A romantic friendship, passionate friendship, or emotional friendship is a very close but normally non-sexual friendship between friends, frequently featuring a degree of physical contact beyond what is common in modern Western countries. Holding hands, cuddling, embracing, kissing, providing massages, or sharing a bed without sexual intercourse or other sexual expression are examples.
The phrase is most commonly used in historical studies to describe an extremely close relationship between persons of the same s*x during a time when homosexuality was not a societal category as it is now. In this regard, the term was coined in the late twentieth century to describe a type of relationship that had been considered unremarkable until the mid-19th century but had become rarer since the second half of the nineteenth century as physical intimacy between non-sexual partners became frowned upon. With the simultaneous growth of female education and a new vocabulary of sexuality, romantic friendship between women in Europe and North America became notably widespread in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
Because the major source material consists of writing about love relationships, which often took the form of love letters, poems, or philosophical essays rather than objective investigations, studying historical romantic friendship is challenging. Because homosexuality was taboo in Western European cultures at the time, some sexual relationships may be hidden, but the rarity of romantic friendship in modern times means that references to nonsexual relationships may be misinterpreted, as claimed by Faderman, Coontz, Anthony Rotundo, Douglas Bush, and others.
