One of the things I sought to highlight in Sacred Unions, Sacred Passions was the beauty and deep goodness of "passionate friendships" with a particular focus toward male-female friendship. As I attempted to briefly demonstrate in the book, deep love between friends (emotional commitment, deep attachment, intensity of relationship, thought preoccupation, warm physical affection including cuddling, holding hands, or close physical touch, vulnerability, sweet language, etc.) has a long and rich history--particularly true among Christians.
Christianity (which affirms the triune God is love) has scores and scores of stories of passionate friendships going back to the life of Christ. Then the friendships of Naomi and Ruth plus David and Jonathan have encouraged many friends to love each other passionately throughout their lives.
Prior to the twentieth century, these friendships didn't need an adjective in front of them: "passionate." But as the twentieth century moved forward so many of these friendships were discouraged, silenced, or shamed through an array of voices. One stream of expert voices (Freud and company) sexualized love, sexualized affection, sexualized touch, sexualized the unconscious, and so on. Another set of voices stressed the masculine-scientific approach toward relationship, hence warm close affection became feminized and demonized. It wasn't just that warm affection between friends could be indicating some latent sexual neurosis, but it was also feminized. The only place for deep love, passion, and affection between humans was the romantic couple--which had not existed prior to the twentieth century.
With romantic ideology firmly in place, sexualizing everything that was characteristic of deep friendship love for centuries, twentieth century scholars began to look at past friendships suspecting more than just friendship was just happening. Some though, have moved away from that. There is a growing number of scholars who are now looking back and admitting it would be too reductionistic to claim that all passionate friendships were sexualized relationships or had underlying sexual intent. Today some of these scholars would describe these friendships as passionate friendships--they involved passion and other twentieth century markers for romantic scripts--but there was no sexual intent in them.
It doesn't surprise me the slightest as we move farther away from Freud and company, more scholars are not only able to see these friendships as friendships, but that there would be more and more contemporary friends nurturing passionate friendships.
Katherine Peterson, in her Ph.D dissertation, Bosom Buddies: Factors Associated with Experiences of Passionate Friendship Among Men and Women reveals a study of 375 contemporary adults (ages 18-26) exploring passionate friendships. Because of romantic ideology firmly in place, she notes social science has had only 3 categories for human relationships: (a) family or kinship, (b) romantic or sexual relationships, and (c) platonic friendships or relationships. However, she notes, "While one might assume that a relationship with an acquaintance would be characterized by the least amount of intimacy, and a romantic partner would experience the greatest amount of intimacy, friendships in particular appear to vary in the nature and quality of intimacy displayed."
I will tell you her conclusion, first: there are highly intimate platonic friendships reemerging in this new century. Her own study revealed there are more women than men participating in passionate friendships, but men are also beginning to open up to intimate friendships. She also underscores passionate friendships have also been observed in cross-sex dyads.
1. A full range of friendship intimacy with no sex.
These friendships are characterized by passion, emotional commitment, expressive physical affection, thought preoccupation, sweet language, emotional expressiveness, fascination, shared experiences, and deep self-disclosure but no sexual intent, motivation, activity. She notes how many have had an emotionally and physically intense platonic friendship with no sexual or romantic intent. I say this sounds a lot like the thousands and thousands of friendship-love stories prior to the twentieth century.
Quoting another author, she cites some friends talking about their friendships: "We spend the kind of time together that you usually spend with a lover" said one friend. She refers to another friend who said,"We had the deep kind of love where I know I could hold her, which is something I normally wouldn't do with a friend." She reports another friend, "It was like this pull to be near her, this longing for nearness, but it wasn't sexual."
2. On gender differences.
And we all know about the relational/gender differences between men and women when it comes to friendship intimacy styles she notes studies where men and women include self-disclosure, emotional expressiveness, and physical contact in their top three most frequently mentioned meanings of intimacy. She draws the conclusion that "many contemporary researchers posit the assumption that males and females are actually more alike than is often assumed." But she doesn't dismiss the differences in intimacy styles between genders. Women (feminine style) are typically emotionally expressive, physically affectionate and expressive, self--disclosing, etc. Men (masculine style) tend to be assertive, instrumental. and competitive. She does discuss men who are more "feminine" and women who are more "masculine" when it comes to gender orientation and style.
3. Defining intimacy.
I appreciated Peterson's scholarly approach to the whole subject of intimacy: "While intimacy is central to friendships, it is, however, a difficult construct to define. Depending upon the nature of the relationship or the characteristics or personality of the persons involved, intimacy within a relationship can look very different from one relationship to another."
She notes that these friends knowing it was a deep platonic friendship gave them greater freedom to enjoy a high degree of physical intimacy between each other. That sounds right to me.
This is good news. A study like this could not have been conducted from the 1920s onward for most of the century for deep passion became sexualized and romanticized. This study gives a glimmer of hope that friendship love is making a comeback.
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