A friend recently confided in me: the passion in his marriage had faded.

The spark—the quickened heartbeat, the charged glances, the romance—was gone. What remained was steady, companionable, and loyal.

But was that enough?

People told him it was natural. “It’s just become platonic love now,” they said, as if this were the final, inevitable phase of any long-term relationship.

That phrase stuck with me: Platonic love.

We say it often, usually with a kind of resigned comfort—as though what once was fire must eventually cool to something calmer, safer, and less demanding. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized: this isn’t what Plato meant at all.

In fact, I happen to be writing my doctoral thesis on Plato, and I spend most of my days reading, analyzing, and wrestling with the texts he left behind.

And I can tell you: what we often call “platonic love” is profoundly un-Platonic.

For Plato, love at its highest was not the absence of passion—but its transformation and consummation. The ideal kind of love is deeply erotic. Not in the purely physical sense, but in the sense of longing, awe, and elevation.

Real Platonic love doesn’t reject desire—it refines it.

In “Phaedrus,” one of Plato’s most lyrical dialogues, Socrates describes the moment a lover first gazes upon their beloved. That moment of amazement—the breath catching, the heart stirred—is not a distraction from higher love. It’s the beginning of it.

The gaze matters. The lover sees something beautiful and is momentarily transfixed, even overwhelmed. And when that gaze is returned, something powerful happens: recognition.

A spark that feels like both discovery and remembrance.

In the dialogue “Alcibiades,” Socrates tells the beautiful young man who bears the name of the dialogue that we see ourselves most clearly in the reflection of another’s eyes. There’s something hauntingly true about that. In those rare moments when someone truly sees us—and we truly see them—we don’t just feel loved. We feel known.

This is the seed of Platonic love. Not a neutered affection or sentimental memory, but a romance that begins in physical beauty and desire, and then leads the soul upward—to reflection, to growth, to something divine.

Plato, through Socrates, even says that when the lover gazes at the beloved, he may think he sees a god. That might sound like an exaggeration, or a poetic flourish. But in ancient Greek culture, extreme beauty was thought to hint at the divine. The lover isn’t just infatuated; he’s awestruck, afraid to reduce what he sees to mere flesh, for fear of missing the soul within.

Eventually, the lover realizes that bodily beauty—the curve of a smile, the sound of a laugh, the light in the eyes—is an image of something more enduring: the beauty of the soul. And that soul, in turn, reflects a still deeper beauty—the world of Forms, Plato’s name for ultimate, eternal truths.

You don’t have to believe in Plato’s metaphysics to feel the truth in this. When you’ve loved someone for years, decades even, there are still moments—unexpected, fleeting—when you look at them and see something that startles you. Not because they’re unfamiliar, but because you suddenly see them again. As if the world opened a window, and you caught a glimpse of something vast inside them.

That moment? That’s still a spark. Maybe not the one you had in your twenties. But it’s no less real. And perhaps it’s even more sacred.

So when we say “platonic love,” maybe we should say it differently. Not as a synonym for friendship. Not as what’s left when the fire burns out. But as a love that begins with the gaze and deepens through the soul—a love that still sees something godlike, even after all these years.

If you’ve ever caught that glimpse in the eyes of someone you’ve loved long enough to doubt it was still there—don’t look away. Hold that gaze.

Because for Plato, that’s where love really begins.

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