page_title: Romantic friendship
hierarchical_section_title: Romantic friendship
caption_attribution_description: English: Frances Shimer and Cindarella Gregory, co-founders of Shimer College, in 1869. Credit: Northern Illinois University Archives.
context_page_description: A romantic friendship, 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 the contemporary Western societies. It may include for example holding hands, cuddling, hugging, kissing, giving massages, and sharing a bed, or co-sleeping, without sexual intercourse or other physical sexual expression.
  In historical scholarship, the term may be used to describe a very close relationship between people of the same sex during a period of history when homosexuality did not exist as a social category. 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.
context_section_description: A romantic friendship,  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 the contemporary Western societies. It may include for example holding hands, cuddling, hugging, kissing, giving massages, and sharing a bed, or co-sleeping, without sexual intercourse or other physical sexual expression.
  In historical scholarship, the term may be used to describe a very close relationship between people of the same sex during a period of history when homosexuality did not exist as a social category. 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. 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.
caption: Shimer College founders Cindarella Gregory and Frances Shimer in 1869; their extremely close relationship has been characterized as a "passionate friendship".[3]
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