When I was younger, I based my worth on how wanted I was by a lover or potential partner. I was preoccupied with romantic prospects. This makes sense, given that we’ve been overfed the idea that romantic love is the highest form of love. Don’t get me wrong: I am all for partnership. But as I got older, I realized I was prioritizing romantic connections over platonic ones, unwittingly casting aside a crucial form of intimacy.
Platonic intimacy is, in essence, a deep connection and love that is nonromantic and nonsexual in nature — though it sometimes blurs those lines. Perhaps you’ve read about it: The topic has popped up everywhere from Newsweek to Cosmopolitan and inspired several books — try Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman’s Big Friendship: How We Keep Each Other Close.
The headline of a 2020 story in the Atlantic by author Rhaina Cohen posed the provocative question: “What If Friendship, Not Marriage, Was at the Center of Life?” That article planted the seed for Cohen’s best-selling 2024 book, The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life With Friendship at the Center. In it, she presents real-life friendships that redefine what intimacy between friends can look like — basically, “moving the lines further and further outward to encompass more space in each other’s lives.”
As ideas of friendship evolve, so does the language we use to describe it. You’ve probably heard of “platonic life partner” or even “queerplatonic.” But how about “squish” (that’s a nonsexual crush) or “zucchini” (another word for a queerplatonic partner)?
More and more, modern friendships are radicalizing what “platonic” means, butting up against conventional definitions. What we’ve traditionally reserved for romantic connections is bleeding into our friendships. By inviting romance, intimacy and eroticism — meaning the vitality and creative energy that can underpin sex but does not have to include it — into our connections, we are creating our own guidelines. It might feel confusing at times, but it also signals a new frontier for friendship.
In both my close circle and wider community, people are forming their futures around friendship. There is talk of buying land together, raising kids, splitting finances, carrying out weekly rituals, putting sleepovers in the calendar. My friends and I exchange saucy selfies in a group chat and shower one another with affirmation. I light up in the safe space of their gaze. We are continually choosing how we want to belong to each other.
So, what does that look like? (The relationships, not the selfies.) If you took snapshots of platonic intimacy — such as the vignettes woven into this essay — you’d see simple, everyday moments that speak of wholehearted, liberatory love, the kind that we might not have experienced in our upbringing but that exists within the safety net of our chosen family. A kind of tenderness that may not be as widely acknowledged but is just as life-giving. A kind of love that embraces the fullness of who we are and does not ask us to prove our desirability. A love that allows us to reclaim ourselves over and over again.
♥
In the mornings I can hear you fiddling in the bathroom, the soft ding of your tongue scraper hitting the lip of the mason jar it lives in. One of us waits for the other at the kitchen table. We whisper: Buenos días, how’d you sleep?
Breakfast heats slowly on the stove as we outline our days. I pull our shared loaf of bread from its paper sleeve and laugh at how bearishly you’ve torn at it. You start cooking something else. Something that is simple but requires time. Something that will simmer well into the evening, long enough to see us dancing in the kitchen while I fix you your favorite drink.
At night we sit knee-to-knee on the couch and read to each other out loud, chewing on big ideas. We scoot around each other in our narrow bathroom as we get ready for bed, talking through occupied teeth.
I want it to stay just like this — sharing shelves in the fridge, planning dinner over breakfast, asking each other for everyday favors like turning the laundry over or picking up eggs. All of these small, ordinary moments have coalesced into our kinship, into a layered and lasting bond.
♥
We don’t have as many models for friendship as romance in our society. Through movies, television and social media, we are bombarded with ideas for how to date, how to maintain healthy partnerships and how to honorably bow out of one. When it comes to friendship, however, guidelines for tending to its evolution are rarer. Luckily, people are now devoting more time to exploring friendships and how we can foster depth and growth within them.
Marisa G. Franco, author of Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make — and Keep — Friends, speaks to how even just placing more value on friendships can validate our platonic experiences, including the grief we may feel when taking space from a friend or ending a friendship altogether:
“When society doesn’t value a relationship that you’re losing, you have trouble grieving … because part of the way we grieve is we get that mirroring from people around us saying, ‘I’m so sorry for your loss. This is devastating.'”
I have experienced some of the purest forms of intimacy in the embrace of my friends. I have known the depths of devotion through how my closest friends and I show up for each other. I have experienced some of the most stinging heartbreak during friend fallouts. With fewer scripts to follow, we are tasked with writing our own stories and, in the process, discovering what it means to authentically be with one another.
♥
I walk out of the apartment building to a scrambling street and catch you getting out of your cab. You set your bags down on the filthy concrete to scoop me up and kiss me on the lips.
We spend the day romping around the city, holding hands and professing how happy we are to be together again. We are on a strip of street that seems to extend for miles, where the buildings aren’t high but the sun is. We close our eyes and soak it in.
We stop at some hip tinned-fish place in Brooklyn. We muse on what the bread might be served with. Ooooh, anchovy butter? I surmise, with wide eyes. That would be a huge miss if they didn’t, you reply. What comes out is four fluffy, gorgeous slices of local sourdough bread next to two pathetic, undeserving packets of butter.
New York is dead, you declare, as you performatively throw the butter onto your plate. Your conviction is served with a smirk, a reminder of the bit we’re doing. Your sense of humor — slightly caustic, blunt — reminds me of my mother. It’s one of the many reasons you feel like home.
♥
Admittedly, this expansive kind of friendship makes it harder to distinguish between friend and partner. I find myself stuttering in conversation when trying to make that distinction. But I take pride in the fact that I’ve poured my heart into something so much that words or labels don’t do it justice. My friends are my partners, the people I entrust with my most heartfelt desires, the people I pencil into the emergency contact line, the people I consider when making life changes, the ones I turn to when I’m a wreck, the ones I want to share my most exciting news with.
And what about the jealousy and insecurity that might arise in our partners as they witness this kind of uninhibited intimacy? Again, this makes sense when we think about how much pressure society puts on romantic relationships, centering them as our main source of security. But I think of the ways the queer community and those exploring ethical nonmonogamy, relationship anarchy, polyamory and the like are encouraging us to challenge those narratives and reflect on our true relationship values.
Of course, friendships can exist in different orbits, and some might not have the romantic, emotional or physical inclinations that others do. The beauty of friendships is that they can look and feel so different and have different boundaries. But the act of setting those boundaries and applying what we’ve been taught about healthy partnership — communication, care, emotional truthfulness, play — can be the secure and lasting foundation of a friendship.
♥
The width of your face is a familiar comfort, your cheekbones high like the top tier of a stadium. Your features are even more striking against the backdrop of snow. We meet on the street corner directly between our two apartments and walk to meditation, a new ritual for us. You ask how my heart is, a question that has become as common as asking what’s for dinner.
I walk with my arm looped in yours as we lay new tracks in the snow. I have two pancakes wrapped in a paper towel to eat on the way. Do you want some pannekaken?! I ask, mimicking my grandmother’s Norwegian. You stop and turn toward me, answering silently by opening your mouth. I move the paper towel out of the way with my mitten and give you a bite.
As we walk and talk, I feel my nervous system unclench. We eventually arrive, stomping up the stairs and slipping off our snow-caked boots. Before we go in, you wrap your arms around me and we sync our breath.
I am grateful for all the ways you reach out to me, for this quiet, common language we speak. I realize that today is just one blip on the long timeline of our friendship, and this reminder fills me with the deepest security I’ve ever known.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Squishy Feelings | A sex educator on the virtues of platonic intimacy”
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This article appears in Love & Marriage Issue 2025.
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