I spent years feeling like a bad gay.

In my twenties, I attended a Pride parade and felt nothing but discomfort with the number of people dressed in speedos. I moved in with other queer people, and it left me with the sense that I was somehow being gay wrong. I met other queer people on first dates and felt hope and all the usual early-dating nerves, but no spark. No fireworks. No fire or tingles or excitement in any part of me.

It was not hard to understand that I was the one who was unusual. Dating is casual and easy for many people. Lots of straight people and queer people do feel instant attraction across a bar room, or a subway train. I would have loved it if fate could strike me that way, but it was never that cooperative. But even though I knew I preferred to date women, I did not want to touch strangers, or be touched by them. And, since most of the people I dated were ultimately people I liked less on better acquaintance, that inclination did not change. True attraction at the time seemed exclusively relegated for people who were–yes, female–but also definitively unavailable. People that I had no wish to make uncomfortable, so I did what polite people do and kept things to myself. Then I would worry if I was self-sabotaging. Or wonder if I was repressed. I examined this quite a bit, reaffirming my comfort with my label. It was only later that I learned of a newer, better-fitting label of demisexual–someone who only feels attraction when they have an emotional connection.

I have to actually like someone to feel the fireworks. And in my twenties, I didn’t know that was a thing. I just felt broken, and somehow not really bi but also not gay enough. I phrased it to myself once that it felt like other people all around me–people who flirted with strangers and genuinely wanted to sleep with people they’d never met–could speak a language to each other than I couldn’t even hear.

And that brings me back to the Omegaverse. Scents, in the way that they are often used in Omegaverse, bring the sense of what is unique about a person deep inside them as an external feature that is instantly recognizable for their potential romantic partners. It doesn’t bring the pairing all the way there, of course, but it offers that element of demisexually appealing emotional connection in the form of scent-compatibility. There’s a connection, or at least the framework of a potential connection. There’s a tangible reason why a character that is not well known to their partnering lead may linger in their mind beyond the few words exchanged in a meet-cute. Whether the story then translates this to a slow-burn or a fast-tracked connection, the external signal of internal qualities frames the connection in a way that makes absolute sense to the romantic logic in my head. Scent in this context becomes a tangible version of the language that I felt like I couldn’t hear.

I enjoy romance across genres, but my buy-in on rapid attraction between leads is markedly higher when scents and sub-genders are involved. An attractive scent across a room–that hint that this one is special and distinct, flows easily to my story logic in a way that a pretty face simply doesn’t.

Life would be much simpler if we could all simply smell who was compatible to us, and even moreso if we could smell when they were attracted to us.

Happy reading to all, in whatever genre makes you happy.