Are We Friends or Lovers?

Sometimes the line between Platonic and Romantic isn't clear

There’s this moment — usually somewhere between splitting fries and sharing a secret — when I catch myself staring at someone I adore and think: Do I want to kiss you … or just talk to you until the world ends?

Attraction, for me, will never be a straight line. Desire is an abstract painting — messy, layered, full of colours that shouldn’t go together but somehow do. The boundary between platonic and romantic isn’t clean. It’s watercolour bleeding across the edges, a little too beautiful to want to contain. People like to believe that you always know when it’s romantic — that your body will tell you, your heart will shout it, your mind will fall in line. But sometimes, all three speak different languages. Sometimes, what feels like butterflies is just admiration in a cuter outfit.

I remember meeting someone once who made my stomach flutter every time she smiled. I’d replay our conversations in my head like they were scenes from a French film — intimate, delicate, perfectly lit. And then one night, after hours of laughing and wine, I realised I didn’t want to kiss her. I just wanted to be near her — to braid her hair, drink tea, and talk about life until we forgot the time. It wasn’t desire. It was devotion.

But then there are the connections that can’t be classified so neatly. The ones that hum like static, that make your pulse quicken when your hands brush. You tell yourself it’s friendship, but you start noticing how often you think about them, how your messages sound a little too much like flirting. You wonder if you’re imagining the tension — or if you’re both pretending not to feel it.

The truth is, the ingredients of friendship and romance are often the same — affection, admiration, care, excitement — just mixed in different measures. The difference isn’t in what you feel but how it moves through you. Friendship simmers. Romance sizzles. But sometimes, the heat sneaks up on you, and before you know it, the line you thought was clear has turned into smoke.

And maybe that’s okay. Love, in all its forms, isn’t meant to be organised into tidy drawers. Can we, as humans reliant on identity politics, be okay with love being a living thing that shifts depending on who we are and who we’re with? Sometimes it’s slow and steady; sometimes it’s chaotic and breathtaking. Sometimes it’s both.

What’s surprised me most is how often my feelings are a mirror. That the people I find magnetic aren’t always the ones I want to kiss — they’re the ones who make me want to be more. To grow, to glow, to step into a version of myself I didn’t know existed until I saw it reflected in their eyes.

So I’ve stopped trying to categorise every spark. I hold hands when it feels right. I say “I love you” without explaining what kind of love it is. I let affection be what it wants to be — tender, complicated, undefined. Because the moment I try to label it, I risk shrinking something vast into something small enough to fit on a form. The more I live, the more I think maybe the goal isn’t to define our feelings, but to experience them. To let connection exist without the pressure to name it. To love, openly and honestly, even when we don’t know what kind of love it is.

Illustration from Wikimedia Commons