Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make—and Keep—Friends

by Marisa G. Franco

“For our life to feel significant, we crave someone to witness it, to verify its importance.

When Italian scholar Marsilio Ficino coined the term “platonic love” in the fifteenth century, the word reflected Plato’s vision of a love so powerful it transcended the physical. Platonic love was not romantic love undergoing subtraction. It was a purer form of love, one for someone’s soul, as Ficino writes, “For it does not desire this or that body, but desires the splendor of the divine light shining through bodies.” Platonic love was viewed as superior to romance.

When choosing friends, we are freer to prioritize the truest markers of intimacy, such as shared values, trust, admiration of each other’s character, or feelings of ease around each other.

“if people expect acceptance, they will behave warmly, which in turn will lead other people to accept them; if they expect rejection, they will behave coldly, which will lead to less acceptance.”

Without vulnerability, “there’s a ceiling you reach in friendship that you can’t exceed,” Dr. Jackson said. And while vulnerability may give people the power to hurt us more deeply, it also gives them the power to love us more deeply.

Authenticity is acting with intention in a way that balances others’ needs and ours.

What people with privilege may not realize—when they get confused that a friend from a disadvantaged group is triggered by a passing comment—is that prejudice feels appallingly cumulative. Each instance of it invokes the weight of every instance of prejudice experienced in the past.