Wiktionary
n. An intensely emotional love relationship between two unrelated people, in which sexuality is unimportant and typically absent, but there is greater physical affection or poetic communication than is typical for friendship.
Wikipedia
A romantic friendship or passionate friendship is a very close but typically non- sexual relationship between friends, often involving a degree of physical closeness beyond that which is common in the contemporary Western societies. It may include for example holding hands, cuddling, hugging, kissing, giving massages, and sharing a bed, or co-sleeping, without sexual intercourse.
In historical scholarship, the term may be used to describe a very close relationship between people of the same sex during a period of history when homosexuality did not exist as a social category. In this regard, the term was coined in the later 20th century in order to retrospectively describe a type of relationship which until the mid 19th century had been considered unremarkable but since the second half of the 19th century had become more rare as physical intimacy between non-sexual partners came to be regarded with anxiety. Romantic friendship between women in Europe and North America became especially prevalent in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, with the simultaneous emergence of female education and a new rhetoric of sexual difference.
Usage examples of "romantic friendship".
It was not because Pierre was a married man, but because Natasha felt very strongly with him that moral barrier the absence of which she had experienced with Kuragin that it never entered her head that the relations between him and herself could lead to love on her part, still less on his, or even to the kind of tender, self-conscious, romantic friendship between a man and a woman of which she had known several instances.
His state of mind was rather the result of rougher undercurrents which had all the time been running beneath the surface of a romantic friendship.
And to one so young, knowing so little of men, it was easy to imagine that a sort of romantic friendship was also possible, had in fact already been established, and that all of this was understood between them.
The two were at one another's throat as often as they were caught up in their romantic friendship, and Karen had certainly never said or done anything proprietary.