Queerplatonic relationships

A queerplatonic relationship — QPR — is a committed partnership that does not fit the split between friendship and romance, and is not trying to. It carries the commitment, priority and daily entanglement usually reserved for a romantic partner, without being romantic.

The term came out of asexual and aromantic communities around 2010, and the queer in it is not primarily about sexual orientation. It is being used in the older sense of askew — the relationship sits at an angle to the available categories. People of any orientation form them.

There is no standard shape, which is the point: a QPR is defined by having been negotiated rather than assumed. What comes up most often:

• Being each other's primary person — the first call, the emergency contact, the default plan
• Shared housing, and frequently shared finances
• Long-horizon commitment, sometimes formalised through marriage, wills or powers of attorney
• Physical affection, on terms the two of them set rather than terms the category sets
• Co-parenting, in some cases

The partner in a QPR is sometimes called a zucchini, a deliberately silly community coinage that exists because English has no serious word for the role. The silliness is doing real work — it marks that no existing term fit.

From close friendship: by explicit commitment. Friendships are generally assumed to yield when a romantic relationship needs them to. A QPR is not — it holds the position a romantic partnership normally holds, and that is agreed rather than implied.

From a romantic relationship: by the absence of romance, which the people in it are usually clear about rather than uncertain about.

From [platonic life partnership](/base/platonic-relationships): mostly by which community the term came from. The arrangements overlap almost entirely; QPR carries the aromantic and asexual lineage, platonic life partner is the term more often used outside it.

The underlying critique is shared with the relationship escalator: the philosopher Elizabeth Brake's term amatonormativity names the assumption that an exclusive romantic partnership is the goal everyone should organise a life around. A QPR is a working counterexample rather than an argument.

Aromantic and asexual people most visibly, since the categories were built for them — but far from exclusively. People who want a life partner and not a romance, people whose closest relationship simply does not read as either category, and people already in romantic relationships who also have a queerplatonic one all form them.

The practical difficulties are the ones every off-escalator arrangement has. No legal recognition, so protections have to be assembled from wills, powers of attorney, cohabitation agreements and sometimes marriage used instrumentally. Constant explanation, to families, employers and medical staff who have one script and it is the wrong one. And no cultural template for ending one, which means a QPR breakup gets less acknowledgement than a divorce and can hurt considerably more than the acknowledgement suggests.