Sexual or romantic attraction between people of different sexes; the condition or practice of heterosexuality.
From Greek hetero- 'different,' eros 'sexual love,' and the suffix -ism. A technical term in sexology and psychology, rarely used in common speech.
Psychologists studying sexuality created parallel terms like 'heteroerotism' and 'homoerotism' to analyze attraction scientifically, but heteroerotism proved so 'normal' that we just call it 'love' while homoeroticisn had to stay named—revealing how power shapes language.
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