In a "For Better or for Worse" comic today there was a discussion about the meaning of "platonic". One sister argued it means "purely spiritural, devoid of sensual feeling." The other view, and probably more like mine, was that it means "just friends, without an intimate relationship or love."

When I look it up, I love this definition: "Transcending physical desire and tending toward the purely spiritual or ideal: platonic love." One definition says that it has come to mean a relationship between the same sex, while another says "a pure, spiritual affection, subsisting between persons of opposite sex, unmixed with carnal desires, and regarding the mind only and its excellences."

How do you use it?

How do you use it?
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Ah, there's the rub! And when you start rubbing, it's no longer Platonic! Yet I suppose that if one were to argue that an ideal of love exists outside any functionality, then sexual love could itself be Platonic. Consider the idea in The Symposium that humans were once hermathrodites, thus complete in themselves. Was that state not an ideal, thus Platonic state?

I've always considered it to mean any non-lusting relationship.

I thought this quote from the online AHD was interesting, and I think Samuel Richardson might have something there. Don't most relationships begin with a "platonic" love?

"In our own century Platonic has been used of relationships between members of the same sex. Though the concept is an elevated one, the term has perhaps more often been applied in ways that led Samuel Richardson to have one of his characters in Pamela say, 'I am convinced, and always was, that Platonic love is Platonic nonsense.'"