Reciprosexual describes someone who only feels sexual attraction to a person after learning that person is attracted to them first. Recipromantic is the same pattern for romantic attraction.
Definition
Both describe how attraction starts, not who it is directed at.
Reciprosexual people do not experience unprompted sexual attraction. Attraction arrives as a response: something has to come from the other person before there is anything to feel. Recipromantic works the same way for crushes and romantic feeling.
The trigger is not usually a formal declaration. People describe it as noticing interest, being flirted with, or being told by a friend that someone likes them. What matters is that the information comes first and the attraction second.
Both terms sit on the ace and aro spectrums, because they describe conditional attraction rather than the ready, unprompted attraction that allosexual and alloromantic describe. Neither says anything about gender: a reciprosexual person still has a separate orientation, or none.
How is this different from demisexual?
What has to happen first. Reciprosexual: the other person's attraction becomes known. Demisexual: a close emotional bond forms.
Does closeness matter? Reciprosexual: not necessarily, it can be a near-stranger. Demisexual: yes, that is the whole condition.
Can both apply? Yes, and people who need both a bond and a signal often use both words.
Flag
No widely established flag exists for either term. Several community designs circulate without a documented origin.
Etymology
From the Latin reciprocus, meaning alternating or moving back and forth, attached to sexual and romantic. Both were coined in online ace and aro communities in the early 2010s, in the same period of vocabulary-building that produced fraysexual, cupiosexual and akoiromantic. As with most terms from that wave, no single coiner is reliably documented.
History
Emerged from AVEN and aromantic community discussions in the early 2010s as part of the broader project of naming variations in how attraction initiates. Often considered part of the ace/aro-adjacent spectrum as it describes a conditional pattern of attraction.
Common myths
Myth: this is just low self-esteem
It can look similar from outside, and for some people the two do sit close together. But reciprosexuality describes an absence of attraction rather than an absence of confidence. Someone who feels attraction and does not act on it because they assume rejection is describing a different experience, and there is no shame in either.
Myth: everyone works this way
Being flattered by attention is close to universal and does make people notice someone they had not noticed. Not being able to feel attraction until the signal arrives is a different thing, and it is not most people.
Myth: it is not a real orientation because it is about other people's behaviour
Every conditional attraction term describes a condition outside the person: demisexual depends on a relationship forming, fraysexual depends on familiarity increasing. Naming the condition is the point.
