Obviously, these ratings weren’t meant to measure sexual activity, intimate histories or label identification, but they were meant to measure “the possibility of homosexual feelings and experiences.”

YouGov is not the only group that has tried to get a handle on the fluid middle. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Survey of Family Growth presented data from 2006-2008 in a 2011 report that showed that 16 percent of American women and 5 percent of men under 45 refused to say they were attracted to only one sex, instead admitting that they were only mostly attracted to one sex, were equally attracted to both, or were unsure. In that survey, 21 percent of women 20-24 years old and 7 percent of men in those ages said that they were somewhere in the middle.

And remember, 2008 is forever ago on the rapidly changing issue of L.G.B.T. acceptability. For instance, according to Gallup, only 48 percent of Americans in 2008 found gay and lesbian relations morally acceptable. That number has now jumped to 63 percent, and among those ages 18-34 it is now at 79 percent.

Attraction is simply more nuanced for more people than some of us want to admit, sometimes even to ourselves. That attraction may never manifest as physical intimacy, nor does it have to, but denying that it exists creates a false, naïve and ultimately destructive sense or what is normal and possible.

Furthermore, different people can experience attraction differently. For some, the order of attraction starts with body first. That’s fine. For others though, it starts with the being first, the human being, regardless of the body and its gender. That’s also fine. And yet, the idea that one can have a physiological response to something other than gendered physicality seems to some antithetical to their rigid, superannuated notions of attraction, or even heretical to it.

But it seems more younger people are liberating themselves from this thinking and coming to better understand and appreciate that people must have the freedom to be fluid if indeed they are, and that no one has the right to define or restrict the parameters of another person’s attractions, love or intimacy.

People must be allowed to be themselves, however they define themselves, and they owe the world no explanation of it or excuse for it. They have to be reminded that the only choices they need to make are to choose honesty and safety.

Attraction is attraction, and it doesn’t always wear a label.