“I called it his magic foreplay,” she said.

She has had relationships she describes as purely sapiosexual, in which there was no sex, just intense conversation. One man was nowhere near her physical type, but the first time they met, he began reciting poetry by Rainer Maria Rilke. “I was so amazed at how fluid the whole conversation was,” she said. “I could feel something happening inside me.”

The next time they saw each other, he took her to an art exhibit and gave her all of Rilke’s books. Since then, Rilke has been one of her favorite poets. In such relationships, she said, “I access my wisdom and love and ability to analyze in this incredible way, and they do, too.”

Darren Stalder, an engineer in Seattle, appears to have coined the term “sapiosexual” in 1998 to describe his own sexuality. “I don’t care too much about the plumbing,” he wrote in a post on the social network LiveJournal in 2002. “I want an incisive, inquisitive, insightful, irreverent mind. I want someone for whom philosophical discussion is foreplay.”

Sapio, in Latin, means “I discern” or “understand.”

The term started to get more attention in the early 2010s. OkCupid included it among sexual orientation choices in part because “we know our audience swings toward the intellectual side,” said Nick Saretzky, the company’s director of product.

Today about 0.5 percent of OkCupid users identify as sapiosexual. Women are more likely to choose the label than men, and it is most common among users between the ages of 31 and 40. Users who are sapiosexual are more likely than average to say religion is not important to them, and to identify as liberal.

Of course, many people seek an intellectual connection with their partners. But people who identify as sapiosexual often say intellect is the first or most important factor that draws them to another person, according to Debby Herbenick, a sexual health educator and professor of applied health science at the Indiana University School of Public Health.