Platonic love
Pausanias defines vulgar Eros as material attraction towards a person's beauty for the purposes of physical pleasure and reproduction, and divine Eros as starting from physical attraction but transcending gradually to love for supreme beauty, placed on a similar level to the divine.
Vulgar Eros and divine Eros were both considered to be connected, and part of the same continuous process of pursuing perfection of one's being,[6] with the purpose of mending one's human nature and eventually reaching a point of unity where there is no longer an aspiration or need to change.
[6] Virtue, according to Greek philosophy, is the concept of how closely reality and material form equates good, positive, or benevolent.
"[6] (187d, 17) - Eryximachus' "completion" of Pausanias' speech on ErosPlato's Symposium defines two extremes in the process of platonic love; the entirely carnal and the entirely ethereal.
According to Diotima in her discussion with Socrates, for anyone to achieve the final rung in the Ladder of Love, they would essentially transcend the body and rise to immortality—gaining direct access to Being.
[8] In the Middle Ages, new interest in the works of Plato, his philosophy and his view of love became more popular, spurred on by Georgios Gemistos Plethon during the Councils of Ferrara and Firenze in 1438–1439.
The play was derived from the concept in Plato's Symposium of a person's love for the idea of good, which he considered to lie at the root of all virtue and truth.
For a brief period, platonic love was a fashionable subject at the English royal court, especially in the circle around Queen Henrietta Maria, the wife of King Charles I. Platonic love was the theme of some of the courtly masques performed in the Caroline era, though the fashion for this soon waned under pressures of social and political change.
[11][better source needed] "Platonic love in its modern popular sense is an affectionate relationship into which the sexual element does not enter, especially in cases where one might easily assume otherwise.
"[12] "Platonic lovers function to underscore a supportive role where the friend sees [their] duty as the provision of advice, encouragement, and comfort to the other person ... and do not entail exclusivity.
She also notes that it can also be misread by observers as close friendship in circumstances where overtly romantic gestures are socially expected.
For Decker, the essence of queerplatonic attraction is its ambiguous position in relation to normative categories: she writes that QPR "is a platonic relationship, but it is 'queered' in some way—not friends, not romantic partners, but something else".
