If you are sapiosexual and 9 other remarkable preferences

After all that baking banana bread, gardening, and online shopping, I just started reading. You have to do something in quarantine, right?

I dutifully scour the internet.

But now I stumbled upon something interesting: something I, as a psychologist, had never heard of. Namely that people can be sapiosexual. It sounds a bit juicy, but it’s actually not: it means that you are attracted to people who are very intelligent. Getting excited about a smart person, so to speak. There’s even a special dating app for it: Sapio. In it, you mainly find incredibly smart people. You are sapiosexual if you really want someone who can have intelligent conversations, who knows what’s going on in the world, and whom you might even look up to because they have six master’s degrees sitting in the drawer, for example. Sapios (that’s what they’re called, yes) are attracted to a heated discussion, engaging small talk, or a rather complicated joke. They don’t care what kind of shoes the date is wearing or how their hair looks (after 61 weeks without a haircut, not even that). A bit like The Big Bang Theory, if you will. It’s not even about someone’s true IQ, but rather about how complex that person thinks about the world and how interesting they can ramble on about it.

Curious as I am, I decided to look up even more juicy forms of sexual attraction. What do some of us really get attracted to? In psychology, this is called a ‘paraphilias’: sexual preferences for striking characteristics, things, or moments.

Here are 9 funny interests: 

1. Autagonistophilia: you feel sexy when you’re in front of the camera or when your partner shines in front of the lens
2. Capnolagnia: it’s very hot when your partner smokes a cigarette
3. Dacryphilia: you find it attractive when the other person (often) cries
4. Formicophilia: it’s charming when insects crawl over you or your partner
5. Lactophilia: your partner loves your breastfeeding
6. Maschalagnia: you get warm from other people’s armpits
7. Metrophilia: you get aroused by a poem
8. Nasophilia: you see a nose as a lust object
9. Stigmatophilia: if your partner has tattoos or a piercing, you are happy

Ah, everyone has their thing, right? But if you’re still looking, make sure to have interesting digital conversations about the universe, the chicken and the egg, and whether your brain determines who you really are or not. You never know if you might hook someone with it. And otherwise, you can always write a poem.