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

by Marisa G. Franco

Our discomfort with affection in friendships coincides with the rise of homophobia, as it is expressed today. Before the 1900s, one’s sexual behaviors didn’t comprise an aspect of one’s identity like they do today. Before 1868, there was no straight or gay, according to Hanne Blank, author of Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality. Because sexual orientation wasn’t an identity, people were harshly stigmatized for having sex with someone of their gender but not for being or even seeming gay. They were free to carve their initials into trees and cuddle and sleep beside friends without stigma, because none of this was sexual. Friends also wrote passionate love letters to each other, like the one in which a nineteenth-century woman told a friend, “The expectation once more to see your face again, makes me feel hot and feverish.” It wasn’t until prominent psychiatrists, such as Sigmund Freud and Richard von Krafft-Ebing, characterized same-sex love as a sexual disorder,[*] creating the concept of sexual identity in the process, that homophobia as we know it rose and affection in friendship declined.