“They loved each other in full daylight, in a century that had not yet decided what that was supposed to mean.”
What it was
A romantic friendship was a very close, emotionally passionate attachment between two people — classically of the same sex — in a period when there was no social category of homosexuality as we know it today. The bond could include a degree of physical tenderness uncommon in modern friendship: holding hands, sharing a bed, ardent letters, a vow to live and die together. As Wikipedia notes, the term itself was coined only in the later twentieth century, to name a kind of love the past lived but never had to label.
The crucial fact is the absence of suspicion. From the Renaissance through the nineteenth century, deep same-sex devotion was widely read as noble — a complement to marriage, not a rival to it. Two people could profess undying love in writing and be celebrated for the depth of their feeling, not interrogated about its nature.
Where it comes from
The phrase belongs to historians, and the historian most bound up with it is Lillian Faderman, whose 1981 study Surpassing the Love of Men traced centuries of passionate attachment between women. Faderman found that such love had once carried a whole wardrobe of approving names — romantic friends, sentimental friends, the love of kindred spirits, and later the Boston marriage — and that it was only in the late 1800s that medicine and anti-feminism combined to recast it as pathology.
The image most people carry is the Ladies of Llangollen: Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby, two Irish gentlewomen who eloped from the marriage market in 1778, settled in a cottage in north Wales, and lived together for roughly half a century — visited and admired by Wordsworth and the Duke of Wellington alike. Their union was famous, respectable, and openly a love story long before the language for it existed.
The Ladies of Llangollen shared one home from 1780 until Butler’s death in 1829 — celebrated visitors, not scandal, for nearly five decades. Source: Wikipedia, “Ladies of Llangollen.”
How it actually worked
In practice, a romantic friendship was carried by the materials of ordinary devotion: correspondence written in the register we now reserve for lovers, gifts and locks of hair, shared rooms and shared finances, holidays and sickbeds attended. What the modern eye reads as coded eroticism, the period often read as the natural grammar of close feeling. Some of these bonds were sensual; some were sexual; many were neither — and, tellingly, their own era rarely felt the need to know which.
This is why romantic friendship resists our questions. It did not run on the romance-or-friendship binary we inherited; the category simply hadn’t hardened yet. The relationship was defined by intensity, loyalty and chosen permanence rather than by what did or did not happen behind a closed door.
A misreading worth resisting
Two opposite mistakes shadow this form. One flattens every romantic friendship into a closeted gay relationship, projecting a modern identity backward onto people who had no such frame. The other strains to prove these bonds were “just friends,” sanitised and sexless, as if to protect them. Both impose a certainty the evidence doesn’t grant. The honest reading holds the ambiguity: these were loves real enough to organise a whole life around, whose physical dimension is often simply unknowable — and was, to the people living them, beside the point.
Why it belongs in a modern atlas
Romantic friendship is the ancestor in the family tree. Strip away the bonnets and the letter-paper and you arrive at something the present has only recently re-named: the queerplatonic bond that refuses to choose between romance and friendship, the partnership defined by devotion rather than by category. It is the proof that sits under so much of this Atlas — that none of this is new. Only the words are. The forms have been here all along, waiting for language to catch up.
How Partnersin.love holds it
This one lives in Wayfarer.
Wayfarer is for the bonds that travel outside the old map — love defined by depth and choice rather than by the name society hands you. Romantic friendship is the path it was walking long before there was a path.
Enter WayfarerThreads to
Its closest descendant is the Boston Marriage, the same devotion given a household and a New England address, and its modern heir is the Queerplatonic bond. It rhymes, too, with the Single at Heart · Aromantic who finds their deepest ties outside the romantic script. On Partnersin.love you can map such a chosen circle with the Kinship Map, follow the Question-Asker path for those still naming what they have, or browse the Lexicon for the words this old love was missing.