«Big Friendship: How We Keep Each Other Close» by Aminatou Sow & Ann Friedman:

“All the research on attraction can usually be applied to friendship as well,” says Emily Langan, a communications professor at Wheaton College who studies all kinds of close relationships. “It’s attractiveness in style. It’s attractiveness in aesthetics, sort of the vibe they give off. It’s attractiveness in personality as well.” 

Much of this, she notes, happens at a subconscious level. It’s often hard to articulate exactly why you’re attracted to someone. You just are. And sometimes it’s even hard to say how you want that attraction to manifest. Do you want to be this person’s lover? Their best friend? Their spouse? Their creative collaborator?

At the sparking point of many relationships, it’s not always clear. And it’s common for two people to interpret the spark in different ways, with one reading it as platonic while the other experiences it as romantic or as something else altogether. Many of us jump to quickly define the feeling based on context. If the other person is of a compatible sexuality, we might interpret the spark as sexual. If we meet them in a professional context, we might think of them as a potential collaborator. If we are in a monogamous romantic relationship, we might choose to read all fresh sparks as platonic.

The same combination of emotions can be categorized many ways, from platonic to romantic to something else altogether, writes Angela Chen in her book Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex. For Chen, who identifies as asexual and therefore doesn’t use “I want to have sex with them or not” as the primary way of sorting brand-new relationships into platonic/romantic categories, the spark feeling carries a sense of undefined possibility. 

“When I first meet someone, I don’t know whether we’re aligned on what we want,” she told us in an interview. “And I think that’s what makes it both exciting and confusing for me. The uncertainty of not only ‘Will they like me?’ but ‘Will they like me in the exact same way that I want?’ Like, will we align?” This is something most of us feel at a moment of spark: we want this other person to like us back in the same way and the same amount that we like them, even if we haven’t fully defined those terms to ourselves yet. And we are excited to find out whether that happens.