vikingboybilly asks:

Why are non-sexual relationships named after Plato?

It comes from a bit in Plato’s Symposium where he has Socrates talk about there being two different kinds of love, one that stems from admiration of the body and leads the lover to loads and loads of awesome sex, and one that stems from admiration of the mind and leads the lover to self-improvement and contemplation of the divine (and of course because Plato is a philosopher he thinks the second kind is obviously superior).  It’s actually sort of a misnomer, though, because the way Plato describes the second kind of love, it’s not sexual, but it kind of is romantic, and really a lot more specific than what we tend to mean when we talk about “Platonic love” in modern English.

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