Platonic love

The practice of Platonic love, of which he had formed ſo fine an idea in ſpeculation, appeared to him but a chimera in reality.

Ye ſanctified and holy, / Who methodiſtically prove / The force of true-⁠-⁠-Platonic love, / Indulge for once with Scholey.

One heart, but in two bodies join’d, / By ancient writers is defin’d, / A friend in truth to prove; / To me ſhe’s preſent when away, / My tender thoughts with Delia ſtay; / Is this Platonic love?

Homosexual appetites, tastes, and fantasies, one is reminded while listening to Elliot, appear to be every bit as various as heterosexual ones, with the range of homosex—running from an almost Platonic love to sadistic lust—being no less wide than that of heterosex.

I didn’t know I loved the earth / can someone who hasn’t worked the earth love it / I’ve never worked the earth / it must be my only Platonic love

Passion, providence, and imitation are conventionally the respective ruling forces of these three processes. Yet to take them at face value, as an innocent reading of the poem might advise, would be to betray Garcilaso’s own efforts, in this sonnet and elsewhere, to expose the arbitrariness of grandiose idealist concepts such as Platonic love and providential history.

Aino’s Platonic love for Luiga lasted at least ten years.

[H]e reads in Plato’s Charmides how Socrates steals a glance inside the toga of a beautiful young man and burns. Gooding scarcely comprehends how it can be so offhand. Is this the Platonic love he has heard of? Shouldn’t it rather be called Socratic?

In an age when the concept of Platonic love gains little credence, selectively chosen details of the relationship and quotations from letters can easily be arranged to suggest a conclusion.