There’s a reason that hot stranger is so intriguing. The mystery, the projection, the total absence of knowing how they load a dishwasher. For fraysexual people, that unknown quality is the engine of sexual desire—and once it’s gone, so does that desire.

Fraysexuality is a sexual orientation in which desire is strongest with people someone doesn’t know well. Once emotional intimacy develops, sexual desire fades, and in many cases disappears entirely. The romantic feelings can stay intact. The sex drive, pointed at that particular person, does not.

It sits on the asexuality spectrum, and it’s essentially the mirror image of demisexuality, where sexual attraction only emerges after an emotional bond forms. Both are legitimate orientations. Neither is a disorder, though fraysexuality in particular gets treated like one.

What Is Fraysexuality? And More Importantly, What Is It Not?

That’s a recurring problem. Fraysexual people who seek therapy can find themselves diagnosed with avoidant attachment or intimacy issues by clinicians who’ve never heard of the orientation, according to psychosexual therapist Silva Neves, who wrote about fraysexuality for Psychology Today. The experience of desire fading inside a relationship gets pathologized when it could simply be explained. And because fraysexuality doesn’t get much cultural airtime, many people spend years assuming something is wrong with them before they find language for what’s actually happening.

There are a few things fraysexuality is not. It’s not a fear of commitment, a preference for casual sex, or evidence that someone gets bored easily. Fraysexual people can have deep, lasting romantic relationships. Those relationships may not involve sex, or they may be structured as open relationships that give the fraysexual partner room to experience desire the way their orientation actually works. Neither option is a compromise or a red flag—they’re just arrangements that fit the reality of how someone is wired.

The orientation also exists on a spectrum. Some fraysexual people lose attraction quickly; others experience a slower fade. Some identify as fraysexual alongside another orientation entirely—gay and fraysexual, or heterosexual and fraysexual.

For partners, this can be a hard thing to receive. A drop in sexual desire reads as rejection in most relational scripts, and explaining fraysexuality requires a level of self-knowledge and communication that not everyone has had the chance to develop. What researchers and clinicians who study this emphasize is that the absence of sexual desire for a partner has nothing to do with how much that partner is valued. The two things can be completely separate.