Romantic friendship

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A romantic friendship (also passionate friendship or affectionate friendship) is a very close but typically non-sexual relationship between friends, often involving a degree of physical closeness beyond that which is common in contemporary Western societies. It may include, for example, holding hands, cuddling, hugging, kissing, giving massages, or sharing a bed, without sexual intercourse or other sexual expression. The term is used in historical scholarship to describe emotionally intimate same-sex relationships that occurred before the establishment of homosexuality as a sexual identity. It was coined in the later 20th century to retrospectively define a type of relationship which, until the mid-19th century, had been considered unremarkable, but had become rarer as physical intimacy between non-sexual partners became increasingly taboo. Romantic friendship between women in Europe and North America became especially prevalent in the late 18th and early 19th centuries with the simultaneous...

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