Queerplatonic partners name the space between best friend and romantic couple
Some people build committed partnerships with the status and structure of a couple, yet without romantic love. In aromantic and asexual communities online these are called queerplatonic relationships, and, joking about how few words exist for them, partners sometimes call each other zucchinis. A crush of the same kind is a squish.
A queerplatonic relationship is a committed, intimate bond between significant others that is not romantic. What separates it from close friendship is an explicit commitment and a recognised partner status, while what separates it from romance is the absence of romantic feelings. The Asexual Visibility and Education Network calls such bonds non-romantic significant-other relationships. Partners may still share some behaviour usually associated with couples.
Two writers, s.e. smith and Kaz, invented the word in 2010, and through the 2010s it stayed mostly inside aromantic and asexual spaces; a university dictionary of new words noted in 2016 that it was used almost nowhere else. From 2021 general-interest websites began explaining it, and some scholars of art and literature now use it as a critical tool. Researchers suggest young people, Millennials and Generation Z, drive its spread, and several writers link it to polyamory and to relationship anarchy, where people tailor their commitments to what they want.
Descriptions differ in emphasis. The writer Julie Sondra Decker says such a bond may look just like romance from outside, but should not be called romantic if those involved say it is not; it is platonic, she argues, yet queered in some way. Others stress depth instead, describing it as a commitment stronger than ordinary friendship.
Commentators often read the idea as pushback against a ranking that puts romance above friendship. The sex therapist Stefani Goerlich traces echoes back to Boston marriages, the formalised friendships of wealthy women in late nineteenth-century New England, and suggests Ruth and Naomi in the Hebrew Bible might count as an early case. One critic has used the concept to reread a Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman story about such a partnership.
Source: Queerplatonic relationship
