 Relationships (Outline) |
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A romantic friendship (also passionate friendship or affectionate friendship) is a very close but typically non-sexual relationship between friends, often involving a degree of physical closeness beyond that which is common in contemporary Western societies. It may include, for example, holding hands, cuddling, hugging, kissing, giving massages, or sharing a bed, without sexual intercourse or other sexual expression.
The term is typically used in historical scholarship, and describes a very close relationship between people of the same sex during a period of history when there was not a social category of homosexuality as there is today. In this regard, the term was coined in the later 20th century in order to retrospectively describe a type of relationship which until the mid-19th century had been considered unremarkable but since the second half of the 19th century had become rarer as physical intimacy between non-sexual partners came to be regarded with anxiety.[1] Romantic friendship between women in Europe and North America became especially prevalent in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, with the simultaneous emergence of female education and a new rhetoric of sexual difference.[2]
