This is the first in a series of posts about non-traditional types of attraction, and how they fit in the context of relationship anarchy. First up, is one that I've experienced enough times that I'm starting to wonder if it's my default setting.
Alterous attraction is a term used to describe ambiguous attraction, where the person who has the attraction cannot tell if it's a crush (romantic and/or sexual) or a squish (platonic and/or queerplatonic) attraction. It may actually be something different entirely that fits somewhere between those more common forms of attraction. It's a fairly well known concept in the Aspec community (particularly the demiromantic and demisexual subsets.)
Given it's ambiguous nature, it can be a very confusing emotion to process. However, in the context of relationship anarchy, despite there still being that uncertainty of your own emotions, the ambiguity of attraction is inconsequential to the properties of the actual relationship! When your core framework is built upon the idea that every relationship must have it's own unique properties, you don't need to have everything fit into a neat little box that's easily described. You don't have to worry about ambiguity or non-reciprocated attraction properties. Just find the properties that do connect, and build a relationship based on those! All the rest is just fluff. Might be confusing fluff, and might make for awkward conversation material if you try to explain it, but it's still just fluff. I personally think that of all the different relationship frameworks, RA is the perfect one for people who experience any kind of ambiguous attraction (which I'll touch more on in future posts.)
While not specifically written from an RA point of view, the linked article comes from someone who identifies as alterous as their romantic orientation. While their views differ from mine in many ways, it's definitely a good solid article, and their writing style reminds me of my own (rather meandering!)
Update from comments
A quick update to this one, I mentioned crushes and squishes in the post, but didn't have a term for an alterous attraction. Well thanks to the aro/demiro community on Tumblr, I present "squashes"! 😃