind,” she explains, emphasizing that the dilemma wasn’t indecisiveness but the reality that her feelings genuinely changed. “My identity moved.” One day she felt strongly that she was a lesbian — but days or weeks later…