336 - Queerplatonic and Alterous Relationships
Romantic vs. Platonic
“[Romantic love is] an emotional feeling of love for, or a strong attraction towards another person, and the courtship behaviors undertaken by an individual to express those overall feelings and resultant emotions.”
Wikipedia
“Romantic love is] an intensity and idealization of a love relationship, in which the other is imbued with extraordinary virtue, beauty, etc., so that the relationship overrides all other considerations, including material ones.”
Collins Dictionary
Alternatively, platonic love is:
“1) Love conceived by Plato as ascending from passion for the individual to contemplation of the universal and ideal or 2) a close relationship between two persons in which sexual desire is nonexistent or has been suppressed or sublimated.”
Merriam-Webster
“In common speech, platonic love means a supremely affectionate relationship between human beings in which sexual intercourse is neither desired nor practiced. In this sense, it most often refers to a heterosexual relationship. By extension, it may be used to cover that stage of chivalrous or courtly love in which sexual intercourse is indefinitely postponed.
From the Renaissance to the end of the 19th century, the term platonic love was also used as an occasional euphemism for homosexual love, in view of the comparatively tolerant attitude to such love discernible in Plato as well as in other Greek authors.”
Brittanica.com
Queerplatonic relationships
The term queerplatonic relationship (QPR) was coined in 2010 and arose from a need to fill the language gap for the desire for an aromantic relationship that was not strictly defined to one of two categories: romantic or platonic.
Since this term was coined by and for queer people and relationships, the alternative term for using to describe a cisgender and heterosexual relationship not defined by the two categories is alterous relationship.
Both QPR and alterous relationships are:
Describing non-romantic relationships.
Both coined by the queer community.
Both able to contain sexual activity.
Both very connected to the concept of relationship anarchy.
Both can describe either a long-term partnership or something more short-term.
Some people use the terms interchangeably and others do not. Alterous relationship can be and is used for anybody and anyone, while queerplatonic is reserved for those who identify as queer.
Both of these terms are important to know in order to more fully understand the range of important relationships that people can have besides simply romantic or platonic ones. It also goes against the stigma that romantic relationships are “more important” or “better” in some way that non-romantic ones.
Image credit to Disabled And Here.
Transcript
This document may contain small transcription errors. If you find one please let us know at info@multiamory.com and we will fix it ASAP.
Jase: On this episode of the Multiamory Podcast, we are not talking about romantic relationships, and we're not talking about platonic relationships, or maybe we're talking about both of them. Today we are talking about alterous relationships and queerplatonic relationships. Both of these terms are relatively new, showing up just within the past decade or so, but they have been spreading because they fill an important gap in our about attraction and relationships. Have we used these terms before? Have you heard them before? What are your relationship to these relationship terms?
Dedeker: Until this episode, I've never heard the term alterous relationships.
Emily: Me neither.
Dedeker: Definitely platonic relationships for sure, no problem, super comfortable, used that word all the time. Only semi-joking, have used the word, I'm familiar with the word. Do I answer your question, yes?
Jase: Yes.
Emily: But alterous yes, I'd never heard before. I didn't know that that was the thing. I was like what are we talking about here?
Jase: I had heard it, but I didn't really know what it was about or what it meant and I was like, "I don't know if this applies to me." In learning about it, I'm actually have come to realize this is a really cool thing and a really useful term, and a useful concept because it does really fill a gap that's missing in terms of our language and how we talk about love, and attraction and relationships. If we're going to talk about some terms that are specifically not romantic or platonic, we're actually going to start by talking about what is romantic and platonic even mean.
Dedeker: That simple task.
Emily: We're going to try our best.
Dedeker: Create antimatter and also define romantic love.
Jase: We'll do the easy one first and then the harder one second.
Emily: Exactly. All right. Okay, so romantic love the definition from Wikipedia is an emotional feeling of love for or a strong attraction towards another person and the courtship behaviors undertaken by an individual to express those overall feelings and resultant emotions that was convoluted nice try, nice try.
Jase: I like how clinical Wikipedia is.
Emily: Let's pull this one. This is from Collins dictionary, an intensity and idealization of a love relationship in which the other is imbued with extraordinary virtue, beauty, et cetera so that the relationship overrides all other considerations including material ones. Wow, what an extreme image that not totally inaccurate of how we conceptualize romantic relationships in our culture, but wow.
Jase: The third definition we pulled here was from a 2021 biological look at romantic love by Bold and Kushnik and it said, "Romantic love is a motivational state typically associated with a desire for long term mating with a particular individual."
Emily: I feel like none of these definitions are exactly it really, so they also had a hard time and maybe they found antimatter to be easier.
Jase: That's what I wanted us to discuss for a moment here, is this is just three definitions and there are lots out there, but all of them have this really hard time or can seem so different from each other, like these three are and yet you always read them and go, "I don't know if that's quite it." Is that the problem? Is it that the definition's wrong, or is it that we maybe use romance to describe all sorts of different things at different times and it doesn't even have a consistent definition.
Dedeker: To dive into the history of the word itself for romance or romantic, it comes from French which morphed its way into old English. It originally referred to verse poems which were basically adventurous stories that were told in verse and there's the modern French word roman which means novel also comes from the same root word. Originally they were adventure stories told in verse, but in the 17th century the story started to include love stories and so the word became associated with those emotions, qualities, and actions.
Jase: Specifically love stories of the like chivalric nights and that whole world that involves a lot of possessiveness or even obsessiveness with this person that you're just so taken with that you'll sacrifice everything for them. That type of losing one's self, I guess in the romance was characteristic of that chivalric love story that romance originally was describing because it was about those stories.
While romance first was describing the stories, then it described the actions which is the courtship and that possessiveness and obsessiveness. I thought this was interesting because if we go back to that definition that we looked at before, the one that Dedeker read from Collins dictionary that talks about the other person being imbued with extraordinary virtue or beauty so that the relationship overrides all other considerations including material ones, like--
Emily: It's so weird.
Jase: I could see that fitting with this original concept of where romance came from and then like the Wikipedia definition talking about, it describes these strong feelings of attraction to someone, but also describes the courtship behaviors undertaken to express those feelings and the emotions one has because of those feelings. It's like yes, that does seem connected to this idea that it's about like these stories of these adventures and these nights that have love involved and what would be going on there actually fits with that.
Dedeker: I also heard once upon a time that another marker of this chivalric romance story was that the object of affection was somebody who may have already been married and someone that you couldn't even have sex with or hoped to actually be with. That was something that made it even more chivalrous and romantic that it's like you still felt so intensely for them despite knowing that you wouldn't be able to have sex with them or marry them or whatever, but you still went out of your way and stopped at nothing to like profess your love or sacrifice things for them.
Jase: Interesting. What you're saying is that your will chooses me, but your heart chooses him.
Dedeker: Something like that, I was thinking maybe I'll do anything for love in parentheses, but not that.
Jase: But I won't do that, okay.
Emily: I think like the real definition of love is going to be specific to each person, and it'll end up in like a beat poetry type of sense. It'll be like trust, communication, excitement, happiness, like something like that and that's it.
Dedeker: Also I do just have to give a call out to Carrie Jenkins who we had on the show many many years ago and her book, What Love Is: And What It Could Be, highly recommend people go check that out because that's also looking at the history of our notions of romantic love, looking at it through a philosopher's lens.
Jase: I think the other thing to come back to with this is that we're not talking about what is love. Don't hurt me, what we're talking about is what's romantic love specifically. When we talk about a romantic relationship or romance what are we even talking about?
Emily: I do wonder if romantic love devolves or not devolves, but evolves rather into something else like committed love or romantic love to me sometimes I associate that with more
of the NRE or courtship stage of a relationship, and then it becomes something else as time goes on, potentially.
Jase: That's interesting. There's definitely people who study forms of love, who like, that's the specific thing that they study is the evolution or the progress through different sorts of love, or maybe the distinctions between different types. I think the reason why romance and romantic love is worth spending some time talking about is because so often we use it as-- We can talk about all these different forms of love and different types of attraction, but we define relationships into one of two categories that are either romantic or they're platonic.
When you really look at the definitions and how they're used, and if you ask people for their definition of it, you're going to get a bunch of different definitions that are like neither of those are large enough to be, these are the only two categories. Yet that is still how we categorize relationships. I don't think that's in itself a bad thing. I think it's useful to have a way to distinguish them, but I think it's worth getting some clarity on what we mean by these distinctions, you know, What is romantic?
One of the other things to note about romantic love is that I came across things from several anthropologists who over the years study cultures that were not completely taken over by European culture, like so many have been and that they stated that in a lot of those cultures, they lack the same sense of romance as we know it, that we take it for granted, it's either romantic or it's platonic, but that their romance might not include the same feelings of monogamy and jealousy and exclusiveness and possessiveness and those things that we associate with romance largely because of it growing out of this Chivalric way of thinking. I thought that was pretty interesting too.
Emily: That's fascinating. Wow. I'm like, "I want to know more about those other cultures and what we can take from them in our own view of love over here in the west." All righty, let's talk now about platonic love. We're going to throw some more definitions at you. The first one is from Miriam Webster dictionary. It is love conceived by Plato, as ascending from passion, for the individual to contemplation of the universal and ideal. What?
Dedeker: What?
Jase: As love that ascends from passion for an individual to contemplation of the universal and the ideal.
Dedeker: I see. It's like your gateway to the doors being blown off your reality and just having a total stoner whoa moment about
Emily: Platonic. Oh, really? Oh, because it's like a Plato thing as opposed to like the word platonic, is that what it's getting at?
Jase: That's where the word comes from.
Dedeker: That's the word comes from.
Emily: Yes Plato, platonic. Got it. Plato's like rocking your freaking world is what you're saying.
Jase: Right. You're transcending passion for one person to just like contemplation of the universe and truth and things like that.
Dedeker: That echoes some sentiments I've heard in some more like New Agey Hippie Dippy spaces around romantic love and also around specifically non-monogamous love as well. The idea that this love is the gateway or the pathway that opens us up to this deeper love of the entire universe or of all beings that it helps us tap into that in some way.
Emily: Sounds like you're on MDMA.
Dedeker: I think that's the shortcut for a lot of people but sure.
Emily: Got it. Super far out. Very cool. The second definition from Miriam Webster is a close relationship between two persons in which sexual desire is nonexistent or has been suppressed or sublimated. That's interesting.
Jase: Dedeker, you look like, you were going to say something.
Dedeker: It's just interesting that they got those flavors in there of suppressed or sublimated as well.
Emily: I know. Yes. Because that almost makes it sound like the people want to, but we're not going to.
Dedeker: We want to, but this is going to be firmly platonic.
Jase: Exactly. I think that is a really interesting distinction as I was learning more about the history and usage and definitions was that that is part of what platonic means. Actually, in a lot of the usage, it was used specifically to describe relationships between heterosexual opposite-sex people who by all accounts should want to do it, but either don't have that desire, or very often are intentionally suppressing that. Which brings us back to what you were talking about Dedeker with the chivalric love of the kind of, "I feel this, but I can't do that," so I'm suppressing it or maybe sublimating it into some other thing, like loyalty to Guinevere or jousting or something like that.
Dedeker: That’s where I’m putting all my pent-up sexual frustration.
Jase: It makes sense.
Emily: Exactly I'm saying, we all know how that turned out. She ended up kissing him and yikes, that didn't end up well. Not that, that has to happen for everyone. They could have remained friends and that could have been it.
Dedeker: I have to clarify. That's how I went down in the 1995 film First Knight, starring, Richard Gere, Sean Connery, and Julia Ormond. That was their telling of the story.
Emily: Not that, that actually happened, but all right, let's talk about this real quick. Plato never used the term Platonic love or talked about it as such, rather the term is grown out of this idea that the highest form of love is a love of divinity and for the conceptual ideas of the universe, rather than just this interpersonal sexual love.
That's interesting because I do think, and I don't necessarily want to conflate it with religion, but when I hear people talking about religion or a higher being, they're like that comes first, like above even my love of my spouse or my kids, for example. I don't know if that has anything to do with it, but it's fascinating.
Dedeker: I mean, it feels connected to me in a lot of cultures and schools of thought, there's still this very sticky, persistent idea of, we put things connected to the body and the needs of the body at the bottom of the ladder. Then we put things connected to the mind or a sense of spirituality, or a sense of connection to the universe at the top of the ladder.
That shows up everywhere from Christianity to things even like the chakras. It's like your root chakra is in your pelvis, right in your crotch there. That's the lowest one versus your crown Chakra, which is like your super spiritual. That's your highest one is, and so this is a theme that shows up a lot.
Emily: If you're doing a downward-dog, it becomes the highest one, your Root Chakra.
Dedeker: Oh, true.
Jase: That's good.
Emily: Or if you're in an inversion.
Dedeker: There's a lot of positions where your root Chakra becomes the highest one. If you know what I mean?
Emily: Quite, indeed. Plato did describe the levels of love as a latter, just like you were talking about with the sexual lust at the bottom, and then as you move up, you stop paying attention to the physical form at all. Then you just like move towards love of divinity and being one with the universe, basically. How beautiful. I don't know. Again, it sounds like he was on a lot of drugs. Good for him, have some fun, but fascinating. I don't know. I feel like I'm a little more grounded on my interpersonal relationships rather than my oneness with the universe.
Jase: I do think it's interesting though, that if we took this term from Plato talking about love, it seems like the way we use it is completely not referring to that at all. It is weird how this one, even more so than the other romance or the other love, the romantic love we talked about is even farther from where it originally came out of at least in how we use it today.
Emily: That's true.
Dedeker: Now here's an interesting definition of platonic love from Brittanica the quote "In common speech. Platonic love means a supremely affectionate relationship between human beings in which sexual intercourse is neither desired nor practiced. In this sense, it most often refers to a heterosexual relationship." Like Jase was saying. "By extension, it may be used to cover that stage of Chivalrist or courtly love in which sexual intercourse is indefinitely postponed. From the Renaissance to the end of the 19th century, the term platonic love was also used as an occasional euphemism for homosexual love in view of the comparatively tolerant attitude to such love discernible in Plato, as well as in other Greek authors."
Emily: Fascinating.
Jase: The whole thing about finding my other half or whatever, that idea that it comes from this story from Plato's symposium, I think was the one that, that came from the idea that humans were originally these beings that shared one body and had two sets of legs and two arms and two faces looking opposite directions. That at some point we were
split apart.
We're on this eternal quest to find our other half. In that story he specifically says, "There were three types of these beings. There were the ones that were two males, male-female, and two females. That idea of maybe platonic love also referring to how they were much more accepting of that than people were in the 19th century.
Dedeker: Oh, it's like that Hedwig song.
Emily: Which one?
Dedeker: The origin of love is basically God exactly.
Jase: I mean that's telling the same story. Yes, exactly.
Emily: Interesting. Again the sexual intercourse thing is the one that differentiates it, I guess that makes sense. It leaves out people who are asexual, for example, a variety of other things. I don't know. I wonder if that's the only thing that creates the differentiation there.
Jase: That's the weird, interesting part when I was trying to get to the bottom of this, where I was like, "Okay." Generally speaking, when we think of romantic relationship or like a romance novel or a romance book, it's that you have two people who want to have sex with each other. Also, feel affectionate toward each other and probably want to keep having sex with each other for a long time.
Those are the defining traits we think of for that and maybe possessiveness too, or monogamy or something. When we think platonic, we think close relationship, but no sex, whether that's because you don't want it or you just can't do it, but either way that's platonic. Then it is this weird thing of like, if we're trying to imagine that these are defining traits of love and then you say, "Okay, well what if you took sex out entirely? Are they still different from each other?"
I was hoping to get to the bottom of what that might be and it all falls apart. It does seem like that's the only difference. I don't think it really is and how we talk about it. There's other romantic gestures and things like, holding hands or kissing or whatever.
Emily: Some friends do that though.
Jase: Some friends do that and some cultures do that more than others. It's just weird to me that we have these two categories that we talk about as if like these are the two categories and yet even they don't hold up too much scrutiny you know?
Dedeker: Yes. I did an interview recently on Australian radio about, it was a very like polyamory 101 style interview. All the typical stuff, you get to the point of answering those same questions over and over. I feel like I could do it in my sleep at this point, but I mean that same argument where you're trying to point out to people like, "Hey, you manage having multiple close friends, you manage having multiple close family members, you manage having multiple children." It's all the same skills really being pulled on. One of the host was like, "Oh," I'm not going to do a terrible Australian accent as much as
Dedeker: It’s just--It's just going to be bad. Oh no, I can't. No, I'm not even going to do it. Okay. Only behind closed doors for that one. One of the hosts was asking, "Oh, but the intimacy, there's intimacy that makes that different." I did try to push him on that of like, "Okay by intimacy, do you just mean sex? Do you just mean that it's sex is the only thing that makes your relationship with your wife at all, any different from your relationship with your best friend?"
He is like, "Oh, well, no, no, no, not just sex," but also couldn't quite put into words what it actually was. It is that weird thing we're on the one hand, I think again, we're trained to think of this binary of sexual relationship, nonsexual relationship. We also know that just because sex is happening does not mean that there's romance happening or love happening or actual partnership happening. It's like, a very incomplete discussion on these things.
Emily: I think it's again in our society and Western culture are in society here in America, especially we place so much, I guess, on the sexual romantic relationship and the possibility of marriage and all of that, because they're the people that get all the tax breaks. It is seen as the highest form of what human beings can accomplish in a unit, I guess, to a lot of people. This is the pinnacle, this is the thing that we're all striving for. That's challenging I think at times. It discounts the other types of relationships that we can have in our lives.
Jase: Something will get into more in the second half of this episode too, is how it also the way we talk about them sets up this hierarchy where platonic relationships are cool and all. The ultimate one's romance, which is why we say things like, "Oh, well this is less than romance, but more than platonic," or something like that of we kind of unconsciously setting up this hierarchy of romantic ones, basically the relationships where you fuck each other are somehow more important, or they're higher or better or more desirable or something like that.
It's just interesting how baked into all of our language and all of our culture that is. We're going to talk about some terms that are challenging that right after we take a quick break to talk about some of our sponsors for this show. If you could take a moment to check them out, it helps us to keep this show going and keep it coming to all of y'all out there for free.
Dedeker: Welcome back. We are going to dive right into talking about the term queerplatonic. This is all new language that we're talking about here, literally coined in the last two decades or less, I would say. Queer platonic relationship or sometimes shortened to QPR, that was first coined on specifically December 24th, 2010. It showed up in an online thread called Kaz’s Scribblings and clearly, it filled a need that was there because the term caught on and spread throughout the queer community.
Emily: Like wildfire. All right. It came out of the need for a term to describe the desire for an aromantic relationship that was not strictly defined into one of the two categories that we were just talking about romantic or platonic. Being part of the queer community and having queer in the name is because part of what defines a queerplatonic relationship is that it doesn't necessarily abide by traditional heteronormative rules. It can bend them. It can exist outside of what is "normally accepted" in platonic relationships.
Jase: I think that's the key there. I've struggled with this term in the past when I've heard it, where I'm just sort of like, "I can't quite parse it." I'm like, "Queer platonic. What does it mean?" I think that makes sense when you get more into queer meaning specifically that it's not fitting into the conventions. It's platonic, but it's queer so it's outside of that. It's different than that. It can have different things than that. I guess is how it makes sense in my head at least of like why this term is the term that's been used for it.
There are other terms that have been used over the years. They all tend to share similar letters, but other variations are quasi platonic, quirky, platonic, or just Q platonic with a capital Q. It does tend to though involve deep, long-lasting relationships. That's kind of a core relationship or a very serious relationship. Not always that that tends to be what goes along with queerplatonic.
The thing about it is being, meaning it's outside of categorization in some ways because it doesn't need to abide by the rules of either being romantic or being platonic. There's a lot of room inside of that category so there could be sex involved. There could be romantic gestures like holding hands or kissing, but generally speaking, those are not as much defining parts of the relationship as they would be in say a romantic relationship or one that people would define as romantic.
I thought that was interesting because that ties in with this relationship anarchy idea that we've talked about before on the show. It's been a little while since we've talked about relationship anarchy too much, but basically, this idea that in society it tends to be okay, we're dating, we're in a romantic relationship and so therefore we've adopted this whole set of expectations of here's the things that I expect that we will do and that everyone else will expect that we do because we're in a relationship we call a romantic one. Like have sex, kiss each other, potentially want to live together. Lots of things like that that just come prepackaged, it's like a prix fixe menu at the restaurant. You can maybe customize it a little bit like which entree do you want, or which dessert, but it's still going to follow pretty much the same shape. On the other hand, if you're platonic and you say,
"We have a platonic relationship." There's similarly a list of kind of unspoken expectations of, this is what will be in that. Then also, this is what will not be in it. Mostly sex. Right? That will not be in it. This idea--
Emily: I'll do anything for a platonic friendship, but not that.
Jase: Yes.
Dedeker: But not that.
Jase: I want you that because it's out of balance. That's not in the contract. Yes, so in a queerplatonic relationship, you might decide to raise kids together or buy a house together or plan your lives together, things that normally we think of only happening in a romantic relationship, those could still happen in a queerplatonic relationship.
Emily: Yes, essentially, this term is kind of outside of the boxes that platonic and romantic relationships sort of are set in what we would describe them as being and maybe just off the top of our head when we think of platonic versus romantic, those boxes are kind of set up there. They're pre-packaged like Jase was saying, but yes, this queerplatonic identity, or what this kind of relationship is, it's ultimately for the people involved to kind of decide like, "Hey, we're going to be the ones setting the terms and deciding what's right for us in terms of what this relationship is going to look like."
It does, again, remind me of Gary Jenkins's book.
Yes, just that decision-making about what love is and what it can be, what this type of relationship is, and what it can be. It doesn't necessarily need to adhere to a particular model of how the relationship should look, which is pretty cool. Just a side note, it's important to understand that this term was created by and for the queer community.
It can feel appropriative or inappropriate for straight cis people to use it to describe their relationships. However, we're about to talk about another term. Our next term is going to maybe be for you. If this feels similar to how you would describe a relationship in your life that you do happen to be cis or straight, and or straight.
Dedeker: That leads us to our next term, which is all alterous attraction. This is the definition pulled straight from the LGBTA Wiki. "Alterous attraction is a form of emotional attraction. It describes a feeling that is not necessarily platonic but also is not romantic in nature. For some, it may be in between romantic and platonic attraction. For others, it may be completely separate from the romantic platonic distinction." This term alterous attraction was introduced around 2015, but there isn't really a clear original source. Usually, whenever you speak that into the universe, inevitably, there's someone who comes to the surface being like, "I made that."
Jase: Me.
Dedeker: Me. It was me.
Emily: They're usually angry about it.
Dedeker: It was me all along. It's me. Of course, while this term mostly describes the same concept, as queerplatonic relationships, it's okay for anyone to use to describe themselves or others. It's not specifically tied to the relationship, or to the participants being queer, although it did also come out of that community, just like the term queerplatonic relationships did.
Jase: Yes, it describes that same thing, right? If that pull toward emotional closeness, or intense feelings for another person, that don't feel strictly platonic, but they're also not romantic, which generally, this tends to go along with the asexual, romantic, spectrum of things where it's kind of like, well-- usually, it's because, "Well, I don't want to have sex with this person." Maybe that's just not a significant part.
It doesn't have to just be that, but that tends to be where both of these terms come in is relationships where sex is not kind of the driving factor in that relationship, as it often is with something we would think of as just a normal romantic relationship. Now, even in trying to describe it, it's kind of hard to avoid saying things like, "Well, it's like a relationship that's more than platonic, but not quite romantic."
Almost setting it up as if it's between and that platonic is less than, and romantic is more than. It's hard to avoid that temptation, but there has been a push to really, intentionally move away from descriptions like that, because that implies this hierarchy, where romance is still somehow the best, or the most. That platonic is somehow weaker than that, and that this is sort of medium strength.
Emily: I appreciate that it's a different word entirely from romantic or platonic. That is, yes, it takes the ideas of what those two relationships are kind of out of the picture, which is cool.
Jase: Yes. Now, something I'll caution is that your autocorrect may try to change it into adulterous relationship.
Dedeker: Oh, no. No, no.
Jase: Be aware your autocorrect may have a hard time with it.
Emily: That's funny. Amazing.
Jase: Yes. I looked and looked and looked and I could not find an origin of the word alterous. I think that it is entirely 100%, this is the meaning. This is where it came from. I don't know if it comes from alt as in alternative perhaps. I'm not sure, but when you try to look up, like definition or origin, all of it is just queer blogs and sites talking about alterous attraction and altreous relationships so I thought that was interesting.
If anyone out there is a linguist, and you actually do know something more about the roots of this, hit me up, let me know, because I've been really curious about this while I was researching this episode. Anyway, yes, to go back to this idea of moving away from talking about it being more than platonic or less than romantic.
That's that many people, including us, prefer to think of it as being just something different, that it's a different type of relationship, rather than being less than or more than, and, as we got into earlier, even the terms romantic and platonic, may carry some connotations that you don't even intend to put into those when you're describing them.
Just kind of I don't know, it points out some weaknesses in our language, for sure. Going along with that is that the aromantic community has worked very hard to combat the stigma of platonic meaning just friends in that kind of negative or less than, it's just that, like wish it could be more, but it's just this, as in that's lacking somehow.
Really trying to get away from that way of thinking about it. That's why I like having these other words, to use to just sort of point out the fact that there's a lot more variation here than our normal ways of talking. We struggle with that on this show, I think. I often find myself trying to sort of describe how something could apply in romantic relationship and also in platonic relationships. In the back of my head, I'm always going, but what am I really trying to say? Do I need to clarify that?
Dedeker: Yes, there's similar.
Jase: If I just say relationships, people assume romantic relationships. It gets into this weird thing of how do I communicate in a way that's as accurate as possible, but also understandable to people, which is ultimately the purpose of language? Right?
Emily: Yes.
Dedeker: Yes. I appreciate having these terms because I mean, I also struggle in my own personal life. Over the course of my own personal history of having such a wide variety of relationships, a lot of which fall into this space. Where, often for me, it's been like, "Well, what counts as having a partner at a certain point? How many partners do I have? Does this person count even though I like almost never see them and we stopped having sex years ago, but there's still a lot of love there?" I don't know. I do think that clearly, there's very much a need for a lot of people to be able to attach some kind of word or label to this.
Emily: Yes, absolutely. Well, let's talk about the comparisons and the contrasting elements of both of these terms. Alterous love, and queerplatonic love, or queerplatonic relationships. Both of these terms describe nonromantic relationships. They were both coined by the queer community. Both terms can be used for people having a sexual relationship, but not necessarily. Some people use them interchangeably, but others think that they're different. I don't really know they sound pretty similar to me but maybe they're different.
Jase: This is a hot, hot topic of debate on forums sometimes
Dedeker: I honestly-- within this community, anyone who's outside the mainstream, if it comes to debating a label, that's--
Jase: We love it. We're all over it.
Dedeker: It's low-hanging fruit.
Emily: Yes, indeed. Also alterous as we said before, it can be used by and for anyone, but queerplatonic should generally be reserved for people who identify as queer and whose relationships are queer.
Dedeker: Some people tend to associate the term queerplatonic relationship with being a very core or long-term partnership that is nonromantic. While alterous attraction tends to include more casual forms of attraction, of course, as you'll see from all the internet debates, that's not always true. Just like romantic and sexual and platonic relationships can have a wide range of enmeshment and commitment, so can queerplatonic relationships and alterous ones as well. Both of these concepts are
very much connected to a lot of the concepts that are attached to relationship anarchy where the terms of our relationship are decided by the people involved based on the specifics of what those people need and their connection, rather than taking on a whole set of expectations and limitations by default like we do when we fall into these default categories of like, "Oh, we're going to call this a romantic relationship, or we're going to call this a platonic relationship.
Jase: I really enjoyed both exploring platonic relationship, and alterous relationships as terms but also just getting a little deeper into romantic and platonic as their own labels with their own histories and baggage and all that stuff. They're just like us. They have histories and baggage.
Emily: Indeed. Most things do.
Jase: I think both these terms are really important to know because at the very least they help illustrate the range of important relationships that we can have with people and how different these can be. I really like that they go against this stigma and stereotype that we're somehow less valuable or less deserving of love or less mature if we don't have a romantic relationship.
I really liked that this is just saying like, "Hey, what if we stopped even thinking about it in that binary way," and tried as a step toward moving away from that which we've talked about many times on this show, these incorrect assumptions about how people who are not in a romantic or sexual relationship actually feel or actually identify or their success or their responsibility or all those things that we've just got so much baggage that we put on that that's not based in anything true. It's really sad and unfortunate. I like that this is at least a step outside of that.
Emily: Absolutely. We are going to leave you with a quote from Sherronda J. Brown from wearyourvoicemag.com. I really like this quote. "When we don't recognize the true value, efficacy, and gravity of non-romantic relationships like those in our real lives, it leaves too many people forcing themselves into romantic entanglements that were never meant to be.
A trap that I fell into before understanding and accepting my Ace-spec identity, affirming that I have always had the capacity to experience love in abundance and invalid ways that come naturally and feel right to me. To be able to challenge the narrative that I would be internally empty, unwanted, and without purpose living a life unencumbered by romance was necessary for me to find a better way of loving myself." It's really beautiful.
Jase: I love it. I found that quote to be really moving because even though I don't identify as being aromantic or asexual, that concept of how often I've felt strongly about a person and either tried to make that into a romantic relationship when really that wasn't the right fit for us or limited or restricted myself from something because it's like, "Oh, it's platonic," so it can't be that serious and just to be free from that boy, if I could go back in time, be a nice thing.
Emily: If I could turn the hands of time.
Dedeker: If you could find a way Jase.
Emily: Cher.
Jase: There's been a lot of musical references in this episode into that.
Emily: Anything like love-related, that makes a lot of sense. That's what most songs are about.
Jase: All right. For our bonus, for this episode, we're going to be talking a little bit about platonic marriages, a trend that perhaps is growing or perhaps has always been here and we're just now discovering it. For our weekly question this week, we want to know, have you ever held yourself back from a relationship just because it was platonic or invested yourself less in a relationship simply because it was platonic? We would love to hear from you.