Women's Intimate Relationships as Romantic Love

Toward a Historical-Sociological Study of Women's Friendship

Abstract

An intimate relationship between the same sex is often seen as homosexual love, or just as friendship. That tendency which uses “homosexuality or friendship” model is based on a simplistic dichotomy, while female intimacy has been thought as having more successive dimensions with respect to maternal affection or friendship itself. In modern society, where the separation between the public and the private should be discernable, intimacy may be put into the private sphere. Furthermore, it has been argued that the private sphere was formed by “romantic love ideology” which consists of the trinity of sex, love, and marriage. However, maternity and female intimate relationships were not always harmonized. This is typically realized when asking whether “plastic sexuality, ” which is free from reproduction and located at the center of romantic love, was practiced by women. In modern Japan, intimate relationships among students at girls' schools have been addressed using the viewpoint of a “morally correct” friendship or “deviant” homosexuality, but their practice of intimacy should be recognized as a form of romantic love. Such an intimacy was accepted as one of the steps toward sound growth, but on the contrary, it was classified as “deviant” after their leave from school, and also seen as incompatible with maternity. Such a viewpoint finally led to the stereotyped notion of the “old miss.”