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What Is a Platonic Relationship?

Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

Carly Snyder, MD is a reproductive and perinatal psychiatrist who combines traditional psychiatry with integrative medicine-based treatments.

Verywell / Madelyn Goodnight

A platonic relationship is one in which two people share a close bond but do not have a sexual relationship . They may even feel love for each other, referred to as platonic love. This concept originates in the ideas of the ancient philosopher Plato, from whose name the term is derived.

Plato believed that platonic love could bring people closer to a divine ideal. However, the modern use of 'platonic relationship' or 'platonic love' is focused on the idea of people being close friends without sexual desire. This term can apply to both opposite-sex and same-sex friendships. 

Platonic Relationship vs. Romantic Relationship

A platonic relationship is different from a romantic relationship. While both types of relationships often involve having a deep friendship and sometimes even love, people in a romantic relationship are typically physically intimate whereas there is no sex or physical intimacy in a platonic relationship.

It is possible to desire physical intimacy (such as hugging, kissing, or touching) or sex with the other person but not be engaged in these activities. If no physical intimacy or sex exists between you and the other person, it is a platonic relationship—even if the desire is there.

Involves deep friendship

People involved may or may not have a desire for physical intimacy

No physical intimacy or sex occurs

Generally involves both people having a desire for physical intimacy

Often involves physical intimacy and/or sex

Signs Your Relationship Is Platonic

There are a number of characteristics that distinguish a platonic relationship from other relationship types . In addition to the lack of a sexual aspect, a platonic relationship also tends to be marked by:

• Closeness : Both people in the relationship feel a closeness to each other and feel that they share things in common. 
• Honesty : Both individuals feel that they can share what they really think and feel with the other person.
• Acceptance : These relationships tend to feel easy and comfortable. Both people feel that they are safe and free to be themselves. 
• Understanding : People who share a platonic relationship have a connection, but they also recognize and respect each other's personal space. They don't try to force the other person to do things they don't want to do or be something that they are not.

Platonic relationships are often friendships . And while the lack of a sexual relationship is what characterizes this type of connection, it does not necessarily mean that the individuals in the relationship are not attracted to each other or could not start to feel attracted to one another.

Types of Platonic Relationships

A few terms have emerged to describe different types of platonic relationships. These include:

• Bromance : This is a term used to describe a close, affectionate, non-sexual relationship between two men.
• Womance : This term is used to describe an emotional, non-sexual, non-romantic bond between two women.
• Work spouse : This phrase is sometimes used to describe a close but non-sexual connection between colleagues or co-workers that involves bonds and sometimes even roles similar to that of a marriage.

How to Form a Platonic Relationship

Platonic relationships can be important for psychological well-being. Research has found that having social support plays a vital role in mental health, so building a network that includes family, platonic friends, and other loved ones can be important for your overall wellness.

Some things that you can do to help foster platonic relationships include:

• Join social networking groups where you can meet people
• Sign up for workshops or classes on topics that interest you
• Participate in online communities
• Volunteer for causes you care about in your community

In addition to developing new platonic relationships, it is also important to understand how to keep the ones you have now healthy and strong. Some ways to do this include being supportive, maintaining boundaries, and practicing honesty .

Benefits of Platonic Relationships

There are several reasons why having platonic relationships is important for your health and well-being. Some of the positive effects that these relationships may bring to your life include:

Improved Health

Research suggests that having love and support from people in your life can have important health benefits. Physically, this type of platonic love and support can lower your risk for disease, improve your immunity, and decrease your risk for depression and anxiety.

Your platonic support system can help provide emotional support as well. They do this by listening to what you have to say, providing validation , and helping you when you are in need.

Lower Stress

Stress can take a serious toll on both your physical and mental health. Chronic or prolonged stress can contribute to health problems such as cardiac disease, high blood pressure, digestive issues, and decreased immunity. It can also play a role in mood problems such as anxiety or depression . 

Having strong platonic relationships outside of immediate family and romantic partnerships has been found to help people better cope with sources of stress. Not only that, but having supportive platonic friendships also lowers the stress that people face.

Increased Resilience

Platonic relationships can play a role in helping you become more resilient in the face of life's challenges. Whether you have troubles in your romantic relationships, problems in your family, work struggles, or health challenges, your platonic relationships can support you as you weather these storms. 

One study found that one of the biggest predictors of a person's ability to recover after a traumatic or stressful event was the presence of strong friendships.

Tips for a Healthy Platonic Relationship

Platonic relationships are not always easy to find. When you do establish a strong platonic bond, it is important to continue to nurture and strengthen that connection. Some things that you can do to help keep these relationships healthy include:

• Don't make the other person do all the work : Don't rely on the other person to make all the plans or initiate all the contact. Reach out to them regularly to invite them to participate in activities.
• Stay in touch : Call, text, or email the other person from time to time just to keep the lines of communication open. Let them know you are thinking of them, reach out to share a funny joke you know they'll enjoy, or just ask them how they are.
• Show up for them : Other people can be an important source of emotional support, but it's just as important for you to reciprocate that support. Be there when they need you, even if it is just to lend an open and supportive ear.

It is also important to know when to let go of a platonic relationship. Unhealthy relationships can create stress, so don't be afraid to end your association if the other person is unkind, manipulative, hurtful, or doesn't support you the way you need.

Potential Challenges of a Platonic Relationship

It is important to note that platonic relationships are not the same as unrequited love . An unrequited relationship is essentially a crush that involves one person being romantically or sexually interested in someone who does not return their feelings. True platonic relationships do not involve an unequal balance of emotions.

This does not mean that a platonic relationship can’t or won’t develop into something romantic or sexual. While such a relationship can potentially turn into a strong romantic relationship, you also run the risk of losing the friendship if you end up breaking up . 

If maintaining a platonic relationship is important to you, focus on establishing and maintaining clear boundaries . For example, set limits on things such as time spent together, amount of contact, and physical intimacy.

Platonic Boundaries

Some boundaries to maintain in a platonic relationship include:

• Don't gossip or complain about your partners to each other
• Don't engage in physical contact beyond casual intimacy (i.e., avoid things like handholding, kissing, or "friends-with-benefits" situations)
• Don't ditch your partner to spend time with your platonic friend
• Don't hide your platonic relationship from your partner
• Give each other plenty of space
• Make time for your other relationships

If You Want Something More

If you want to extend a platonic relationship or platonic love into a sexual or romantic relationship, it is important to be open and honest with the other person. Express your interest without pressuring them.

Discuss what it might mean to the relationship and how it might ultimately affect your friendship. Platonic relationships can serve as a great foundation for a romantic relationship, but it is important to be honest and communicate openly .

American Psychological Association.  Manage stress: strengthen your support network .

Miller A. Friends wanted . Monitor on Psychology . 2014;45(1):54.

Amati V, Meggiolaro S, Rivellini G, Zaccarin S. Social relations and life satisfaction: the role of friends .  Genus . 2018;74(1):7. doi:10.1186/s41118-018-0032-z

Harmelen A-L van, Kievit RA, Ioannidis K, et al. Adolescent friendships predict later resilient functioning across psychosocial domains in a healthy community cohort .  Psycholog Med . 2017;47(13):2312-2322.

By Kendra Cherry, MSEd Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

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Plato on Friendship and Eros

Plato discusses love ( erôs ) and friendship ( philia ) primarily in two dialogues, the Lysis and the Symposium , though the Phaedrus also adds significantly to his views. In each work, Socrates as the quintessential philosopher is in two ways center stage, first, as a lover of wisdom ( sophia ) and discussion ( logos ), and, second, as himself an inverter or disturber of erotic norms. Plato’s views on love are a meditation on Socrates and the power his philosophical conversations have to mesmerize, obsess, and educate.

In what follows, section 1 deals with the Lysis and Symposium . Sections 2–4 primarily with the Symposium alone. Section 5 deals with the Phaedrus . Section 6 with the closing section of the Symposium and with parts of the Ion , Protagoras , and Laws . Sections are not self-contained, however, and are intended to be read sequentially. Most scholars agree that the order of composition of the “erotic” dialogues is Lysis, Symposium, Phaedrus , though some put the Phaedrus earlier than the Symposium .

1. Socrates and the Art of Love

2. socrates and athenian paiderastia, 3. loving socrates, 4. love and the ascent to the beautiful, 5. the art and psychology of love explained, 6. writing about love, other internet resources, related entries.

“The only thing I say I know,” Socrates tells us in the Symposium , “is the art of love” ( ta erôtika ) (177d8–9). Taken literally, it is an incredible claim. Are we really to believe that the man who affirms when on trial for his life that he knows himself to be wise “in neither a great nor a small way” ( Apology 21b4–5) knows the art of love? In fact, the claim is a nontrivial play on words facilitated by the fact that the noun erôs (“love”) and the verb erôtan (“to ask questions”) sound as if they are etymologically connected—a connection explicitly exploited in the Cratylus (398c5-e5). Socrates knows about the art of love in that—but just insofar as—he knows how to ask questions, how to converse elenctically.

Just how far that is, we discover in the Lysis , where Socrates makes a similar claim. Hippothales, like Socrates, loves beautiful boys and philosophical discussions (203b6–204a3). But he does not know the art of love and so does not know how to talk to Lysis—the boy with whom he is in love. What Hippothales does is sing eulogies to Lysis, and that , Socrates argues, no skilled lover would ever do. For if your suit succeeds “everything you’ve said and sung turns out to eulogize yourself as victor in having won such a boyfriend,” but if it fails, then “the greater your praise of his beauty and goodness, the more you will seem to have lost and the more you will be ridiculed.” Consequently, someone “who is wise in the art of love ( ta erôtika ) doesn’t praise his beloved until he has him: he fears how the future may turn out” (205e2–206a2). Convinced, Hippothales asks Socrates to tell him “what someone should say or do to get his prospective boyfriend to love him?” (206c1–3). As in the Symposium , Socrates is uncharacteristically forthcoming: “if you’re willing to have him talk with me, I might be able to give you a demonstration of how to carry on a discussion with him” (c4–6). What follows is an elenctic examination of Lysis. Socrates’ lessons in love, we may infer, are elenctic lessons—lessons in how to ask and answer questions.

At the end of the examination, Socrates characterizes what he has accomplished: “This is how you should talk to your boyfriends, Hippothales, making them humble and drawing in their sails, instead of swelling them up and spoiling them, as you do” (210e2–5). It sounds simply chastening put like that. But in the overall context of the Lysis , where love is a desire and desire is an emptiness, it is much more. It is a step in the creation of the canonical lover—the philosopher:

Those who are already wise no longer love wisdom ( philosophein ), whether they are gods or men. Neither do those who are so ignorant that they are bad, for no bad and stupid person loves wisdom. There remains only those who have this bad thing, ignorance, but have not yet been made ignorant and stupid by it. They are conscious of not knowing what they don’t know. (218a2-b1)

So by showing Lysis that he isn’t already wise, by getting him to recognize that he doesn’t know, Socrates sets him on the road to philosophy (cf. Sophist 231b3–8).

The elenchus is important to love, then, because it creates a hunger for wisdom—a hunger which it cannot itself assuage. So even though Lysis is already something of a philosopher when he meets Socrates and receives a rare accolade from him—“I was pleased with his love of wisdom ( philosophia )” (213d6)—he, too, is left in puzzlement ( aporia ). He is made aware of his desire by Socrates but the desire itself remains unsatisfied. Socrates may be the master of foreplay, of arousing desire, and may to that extent be a master of the art of love, but when it comes to satisfying desire, he is a failure.

The connection—amounting to an identification—between the art of discussion and the art of loving boys explored in the Lysis allows us to see why Plato’s own explorations of love invariably involve an exploration of discussion too—love-talk in the Lysis , symposiastic speech-making and drama in the Symposium , oratory and rhetoric in the Phaedrus . Loving boys correctly, after all, is—in part at least—just a matter of knowing how to talk to them, of how to persuade them to love you back.

As a man who loves boys in an idiosyncratic, because elenctic, way, Socrates is placed in potential conflict with the norms of a peculiar Athenian social institution, that of paiderastia —the socially regulated intercourse between an older Athenian male ( erastês ) and a teenage boy ( erômenos , pais ), through which the latter was supposed to learn virtue. And this potential, as we know, was realized with tragic consequences—in 399 BC Socrates was found guilty of corrupting the young men of Athens and condemned to death. The effect on Plato is palpable in his works, turning very many of them into defenses—not always uncritical—of Socrates, and of what he represented for the young men he encountered. His account in the Symposium of one such relationship—that with the brilliant and beautiful Alcibiades—is an illuminating case in point.

Alcibiades was so in love with Socrates—“it was obvious,” the Symposium (222c1–2) tells us—that when asked to speak of love, he speaks of his beloved. No general theories of love for him, just the vividly remembered story of the times he spent with a man so extraordinary there has never been anyone like him—a man so powerfully erotic he turned the conventional world of love upside down by “seeming to be a lover ( erastês ) while really establishing himself as a beloved boy ( pais ) instead” (222b3–4).

The stories of all the other symposiasts, too, are stories of their particular loves masquerading as stories of love itself, stories about what they find beautiful masquerading as stories about what is beautiful. For Phaedrus and Pausanius, the canonical image of true love—the quintessential love story—features the right sort of older male lover and the right sort of beloved boy. For Eryximachus the image of true love is painted in the languages of his own beloved medicine and of all the other crafts and sciences. For Aristophanes it is painted in the language of comedy. For Agathon, in the loftier tones of tragedy. In ways that these men are unaware of, then, but that Plato knows, their love stories are themselves manifestations of their loves and of the inversions or perversions expressed in them. They think their stories are the truth about love, but they are really love’s delusions—“images,” as Diotima will later call them. As such, however, they are essential parts of that truth. For the power of love to engender delusive images of the beautiful is as much a part of the truth about it as its power to lead to the beautiful itself. Later, we shall learn why.

Love stories, however inadequate as theories of love, are nonetheless stories, logoi , items that admit of analysis. But because they are manifestations of our loves, not mere cool bits of theorizing, we—our deepest feelings—are invested in them. They are therefore tailor-made, in one way at least, to satisfy the Socratic sincerity condition, the demand that you say what you believe ( Crito 49c11-d2, Protagoras 331c4-d1). Under the cool gaze of the elenctic eye, they are tested for consistency with other beliefs that lie just outside love’s controlling and often distorting ambit. Under such testing, a lover may be forced to say with Agathon, “I didn’t know what I was talking about in that story” (201b11–12). The love that expressed itself in his love story meets then another love: his rational desire for consistency and intelligibility; his desire to be able to tell and live a coherent story; his desire—to put it the other way around—not to be endlessly frustrated and conflicted, because he is repetitively trying to live out an incoherent love story.

In Alcibiades’ love story, in particular, these two desires are self-consciously in play: “Socrates is the only man in the world who has made me feel shame… I know perfectly well that I can’t prove he’s wrong when he tells me what I should do: yet, the moment I leave his side, I go back to my old ways: I cave in to my desire to please the crowd” (216b1–5). Even such awareness of conflict as is manifested here, however, is no guarantee of a satisfactory resolution. For the new love—the one that seems to offer coherence, satisfaction, and release from shame—may turn out to be just the old frustrating one in disguise.

Alcibiades’ famous failed attempt to seduce Socrates shows that this is so in his case too (218b8-e5). For Alcibiades doesn’t try to win Socrates’ love by undertaking the difficult task of self-transformation required to become a more virtuous, and so more truly beautiful and lovable, person. Instead, he takes the easy, familiar path of offering the physical attractions he already has—the ones that have earned him the approval of the crowd. When these fail him, it is to the crowd (in the form of the Bacchic revelers we meet at the end of the Symposium ) he will regressively return, having never really succeeded in turning away.

That he has never turned away is made yet more vivid in one of the most intriguing passages in the Symposium . Socrates, Alcibiades says, is “ironical eirôneuomenos ) and spends his whole life playing with people. Yet, I don’t know whether anyone else has seen the figures within ( ta entos agalmata ) when he is serious and opened up, but I saw them once, and I thought that they were so divine and golden, so marvelously beautiful, that I just had to do whatever Socrates told me” (216e4–217a2). Imagine seeing Socrates without his ironic mask of mock modesty. What we wouldn’t give to see that. As is so often the case with love, however, it is fantasy we are dealing with. What Alcibiades thinks he sees in Socrates are embryonic virtues, which—like spermatazoa in the embryology the Symposium implicitly embraces when it speaks of the lover as pregnant and as seeking a beautiful boy in which to beget an offspring—need only be ejaculated into the right receptacle in order to grow into their mature forms (209a5-c2). Sex can lead to virtue, in other words, without the need for hard work. As soon as the illusion is enjoyed, therefore, it gives birth not to a realistic attempt to acquire virtue, but to the sexual seduction fantasy mentioned earlier.

The origins of this fantasy—though, no doubt, partly personal—are predominantly social. It is the complex ideology of Athenian paiderasteia that has shaped Alcibiades’ own desires. For, according to it, love is really “two things”: good Uranian love, whose object is the soul, and whose aim is to instill virtue in the younger male; and bad Pandemotic love, whose object is the body and whose aim is sexual pleasure for the older lover (180c1-d7). What causes the split is the need Pandemotic love has to mask itself as Uranian love in order to preserve the illusion that the young man’s participation in it is compatible with his status as a future male citizen. It cannot, then, be motivated by a reprehensible desire to adopt a passive, slavish, female pleasure-seeking role. Instead, another motive must be invented for it—a willingness to accept “slavery for the sake of virtue” (184c2–3).

A major cost of preserving this split, however, is that the older male’s body-focused, sexual intercourse must itself be masked as intercourse of a more respectable sort. Alcibiades’ later re-description of Socrates’ inner figures shows him succumbing to the double-vision that inevitably results:

If you were to listen to his arguments, at first they’d strike you as totally ridiculous; they’re clothed in words as coarse as the hides worn by the most vulgar satyrs. He’s always going on about pack asses, or blacksmiths, or cobblers, or tanners… But if the arguments are opened and one sees them from the inside, he will find first that they are the only arguments with any sense in them, and next that they contain within themselves utterly divine and multitudinous figures of virtue ( agalmat’ aretês ). (221e1–222a4)

For Alcibiades, then, Socrates’ body is identical to his words; the virtues that are in him are in them; talking philosophy is having sexual intercourse, and vice versa.

At the beginning of the Symposium , an unidentified man wants to hear what was said about love by Socrates and the others at Agathon’s house. He has heard a garbled account. Now he wants Apollodorus to tell him what was really said. But Apollodorus wasn’t there either. He got his account of the proceedings second-hand from Aristodemus. All these men who ought to be chasing boys are presented as so besotted with Socrates and his conversations that one of them—Apollodorus—makes it his business to know exactly what Socrates does and says each day (172c4–6), while another—Aristodemus—is so far gone in his passion for Socrates that he walks barefoot like his beloved (173b1–4). One reason for this complex set-up is to let us see the inverting impact of Socrates—and so of philosophy—on Athenian paiderastic norms. Another is more subtle. Alcibiades’ love for Socrates focuses on the beautiful figures of virtue which he thinks he sees lying beneath those “words as coarse as the hides worn by the most vulgar satyrs,” which are the analog for him of Socrates’ ugly, satyr-like body (215b3-4). Aristodemus’ love for Socrates, by contrast, seems to focus on his coarse exterior, so that Aristodemus himself is a sort of inverted Alcibiades, whose very name associates him with Pausanias’ body-centered goddess of love, Pandêmos . Loving Socrates, we may infer, is a complex business, since just what someone loves in loving him is tied to that person’s peculiar desires, and the limits they impose on how like Socrates he can become.

In the dialogue’s next few scenes, this point is driven home. When Aristodemus meets him, Socrates has just bathed and put on his fancy sandals—“both very unusual events” (174a3–4). Aristodemus remarks on this because he is naturally sensitive to those aspects of Socrates which he himself—perhaps because of his own size and appearance (173b2)—has chosen to emulate. The reason for the departure from his usual habits, Socrates explains, is that he is going to Agathon’s party and wants “beauty to go to beauty” (174a9). Oddly, this doesn’t stop him from bringing Aristodemus—un-bathed, un-sandaled, un-beautiful—along. But what is odd from the point of view of Socrates’ self-ascribed motivations is not at all odd from that of Plato’s . He has now made the complexity of Socrates—his beautiful insides and ugly outsides or vice versa—as dramatically present to our eyes as to those of Agathon and his other guests.

Socrates is invited to Agathon’s—Goodman’s. (‘Agathon’ means good in Greek.) He thinks—wrongly as it happens—that Aristodemus isn’t invited, but offers to take him along anyway. Aristodemus’ reply—“I’ll do whatever you say” (174b2)—again connects him to Alcibiades: “I just had to do whatever he told me” (217a1–2). “Come with me then,” Socrates responds, “and we shall prove the proverb wrong; the truth is, ‘Good men go uninvited to Goodman’s feast’” (174b4–5). [ 1 ] Aristodemus is not convinced. “Socrates, I’m afraid… mine is the case of an inferior arriving uninvited at the table of a wise man” (174c5–7). The familiar Socratic tri-unity—good, beautiful, wise—are all now in play.

Despite his reservations, Aristodemus agrees to accompany Socrates—but with an important proviso: “See what defense you’re going to make ( apologêsê ) for bringing me along, because I won’t admit I came uninvited, I’ll say you brought me!” (174c7-d1). It is this proviso that initiates the next mystifying episode. It begins when Socrates replies by under-quoting Homer: “We’ll take counsel about what to say ‘when two go together along the way’” (174d2–3). What he leaves out is what happens when two do go together, namely, “one of them knows before the other” ( Iliad X. 24). The elision of this phrase is matched by an elision of Plato’s own. For what happened on the road to Agathon’s is that “Socrates began to think about something, lost himself in thought, and kept lagging behind” (174d4–7). Yet we are never told what he thought about—what it was that one knew before the other.

That the match between these two elisions is significant is established by another match: the one between the defense Socrates doesn’t give for bringing Aristodemus to Agathon’s and the one he doesn’t give before the jury in 399 B.C., when he is on trial for corrupting the youth. I mean, the defense Socrates’ familiar spirit or daimonion prevents him from giving by not preventing him from giving the one in which he speaks and acts in his own accustomed elenctic way—in which he plays the part of himself ( Ap . 40a2-b6). Later in the Symposium , the match is reestablished by the close parallels between the preamble to Socrates’ speech in praise of Erôs and that to his speech before the jury. There he is “amazed ( ethaumasa )” by what his accusers say ( Ap . 17a4–5); here Agathon’s speech is “amazing ( thaumasta )” ( Smp . 198b4). There he isn’t a clever ( deinos ) speaker, unless cleverness consists in speaking the truth ( Ap . 17a4-b6). Here he isn’t clever in the art of love unless encomia to Erôs involve telling the truth about it ( Smp . 198c5–199a6). There “what the jurors will hear will be spoken extemporaneously ( epituchousin ) in whatever words come to mind” ( Ap . 17c1–2); here the symposiasts will “hear the truth spoken about Erôs in such words and arrangements as occur to me extemporaneously ( tuchê epelthousa )” ( Smp . 199b3–5). Whatever occupies Socrates on the road to Agathon’s, we may infer, ends not in the knowledge Homer is so confident either he or Aristodemus will have, but in the aporetic awareness of the absence of knowledge that distinguishes Socrates’ “human wisdom” from the “more than human wisdom” claimed by the sophists ( Ap . 20c4-e8).

The result of Socrates’ losing his way in thought and ending up stymied in Agathon’s neighbor’s porch is that Aristodemus, like a proper Socratic paraclete, arrives at Agathon’s quite a bit before Socrates. When Socrates finally does arrive in propria person , Agathon says: “Socrates, come lie down next to me. Who knows, if I touch you, I may catch a bit of the wisdom that came to you under my neighbor’s porch” (175c7-d1). Socrates replies with an obviously sexual simile, which acknowledges, so as later once again to invert, paiderastic norms: “If only wisdom were like water which always flows from a full cup into an empty one when we connect them with a piece of yarn. If wisdom were that way too, I value the place beside you very much indeed; for I think I will be filled from you with wisdom of great beauty” (175d4-e2). What actually happens, however, is the very reverse. Socrates responds to Agathon’s fancy speech about love with an elenchus, so that his emptiness, his lack of knowledge, flows into Agathon, destroying the wisdom of great beauty that had won his tragedy a first prize the day before (175e4–7).

Socrates is adept at some parts of the art of love but cannot take his beloveds all the way. So he is clearly in need of further instruction in the art of love. In the Symposium , this is provided to him by Diotima, whom he describes as “the one who taught me the art of love” (201d5). And what she teaches him, in a nutshell, is Platonism. What the elenchus needs if it is to satisfy rather than frustrate love, in other words, is the theory of Platonic Forms. What Socrates needs—and so ought to love—is Plato! The story of Platonic love is, one might say, the story of the Platonizing of Socrates.

If what Socrates learned from Diotima was about all love, however, it would be refuted by the very fact of Alcibiades, whose love for Socrates has not led him to love the beautiful itself. It would be equally refuted, indeed, by all the other symposiasts, none of whom has been led there by his love. But Diotima’s love story is not so general. It is self-advertised as a story about “loving boys correctly ( to orthôs paiderastein )” (211b5–6)—as a lesson in “the correct way to go or to be led by another to the art of love” (211b7-c1). To be sure, it doesn’t itself explicitly provide us with a story about how Erôs can act as a force which retards development. But that isn’t because Plato thought Erôs could not act as such a force—consider Alcibiades. Rather, it is because Diotima’s story is a story about successful or correct love.

The credibility of Diotima’s love story is another matter, of course. To many, it has seemed both incredible and distasteful, because it seems to say that beautiful individuals have only instrumental value. When one has climbed the ladder, of which they are merely the first rung, one should kick it—and them—away. But is this message really Diotima’s?

What we all love, according to Diotima, is the good—that is to say, we want good things to be ours forever. But because we are mortal, the closest we can come to satisfying this desire is to initiate an endless cycle of reproduction in which each new generation has good things. We achieve this, in a famous phrase, by “giving birth in beauty ( tokos en kalô )” (206b7–8, e5). What does this mean? Like Athenian paiderasteia , Diotima recognizes two fundamentally different kinds of love, two fundamentally different varieties of the desire to give birth in beauty. In the case of heterosexual lovers, who are “pregnant in body,” such giving birth consists in producing children who resemble, and so share in the beauty of their parents (209a3–4). Homosexual lovers, however, are a different story. What they give birth to is “wisdom and the rest of virtue” (209b8). When a man who is pregnant in soul finds a beautiful boy, Diotima says, it “makes him instantly teem with accounts of virtue” (209b8), or “beautiful accounts” (210a8). Giving birth to virtue and giving birth to accounts of it are obviously different. But some of the other phrases Diotima uses show us how to mitigate the difference. For what homosexual lovers want is to give birth to accounts of virtue of a particular sort—ones that can be used in “the proper ordering of cities and households” (209a6–7), and so can “make young men better” (210c1–3).

If the lover’s accounts are to achieve this goal, however, they mustn’t be the product of distorting fantasy, as Nietzsche thinks so many of our moral concepts are and as some feminists think our concept of romantic love itself is. What is intended to insure that they will not is their openness to reality—an openness guaranteed by the fact that in the course of his ascent the lover must study the beauty of ways of life and laws (210c3–5) and the beauty of the sciences (c6–7). What he gains from these studies are the conceptual resources needed to see the world, including the human world, aright—to gain knowledge of it. This is not the project an analysand takes up in psychoanalysis. Nor is it the one that we less formally undertake when we reflect on our own love stories in hopes of understanding them (often a project provoked alas by an unhappy ending). It is instead the project of philosophy, as Plato conceives of it. That is why it culminates in “the birth of many gloriously beautiful accounts and theories in unstinting love of wisdom ( philosophia )” (210d5–6). Yet the grander project intersects with the analysand’s project and with ours in an interesting way. The terms or concepts we use to tell our love stories must themselves be coherent if the stories we use them to tell are themselves to be coherently livable.

In Plato’s view, this means that they must be the concepts the true lover uses once he has seen the beautiful itself—the concepts whose ontological correlates are forms. If they are not, they will be incoherent and the lover who employs them will find himself embroiled in a love story he does not understand, a love story whose incoherence the elenchus, or psychoanalysis, or just plain critical scrutiny will reveal. It is this incoherence, indeed, encountered at lower stages in the ascent, that leads the correct lover, under pressure from his rational desire for truth and consistency, and the pain of inconsistency, to climb to the next stage.

We can see Diotima, then, not only as revealing the other more abstract loves that a true lover of boys must have, but also as exploring the conditions concepts must meet if they are to figure in genuinely coherent love stories. Her story isn’t about a lover who abandons the individual boys he loves, but about someone who comes to love boys successfully by coming to love something else as well.

Like Diotima herself, we have been concentrating on what other things a lover is led to love by his love for his beloved boy. We have said nothing about the changes explorations in this enlarged erotic field effect in the desires and feelings of the lover himself. But these, too, help us to see what happens to his love for his boy in the course of his explorations. What hooks the lover to begin with is love for a particular body: “First, if the Leader leads aright, he should love one body and beget beautiful accounts there” (210a6–8). At this stage, what the boy engages in the lover is his sexual desire for physical beauty, albeit one which, in firm keeping with the norms of Athenian paiderastia , is supposedly aim-inhibited: instead of sexual intercourse, it leads to discussions about beauty and to accounts of it. Here the beauty at issue is, in the first instance, the boy who represents beauty itself to the lover. That is why, when the lover finally comes to see the beautiful itself, “beauty will no longer seem to you to be measured by gold or raiment or beautiful boys or youths, which now you look upon dumbstruck” (211d3–5). One effect of generating accounts of this beauty, however, is that the lover comes to see his beloved’s beautiful body as one among many: if it is beautiful, so are any other bodies the accounts fit. And this initially cognitive discovery leads to a conative change: “Realizing this he is established as a lover of all beautiful bodies and relaxes this excessive preoccupation with one, thinking less of it and believing it to be a small matter” (210b4–6).

It is important in reading Diotima’s description of this change that we see it as comparative and contrastive: the lover used to overvalue his beloved (211d5–8, quoted below)—now he values him appropriately . But valuing appropriately is still valuing. The boy is still included in the class of beautiful bodies the lover now loves. It is also important to notice that cognitive and conative change are going hand-in-hand. To recognize that his beloved is one among many, the lover’s love for him has to change. And that means that psychological resources within the lover—beyond his sexual responsiveness to physical beauty—are coming into play. More of the lover is now involved in his love. Hence what his beloved might be thought to lose in exclusivity he gains in richness—and no doubt in endurance and reliability—of response. When his physical bloom fades, he will now still be loved.

But love that is to escape frustration cannot stop with bodies. The attempt to formulate an account of love free from puzzles and immune to elenctic refutation must lead on from beautiful bodies to beautiful souls, and so to the beautiful laws and practices that will improve souls and make young men better. Again this cognitive achievement is matched by a conative one. When the lover sees that all these beautiful things are somehow akin in the beauty, he comes to think that “bodily beauty is a small thing” (210c5–6), and so, as before, becomes less obsessed with it.

At the top of the scala amoris lies the beautiful itself, the first loved object that—like the “primary object of love” ( prôton philon ) in the Lysis (219d2-e4)—is not in any way gone beyond. Here, it seems, the lover at last finds something worthy of the obsessive attention he had once lavished on his beloved boy (211d8–212a7). Nonetheless, obsession is out of place even here. For the beautiful itself can no more satisfy the lover’s desires to eat and drink than his beloved can. Here—as there—what he would do if it were possible must not be confused with what he can and does do. After all, the lover himself cannot become immortal except by giving birth in the beauty he has at last found. He does that, however, precisely by arranging for his beloved to grow up, become truly virtuous, and be with him in the contemplation of—and, to the extent that it is possible, the possession of—true beauty.

In the Phaedrus we find a more detailed account of the psychology and art of love than in the Symposium . This account will be our exclusive focus. The soul, whether divine or human, Socrates claims, is like “the natural union of a team of winged horses and their charioteer” (246a6–7). But whereas in a divine soul all three elements are “good and come from good stock,” in a human soul the white horse (familiar from Republic IV as the honor-loving spirited element) is “beautiful and good, and of similar stock,” while the black one (the Republic ’s appetitive element) is “the opposite and of the opposite stock,” so that “the driving in our case is necessarily difficult and troublesome” (a7-b4). When spirit together with the charioteer (the Republic ’s rational element, there too identified with what is truly human rather than bestial in us (588b10–589a4)) “leads us towards what is best and is in control,” we possess moderation ( sôphrosunê ) (237e2–3). But when “appetite drags us irrationally towards pleasures and rules in us, its rule is called excess ( hubris )” (238a1–2). Of this excess, gluttony is one species, but erotic love another (238b7-c4). This is the bad kind of love—Pandemotic in the Symposium —that Lysias rightly disparages in the speech Phaedrus admires and reads to Socrates (230e6–234c5).

In Socrates’ view, however, there is also another kind of love, namely, “the madness of a man who, on seeing beauty here on earth, and being reminded of true beauty, becomes winged, and fluttering with eagerness to fly upwards, but unable to leave the ground, looks upwards like a bird, and takes no heed of things below—and that is what causes him to be regarded as mad” (249d5-e1). This madman is the philosopher of the Symposium , who when he falls in love with a boy is led by his love to ascend by stages to the form of the beautiful. What makes his madness a divine gift, however, is that the ascent is now revealed as involving recollection of a prior pre-natal ascent taken in the company of a god.

From the rich literary account of this ascent, we need to take away just one idea: souls have different psychological structures depending on which god they followed, since this sets an upper limit on how much of the forms they see, and so how much they can subsequently recollect. Since gaining access to forms nourishes and strengthens the rational element in the soul (248b5-c2), this also helps determine their motivational structure: the stronger their reason is, the more likely it will be to succeed in controlling the other elements in the soul.

Followers of Zeus, for example, choose someone to love whose soul resembles their patron god. So they seek someone who is “naturally disposed to philosophy and leadership, and when they have found him and fall in love they do everything to make him philosophical” (252e1–5). Nonetheless, the falling itself involves a huge psychological upheaval. The black horse of appetite immediately urges towards sexual intercourse. The white horse—“constrained then as always by shame” (254a2)—holds itself back. Eventually, however, the black horse forces both the charioteer and the white horse “to move towards the beloved and mention to him the delights of sex” (a5–7). Again they balk, “indignant at being forced to do terrible and improper things” (b1). But finally, “when there is no limit to their plight, they follow its lead, giving in and agreeing to do what it tells them” (b2–3). As they come close to the beloved, however, to initiate intercourse, the flashing face of the beloved reminds the charioteer of the beautiful itself, so that his memory “again sees it standing together with temperance on a holy pedestal” (b5–7). He becomes frightened and “in sudden reverence falls on his back, and is forced at the same time to pull back the reins so violently as to bring the horses down on their haunches, the one willingly, because of it lack of resistance to him, but the unruly horse much against its will” (b7-c3). Eventually, “when the same thing happens to the evil horse many times, it allows the charioteer with his foresight to lead” (e5–7). If this control of appetite by reason and spirit continues—even when the boy has accepted his lover and embraces, kisses, and lies down with him—and draws them to “a well-ordered life and to philosophy,” they are blessedly happy here on earth, and, if they live such a life for three successive incarnations, they re-grow their wings and re-join the entourage of their god (255e2-b7).

When followers of Ares fall in love, on the other hand, they “adopt a lower way of living, not philosophical, but honor-loving” (256b7-c1). When they are drinking together, for example, or are careless in some other way, “the licentious horses in the two of them catch their souls off guard,” and since the man’s recollection of beauty is dimmer and is not rekindled by philosophical conversation, they end up having sex together—something “the masses regard as the happiest choice of all” (c1–5). Nonetheless, they don’t have sex very often, because “what they are doing has not been approved by their whole mind” (c6–7). So while the degree of their love and happiness is less than the philosophical pair and, on their death, “they leave the body without wings,” still they have an impulse, coming from love, to try to gain them. Hence they aren’t punished in the next life, but helped on the way to future happiness together (c7-e2).

The love that is divine madness is a good thing, therefore, especially when, “accompanied by philosophical discussions ( erôta meta philosophôn logôn )” (257b6), it leads to the beautiful itself and the other forms, which are what we—as most of all the rational element in our souls—truly love and crave. The question is what makes a discussion philosophical? What makes it of the sort to be included in the true art of love that the philosopher who loves the beautiful itself practices? The answer now proposed is that it must be a technê or craft, and so must have the defining characteristics of one. As applied to love itself, for example, it must begin with a definition of love, and reach its conclusions by ordering its discussion in relation to it (263d5-e3). And this definition, in turn, must be established by what Socrates refers to as collection and division (266b3–4).

Collection is a process of “perceiving together and bringing into one form items that are scattered in many places” (265d3–4). It is a process that we, unlike other animals, are able to engage in it, because our souls include a rational element that has prior acquaintance with forms: “a soul that never [prenatally] saw what is true cannot take a human shape, since a human being must understand what is said by relation to a form that is reached from many sense-perceptions being collected into one by reasoning” (249b5-c1). (It is useful to compare this description with the one given in Aristotle, Posterior Analytics II. 19.)

Once a form has been reached in this way, division begins. This is a matter of “cutting the form up again, by relation to [sub-]forms, by relation to its natural joints” (265e1-2). As an example, Socrates cites the case of love itself:

just as a single body naturally has its parts in pairs, with both members of each pair having the same name, and labeled respectively left and right, so the two speeches regarded madness as naturally a single form in us. The one [Socrates’ reorganized version of Lysias’ attack on love] cut off the part on the left side, then cutting it again, and not giving up until it had found among the parts a love which is, as we say, “left-handed,” and abused it with full justice, while the other speech [Socrates’ own defense of love] led us to the parts of madness on the right-hand side, and discovering and exhibiting a love which shares the same name as the other, but is divine, it praised it as a cause of our greatest goods. (265e4–266b1)

Thus, while each speech tells only half the story, the two together show how correct division should proceed. The goal, however, isn’t just truth or correctness, but explanatory adequacy. Thus if the form in question “is simple, we should consider…what natural capacity it has for acting and on what, or for being acted upon and by what,” and if it is complex, we should count its sub-forms, and consider the same things about them as about the simple ones (270d3–7). That Socrates—the archetypal searcher for explanatory definitions ( Euthyphro 6d9-e6)—should pronounce himself “a lover of these divisions and collections” is no surprise, therefore (266b3–4).

Philosophy aims at true definitions and true stories based on them. But it also aims at persuasion, since the philosophical lover wants to persuade his boy to follow him on the path to the forms. Philosophy and rhetoric must thus go together, which means that rhetoric, too, must be developed as a technê . It must, first, distinguish and give definitions of the various kinds of souls and kinds of speeches, revealing their respective capacities and susceptibilities, and, second, “coordinate each kind of soul with the kind of speech appropriate to it, explaining why one kind of soul is necessarily convinced by one kind of speech, while another is not” (271b1–5). Mastery of such a science, however, requires one further thing: “the student must observe these things as they are in real life, and actually being put into practice, and be able to follow them with keen perception” (d8-e1). It isn’t enough, in other words, to know what kinds of speeches affect what kinds of soul, the philosophical rhetorician must also know that this man in front of him is of such and such a kind, and be able to talk in the kind of way that will prove convincing to him (e2–272b2).

At the end of the Symposium , Alcibiades has gone off, presumably with the throng of Bacchic revelers, who burst into his life as representatives of his overpowering love for the approval and flattery of the crowd. Socrates, Aristophanes, and Agathon are left behind discussing tragedy and comedy: “the main point was that Socrates was trying to prove to them that the same man knows ( epistasthai ) how to write both comedy and tragedy, that someone who is by craft ( technê ) a tragic poet is a comic poet too” (223d2–6).

The key words here, as we learn in the Ion , are epistasthai and technê . Ordinary poets cannot write both comedy and tragedy, because they do not write out of knowledge and craft ( technê ) but out of divine inspiration ( Ion 534c5–6). If they did write out of craft and knowledge, if they were craftsmen poets , they would be able to write both comedy and tragedy, because opposites are always studied by the same craft. Thus the comedic craft and the tragic craft would have to be one and the same; just as one and the same craft, medicine, deals with both sickness and health.

Socrates tells us what a craftsman poet would be able to write, he does not tell us what he would write. Other Platonic spokesmen are somewhat more forthcoming. “We ourselves are poets,” the Athenian Stranger tells us in the Laws , “who have to the best of our ability created a tragedy that is the finest and the best; at any rate, our entire constitution is constructed as an imitation of the finest and best way of life—the very thing which we claim is the truest tragedy” (817b1–5). Earlier in the same discussion, the Stranger is equally explicit that this same constitution, though not a comedy, does nonetheless embody comedic knowledge:

Someone who is going to gain practical wisdom can’t learn serious matters without learning ridiculous ones, or anything else, for that matter, without its opposite. But if we intend to acquire virtue, even on a small scale, we can’t be serious and comic too, and this is precisely why we must learn to recognize what is ridiculous, to avoid being trapped by our ignorance of it into doing or saying something ridiculous, when we don’t have to. (816d5-e5)

The Laws is a tragedy, then, because it is “an imitation of the finest and best way of life.”

The Symposium is a tragedy for an analogous reason: it contains an imitation of one part of such a life, namely, what the Protagoras terms a “symposium of beautiful and good men” who “test each other’s mettle in mutual argument” by asking and answering questions (347d3–348a9). This is how Socrates responds to Agathon’s speech. It is how Diotima converses with Socrates. It is the type of symposium Socrates tries to re-establish when Alcibiades’ “satyr-play” is finished, and the throng of Bacchic revelers has left.

Unlike the Laws , however, the Symposium is a comedy too, since it also contains an imitation of the second best kind of symposium described in the Protagoras —one where there are poets present, and where the participants “argue over points that can’t be established with any certainty” (347e1–7). An accurate description, surely, of the speeches made by all the symposiasts who speak prior to Socrates.

Finally, Alcibiades arrives with—significantly enough—a flute-girl (212c5-e3; compare 176e6-7). And though she does not play, her arrival inaugurates the further decline of the symposium into something even more like the kind of symposium reviled in the Protagoras as “a symposium of common, vulgar fellows… who, unable to entertain one another with their own conversation, put up the price of flute-girls, and pay large sums to hear the sound of the flute instead of their own talk” (347c4-d2). This is the element of satyr-play in the Symposium —satyr imagery is frequent in Alcibiades’ speech. [ 2 ]

The idea is the one mentioned earlier. Some love stories—the good ones—are tragedies (in the special sense of the term introduced in the Laws ): they involve the kind of love found in the best kind of life, a life that comes as close as possible to the divine—one in which we achieve happiness by having good things be ours forever (205d1–206a12). Other love stories are comedies: they involve a lesser kind of love. Others still are satyr plays: genital farces. But the true story of love, the story that is Plato’s Symposium itself, is the story of all these stories. In the Symposium , it takes the form appropriate to its genre and audience. But in the Phaedrus , we learn of the longer more technical road it might take in the future, when armed with a scientific psychology and rhetoric it becomes a matter for experts.

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How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

• Plato’s Phaedrus translated by Benjamin Jowett (Project Gutenberg).
• Plato’s Symposium , translated by Benjamin Jowett.
• Philosophy of Love entry from the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

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The Unsung Joy of Falling in Big, Deep Platonic Love

There is magic in the moment when you realize you’ve found a friend like no other. What if we celebrated that kind of connection more?

Credit... Irene Servillo

Supported by

By Catherine Pearson

• Feb. 14, 2023

Every year on Feb. 16, Carly Crone’s father would wish her a happy birthday and — in the same breath — remind her it was also the birthday of Harry Cohn, his very best friend since kindergarten.

The two didn’t meet until nine years ago, however, when Ms. Crone’s dad died and she called to tell Mr. Cohn. From the moment he picked up, she felt a connection to him she still struggles to describe.

“I remember where I was standing when I made the phone call,” recalled Ms. Crone, 46. “There was something … it was like this knowing of him, like I felt this trust inside. I can’t quite actually put it into words.”

From there, the pair kept in touch. They texted and chatted on the phone several times a week, in conversations that sometimes lasted an hour or more. “We would talk about everything. I would talk about my kids. I would talk about work. He would tell me stories about my dad,” Ms. Crone said.

Whenever Mr. Cohn traveled from his home in Connecticut to Chicago, where Ms. Crone lives, they went out to dinner — a tradition they keep up today. “When we go to the restaurant, one of the first things I say to the waiter is, ‘What time does this place close?’” Mr. Cohn, 74, joked.

At times, their bond feels almost enchanted. “I’ll be like, ‘Oh, I need to call Harry about something,’ and then he’ll call me right away,” Ms. Crone said. Or Mr. Cohn will think of emailing Ms. Crone and open his inbox to find a message from her waiting for him.

“My dad would be so happy to know that he gave me the gift of his friend,” Ms. Crone said.

“I always tell Carly I’m really not spiritual — though she tells me I am — but there is some connection here,” Mr. Cohn said. “I have no idea, I can’t explain it.”

Their inability to describe their friendship — from the spark they felt during that initial phone call to the kinship they share today — belies a deeper truth, which is that we seldom talk about big, profound platonic love. Romantic partners gush about love at first sight; parents rhapsodize about meeting their babies for the first time. But it’s rare for friends to wax poetic about the moment they “fell” for one other.

“We don’t have nuanced words for that kind of deep, deep, deep caring and connectedness,” said Diane Barth, a psychotherapist and the author of “I Know How You Feel: The Joy and Heartbreak of Friendship in Women’s Lives.”

Andrea Bonior, a psychologist and the author of “The Friendship Fix,” said that when we talk about friendship, “we kind of take the magic away,” even though many platonic connections start with a rush that feels an awful lot like falling in love — a recognition that there is “a specific alchemy to this new relationship that brings out something special in you.”

Not every friendship begins with that kind of lightning bolt moment, but Dr. Bonior and others believe there is a case to be made for honoring it when it does happen, and for just generally doing more to revere and celebrate platonic love. By making a deliberate effort to do so, we are more likely to keep our friendships top of mind and prioritize them, Ms. Barth added.

This Valentine’s Day, the Well team asked friends — like Mr. Cohn and Ms. Crone — to describe the moment they knew they had something special.

“It was a really, really intense moment.”

Thea Breite, 64, and Martha Hausman, 60, met years ago through their children’s school in suburban Boston. When Ms. Breite and her wife were both diagnosed with cancer in early 2017, Ms. Hausman was one of many who pitched in, driving them to various appointments and helping with meals.

Still, the women didn’t become close friends until later that year. Ms. Breite had finished her cancer treatment but had sunk into depression. Her wife was very sick, and she had three children to raise. One day, while driving to a destination she can no longer remember, she pulled over at an unfamiliar playground, got out and started to cry.

Ms. Hausman, who had been visiting another friend and was driving a route she didn’t normally take, spotted her. “I don’t know why I decided to go in another direction that day, but I did and I saw Thea on the playground,” she said. “She was walking, but really stooped. I could see that she was in distress.”

Ms. Hausman pulled over and the women sat together on a bench.

“You wept,” Ms. Hausman recalled.

“I wept,” Ms. Breite agreed.

“It was a really, really intense moment for both of us,” Ms. Hausman said.

From there, they developed a deep attachment. Ms. Breite’s wife died in 2020, and though she has been supported by a large and willing group of friends, she has leaned particularly heavily on Ms. Hausman, who has stepped in to join her friend at parent-teacher conferences and helped her cope with the pain of losing her partner. “I really needed a Martha,” Ms. Breite said.

But the friendship does not feel one-sided, Ms. Hausman added. When her sciatica flared, Ms. Breite drove to her home with lidocaine patches and gave her a back massage. And she loves that she made a new best friend in her late 50s. “It’s just nice to have a clean slate with someone and just be who you are now,” she said.

“I didn’t turn around or cry.”

Shahrzad Radbod and Neda Barkhordar, both 36, forged their bond before they knew how to read or tie their shoes. Ms. Radbod and her family were recent refugees from Iran, trying to acclimate to life in Southern California. “I didn’t know a word of English,” Ms. Radbod said. “My mom enrolled me in kindergarten and sat me next to the only Persian person in class.” That person was Ms. Barkhordar.

Ms. Radbod remembers snippets from those first days. She recalls the sound of her friend’s voice as she translated for her: Now it is time for recess. Now it is time to color. And she remembers a feeling: There was someone next to her, looking out for her.

“My mom says she was kind of shocked that I sat down next to Neda and I didn’t turn around or cry,” she said.

Ms. Barkhordar remembers immediately recognizing how capable Ms. Radbod was, and that she acclimated to her new environment much faster than she gives herself credit for.

Today, the women are lawyers in Los Angeles, and continue to show up for each other in ways big and small. When Ms. Radbod went through a difficult breakup early in the pandemic and was struggling to sleep, Ms. Barkhordar arrived in a surgical mask with a bottle of melatonin. When Ms. Radbod makes big life decisions — like when she bought a house, or negotiated her work salary — Ms. Barkhordar is the first person she calls.

Ms. Barkhordar calls Ms. Radbod her “moral compass.” Though they sometimes “fight like a married couple,” when she connects with Ms. Radbod, she feels, above all else, a sense of “safety.”

And whenever they meet someone new together, “Neda always says: ‘This is Shahrzad. She didn’t know a word of English when I met her. Now look at her!’” Ms. Radbod laughed.

“I was scared but you were guiding me.”

Raphaela Francis, 47, and Renée Kornbluth, 71, have been friends for more than three decades. They met in 1990 at an Outward Bound program in New York City — Ms. Francis was a Black high school student from the South Bronx and Ms. Kornbluth was a white 39-year-old volunteer from suburban New Jersey. Within minutes of being introduced, they were paired up and scaling the masts and rigging of the Peking, a towering merchant ship stationed at the South Street Seaport.

Ms. Francis was wary of investing too much in a relationship with any of the program volunteers, but the trust she felt was instantaneous.

“We were up in the air and I was scared, but you were guiding me and you were calm,” Ms. Francis recalled in a conversation with Ms. Kornbluth. “You were — I don’t know, there was something that you gave me that I needed.” After the weekend was over, Ms. Francis sent Ms. Kornbluth a letter saying she wanted to stay in touch.

Ms. Francis’ mother had substance abuse issues and she was living with her older sister at the time, so Ms. Kornbluth invited her to spend weekends at her home in New Jersey. “I think maybe she needed a mother figure a little bit, and I needed a kid,” Ms. Kornbluth said. “We were a great fit for one another in that regard.”

Ms. Kornbluth didn’t have a car, so she drove Ms. Francis around on her motorcycle. “I took her everywhere on the back of my bike.”

As the years have gone by, they have remained in touch even though they’ve often lived far apart. (Ms. Kornbluth still resides in New Jersey; Ms. Francis is currently in Washington State.) At the start of the pandemic, Ms. Kornbluth was out of work and feeling “very depressed.” Ms. Francis called her landline (Ms. Kornbluth did not have a cell at the time) and said: “There’s a Samsung Galaxy S10 waiting for you at Russell Cellular, I’m putting you on my plan,” Ms. Kornbluth recalled. “I said, ‘I’ll pay you for it!’ And she said, ‘No way.’” 

“You know, my friend wasn’t doing well,” Ms. Francis said. “I wanted to be able to call her and know where she was.”

“I just think it’s easy to fall for somebody who doesn’t judge you, who’s genuine,” she added. “It doesn’t matter what color they are, what age they are. You can tell when somebody is genuinely trying to be good to you.”

Catherine Pearson is a reporter for the Well section of The Times, covering families and relationships. More about Catherine Pearson

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Home — Essay Samples — Philosophy — Plato — The Construction of Platonic Love and Affection Concepts

The Construction of Platonic Love and Affection Concepts

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• Exploring the Beauty of Platonic Love Through Poetry

Love, in all its forms, has been a common theme in poetry for centuries. While romantic love often takes center stage, the profound beauty of platonic love deserves its own spotlight. Platonic love, characterized by deep affection and a strong bond between individuals with no romantic or sexual involvement, is a powerful and enduring connection. In this article, we will delve into the world of poetry that celebrates the essence of platonic love.

1. "To My Best Friend" by Lang Leav

2. "friendship" by henry david thoreau, 3. "a dedication to my mother" by alice meynell.

"To My Best Friend" by Lang Leav masterfully captures the essence of platonic love. Leav intertwines the emotions of friendship and love, highlighting the depth and significance of these connections. The poem paints a vivid picture of the profound impact a best friend can have on one's life, emphasizing the unwavering support and understanding they provide.

"You have always been there for me, Through the laughter and the tears, The good times and the bad, You have been my constant, My rock, my best friend."

Henry David Thoreau's poem "Friendship" delves into the complexities of platonic love, emphasizing the importance of genuine connections. Thoreau beautifully expresses the power of true friendship, emphasizing the need for authenticity and vulnerability in these relationships. The poem reminds us that platonic love can be a source of strength and solace in times of need.

"I value more the presence of a sincere friend than wealth and luxury's empty show, And—oh! by what a thousand tender ties Our hearts are bound, how dear, dear friends we grow!"

While platonic love is often associated with friendships, it can also encompass the profound bond between a child and their mother. In "A Dedication to My Mother" by Alice Meynell, the poet pays tribute to the unwavering love and support of a mother. This touching poem beautifully captures the essence of platonic love between a child and their caregiver.

"And love, I know, is long, And, knowing, long endureth. Each hour is strong to keep. And yet I know not how Thou hast such strength to go So far, so far, from me, Thy child, thy love most dear."

Poetry has the remarkable ability to capture the essence of complex emotions, including the pure and profound love found in platonic relationships. Whether it's the bond between best friends, the strength of genuine connections, or the love between a parent and child, these poems beautifully celebrate the beauty and significance of platonic love. Through the power of words, these poets remind us of the invaluable role these relationships play in our lives, filling our hearts with joy, support, and understanding.

• Poems That Capture the Essence of Gym Class
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Platonic Love

1976, Facets of Plato's Philosophy

Related Papers

Appeared in D.D. Butorac and D.A. Layne (ed.), Proclus and his Legacy, De Gruyter ('Millennium Studies' series, vol.65), Berlin-Boston, 2017, pp.45-52.

Dimitrios A . Vasilakis

Selected Papers from the Tenth Symposium Platonicum, Academia Verlag

Mehmet M Erginel

At the heart of Plato’s theory of erōs is the ‘ascent’ of love for an individual body, through several stages, to love of Beauty itself (Symposium 210a-212b). I argue that our understanding of the psychology of this transformation would benefit especially from bringing in Plato’s views on pain from the Republic. For erōs is presented in the Symposium as including sexual desire (207b) as well as love of wisdom (210d), but the Republic takes the former to be a painful desire, whereas the latter is apparently treated as painless. The ‘ascent’ of love, then, seems to involve the transformation of a painful desire into a painless one. I conclude that this transformation is best understood as a rechanneling of desire within the tripartite soul.

Emotions in Plato, Joint Workshop, Université Nanterre, Paris

Mariangela Esposito

Love - Ancient Perspectives

In his classic paper on "The Individual as an Object of Love in Plato" Gregory Vlastos denied that according to Plato's Diotima in the Symposium a human individual can ever be the proper object of one's erotic desire, because what one (should) be enamoured with is the Form of Beauty. For the true Platonic lover, the beauty of an individual is only the starting-point for one to understand that beauty can reside also in more abstract levels. Hence, Vlastos argues that the beloved individual is for his lover only a means to an end, so that the lover recollects and attains to true Beauty, and that this is morally objectionable. The systematic Neoplatonic philosopher Proclus (412-485 AD) had already given an answer to this accusation. I will first present the altruistic side of Eros as an ontological entity in Proclus's metaphysical system. My guide in this will be Socrates, as well as the Platonic Demiurge from the Timaeus and Republic's philosopher-king. It will be shown that, according to Proclus's interpretation of various Platonic texts, Vlastos was wrong to accuse Plato of the abovementioned "instrumentality" on the erotic field. However, my paper will close with a critical engagement with Proclus too, since I discern that in his view of Platonic love another sort of instrumentality, one which is akin to Stoic ethics, arises. Vlastos was wrong, but we do not need to be wholeheartedly sympathetic to Proclus.

Daniel Boyarin

Alexander Nehamas

Anthony Hooper

Fierro, María Angélica, “Loving and lovable bodies in Plato´s Symposium”, XI Symposium Platonicum: The “Symposium”. Proceedings II, International Plato Society – Universidad de Pisa, Departamento de Filología, Literatura y Lingüística, Pisa, Italia, 2013: 258-262.

Maria Angelica Fierro

The Heythrop Journal

T. Brian Mooney

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Essay: Platonic ideals of love (Shakespeare’s Sonnets 116 and 130)

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Shakespeare’s sonnet 116 and sonnet 130 both describe love in different ways but both show the ideals of platonic love. The three stages of platonic love is the love of body, the love of mind and the love of soul.

Shakespeare discusses the love, or lack there of, body in sonnet 130 by saying that his love does not need to be comely to sight for him to be happy with her. He describes how actually unattractive she is by comparing her hair to “Black wires” and by saying her eyes are “Nothing like the sun”. He also describes her bad breath and her colorless cheeks yet at the end he says he considers her as rare as any other and conveys the message that he is happy with her. Sonnet 116 also states that beauty is not what love is all about. It says “Though rosy lips and cheeks within his bending sickle’s compass come.” this shows that beauty fades and shows the belief that love must be more than beauty.

The love of mind is discussed in sonnet 130 when Shakespeare writes “I love to hear her speak, yet well I know that music hath a far more pleasing sound.” this means that he is content with his love whether or not she speaks her mind. In sonnet 116 he says that he does not want to just marry someone for their mind because people are changed over time and “Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds,”.

Sonnet 116 shows that love is not true, platonic love unless it lasts forever, or is love of soul. This is shown in lines 11 and 12, “Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, but bears it out even to the edge of doom.” in sonnet 130, Shakespeare shows a love of soul by stating that his love is not thought of as beautiful nor is she interesting but he loves her and cherishes her all the same. He must love her soul because the others characteristics of platonic love don’t seem important to him.

Platonic love is shown through both of Shakespeare’s sonnets, 116 and 130 even though in different ways.

How Shakespeare’s sonnets 116 and 130 show the ideals of platonic love

Shakespeare’s Sonnets 116 and 130 are two of his most famous and beloved works that explore the concept of platonic love. Plato first proposed the idea of platonic love in his dialogues during the fourth century BCE, and it has since become an important theme in literature, art, and philosophy. Platonic love is a type of love that is based on intellectual and spiritual attraction between two people, rather than sexual desire. It is a deep and lasting connection that can transcend physical boundaries.

In Sonnet 116, Shakespeare evokes the idea of platonic love through the metaphor of a star-crossed lover’s bond that is “not time’s fool”, but rather “an ever-fixed mark” that “looks on tempests and is never shaken”. He paints a picture of two people whose connection is strong enough to weather the storms of life and remain unshaken by time. This imagery alludes to the idea of lasting platonic love, suggesting that the bond between two people can be so deep and lasting, that it transcends the physical realm and is unaffected by the passage of time.

In Sonnet 130, Shakespeare again uses imagery to explore the idea of platonic love. He compares his beloved to various objects in nature, such as “a lily of the field”, a “black wire wig”, and a “breath of all the western wind”. He acknowledges the differences between his beloved and these objects, but emphasizes that he still loves her in the same way. This imagery suggests the idea of loving someone for who they are, rather than for their physical appearance or outward beauty. It alludes to the idea of platonic love, which is based on a deep understanding and appreciation of one another, rather than physical attraction.

Shakespeare’s Sonnets 116 and 130 explore the idea of platonic love in different ways. In Sonnet 116, he evokes the idea of a connection so strong and so lasting, it transcends the physical realm and is unaffected by the passage of time. In Sonnet 130, he uses imagery to suggest the idea of loving someone for who they are, rather than their physical beauty. Together, these two sonnets provide a powerful insight into the ideals of platonic love and illustrate the importance of understanding and appreciating one another on a deeper level.

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Understanding Plato's "Platonic Love" 3 Pages 692 Words

            Platonic love is defined as love conceived by Plato as ascending from passion for the individual to contemplation of the universal and ideal or a close relationship between two persons in which sexual desire is nonexistent or has been suppressed or sublimated. In Symposium, Plato discusses various types of love through the dialogue of his speakers, and it is through this that we are able to go beyond a simple definition and truly understand the nature of Platonic love, its importance in ancient Greece, and its relevance to our lives today.              For Plato, the search for virtue is capable of being attained through platonic love, the love of true Beauty. Only after one has ascended past the basic forms of love, (the love of beautiful bodies, and the love of wisdom) can one love true Beauty and therefore be capable of true virtue. It is easy to understand when at the end of the speech of Diotoma, she says:.              "When he looks at Beauty in the only way that Beauty can be seen – only then will it become possible for him to give birth not to images of virtue (because he"s in touch with no images), but to true virtue (because he"s in touch with true Beauty).".              Thus Platonic love in its purest essence in Symposium is love of this kind, the love of Beauty. This is the kind of love is the epitome of what Platonic love is.              There are other references in Syposium to love that is non-sexual. One such example takes place in the Speech of Pausanias makes a distinct difference between vulgar love and noble love, the love of the body versus the love of the soul. This speech focuses on the fact that loving just the sexual act is a young base type of love, which included both the love of women and lust for young boys. The real love is that of strictly men (older boys) and is love out of virtue, and what is right. .              The importance of Platonic love for Plato in his time was the direct tie of the love of Beauty to true virtue.

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