Meaning
Loving or affectionate without sex - the friendship that is warm, deep, sometimes passionate, and deliberately stops short of the physical. Applied to relationships, it is the standard gentle way of saying we are close, but not like that. Everyday and kind; capital P marks the philosophy, lowercase the friendship - and purists enjoy noting Plato would barely recognize either. Regional use: General English; Renaissance-philosophical origin.
Origin
The Renaissance built the word, not Plato. Marsilio Ficino coined the Latin amor platonicus in the 1460s-70s from the Symposium's ladder of love, in which desire for one beautiful body is only the first rung of an ascent toward beauty itself; the English phrase platonic love arrived in the 1630s with a Neoplatonist fashion at court. The modern sexless sense settled in the eighteenth century, and scholars are blunt about the distance travelled: Lee's 1973 verdict is that the chaste reading is certainly not what Plato had in mind, since for the Greeks it was precisely sensual attraction that first evoked eros. Wiktionary dates the non-sexual sense to the seventeenth century in English and the fifteenth in Latin; William James still used the capital-P philosophical sense in 1902, but the lowercase friendship sense has long since taken the street.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- platonic friendship
- platonic love
- platonically
Usage Examples
- Their platonic partnership survived two co-authored books and one shared office the size of a cupboard.
- She described the marriage as platonic after 1953, and the letters he kept suggest she was exact.
- The film's platonic centre - two pensioners, one allotment, no romance whatever - charmed every festival jury.