Romantic vs Platonic Love in Loved One

The Blurred Boundary: Defining the Central Thematic Claim

Aisha Muharrar’s Loved One dismantles the traditional binary between romantic and platonic love, instead insisting that the most profound human connections resist simple classification. The novel argues that love—especially in the wake of loss—cannot be neatly filed into categories like “friend” or “lover.” Julia Hendricks and Gabe Wolfe‑Martel’s relationship is a testament to this blurring. They begin as friends, become briefly romantic, then settle back into a deep platonic intimacy that never fully renounces its romantic undertow. After Gabe’s sudden death, Julia is forced to confront not only grief but the illegibility of what they meant to each other. The thematic claim emerges: Love that evades labels can be the most authentic, yet it is also the most vulnerable to erasure, because it lacks the social scripts that ritualize loss. Julia’s struggle to publicly mourn a friend when her private memories were charged with romantic residue exposes the inadequacy of language and custom. Ultimately, the narrative suggests that healing requires owning the ambiguity—accepting that love is not a single note but a chord, sustained across time and untouched by death.

Tracing the Theme Across Three Key Plot Movements

The Eulogy and the Secret Hook‑Up: Love Made Unspeakable (Chapter One)

The novel opens at Gabe’s funeral, where Julia stands at the lectern to deliver a eulogy for “my dear friend Gabe.” From the outset, the tension between public platonic narrative and private romantic truth is unbearable. The text immediately undercuts the label “friend” by revealing that a month earlier they slept together, and that Gabe then went silent—leaving their relationship in a liminal space. As Julia admits, “the month before, we’d made a dumb mistake and slept together.” The choice of the word “mistake” echoes society’s policing of male‑female friendships; it suggests that crossing the line is an error to be fixed, not a possible evolution. Yet Julia also insists, “Gabe and I were actual friends,” preemptively countering the rom‑com trope that a male‑female friendship is simply unconsummated romance. This defensive posture highlights the cultural pressure to categorize. Later, she confesses to her therapist‑in‑training friend Will but asks him to keep it from Casey, underscoring how the secret isolates her into performing a grief she feels is fraudulent.

The eulogy itself forces Julia to compress her tangled history into safe, familial terms: “Gabe was the kind of friend who was more like family.” But even while speaking, she senses “a disconnect between the words I was saying and what I was feeling.” The disconnect isn’t only about the secret hook‑up; it’s about the fact that their entire twelve‑year bond—from a first kiss in Barcelona to a quasi‑familial constancy—could not be spoken. The funeral scene thus establishes the central problem: When love occupies an unlabeled middle ground, loss steals the chance to name it together. Julia’s silent rage at the burial—“she silently raged at Gabe for leaving their relationship unresolved”—crystallizes this violation.

The Barcelona Origin and the Medical ID Bracelet: A Promise That Confounded Categories (Chapters Three & Ten)

The Barcelona flashbacks in Chapters Three and subsequent chapters excavate how the romantic‑platonic blur first formed. Gabe and Julia’s summer in Spain is a greenhouse for intense multi‑dimensional intimacy. They make out “a lot,” share a twin bed, and build a deep, methodical physical connection that deliberately stops short of intercourse. Julia tells her cousin Ines they “had decided to be friends,” imposing a retroactive label on an experience that was too organic to be named. The narrator acknowledges this self‑deception: “I felt like we were in love. I’d always wanted to be in love. But we had never said I love you.” The bracelet Julia forges for Gabe’s situs inversus becomes the ultimate emblem of love that hovers between friendship and romance. She pours her savings and technical ambition into making a medical ID piece “way better than one from some random medical catalog,” something no one else “would ever think to do.” When she presents it, Gabe responds by saying he’d want to do such a grand gesture but “cop out because I was scared of seeming too intense.” The exchange is profoundly intimate—a mutual admission of fear and devotion—yet it is not declared as love. Instead, Gabe promises, “I’ll never take it off,” a vow that turns the bracelet into a portable, physical hybrid: a practical medical tool, a gift of intimate care, and a symbol of a bond the two never openly claimed as romantic.

Their subsequent breakup on Tibidabo shatters the illusion that such a bond can survive without naming. Gabe leaves for a band opportunity, and Julia’s heartbreak is rendered illegible by their “just friends” narrative. Later, as adults, when Gabe re‑examines the summer, he says, “I thought about you all the time,” and admits that the breakup was a failure of courage, not feeling—but by then the moment has slipped through his fingers. The missing bracelet in the present day (Chapter Three) becomes Julia’s fixation because it embodies the broken promise and the unresolved question: Was what they had romantic, platonic, or a third thing that died unnamed with Gabe?

The Memorial and the Tense Shift: Love Unbound by Definition (Chapter Thirty‑One)

The thematic resolution arrives during the yahrzeit memorial, a tribute night styled as Gabe’s last secret show. Julia finally speaks publicly, running through hypothetical conversations she might have had with Gabe at Hotel Frank. She admits she cannot choose one scenario over another—either they would have been together romantically or remained friends—because it would have taken both of them to decide. Then she arrives at the only certainty: “I would go to Hotel Frank and tell him that. And he would say he loved me. In that love, I felt certain.” The pivotal moment comes when she says aloud, “I loved Gabe,” then corrects herself: “I love Gabe.” The shift from past to present tense tears down the wall between “friend” and “lover,” between “grief” and “ongoing relationship.” Love is no longer a finite emotion tied to a label; it is a continuous force that persists beyond death and beyond definition. This public utterance finally integrates the romantic and the platonic into a single, unapologetic declaration.

Crucially, Elizabeth and baby Cosme—whose eyes are “Gabe’s”—are present, symbolizing the many forms love can take. The earlier “love triangle” tension between Julia and Elizabeth dissolves here into a shared understanding that Gabe’s love was never a zero‑sum game. By welcoming Elizabeth and her child, Julia enacts a broader acceptance: that loving Gabe fully means accepting all the relationships he held, and all the ways she herself loved him.

Complexity and Contradiction: When Labels Protect and Fail

Muharrar does not simply celebrate ambiguity. The novel also shows the pain of existing without labels. Julia’s grief is disenfranchised: she has no title to mourn as a girlfriend or a widow, so she must impersonate the “dear friend” who speaks of reliability, not of desire or loss. The secret hook‑up magnifies this erasure, making her feel fraudulent. Similarly, the bracelet’s disappearance torments her precisely because it was a concrete, physical marker of a love that had no name; without it, she fears even that evidence is gone. This tension reveals a hidden contradiction: labels can confine, but their absence deprives us of recognition and communal support. Julia’s journey thus isn’t toward declaring a label, but toward letting go of the need for one, while still reckoning with the cost of that choice.

The novel also challenges the typical arc of “friends to lovers” by insisting that even a return to friendship can be romantic. Gabe and Julia’s adult reconnection thrives on a chaste but deep platonic rhythm—movie nights, long phone calls, emotional support—yet the chemistry never truly evaporates, as the Joshua Tree hook‑up proves. This refusal to resolve the tension mirrors real human relationships more faithfully than most fiction.

Key Character and Symbol Connections

• Julia Hendricks: The protagonist, whose identity as a jeweler is tied to making meaning permanent. Her inability to categorize her love for Gabe makes her grief unentitled and drives her quest for the bracelet, a symbol she hopes will grant her the role she never claimed.
• Gabe Wolfe‑Martel: His situs inversus (reversed heart) becomes a metaphor for his emotional life—his love is real but oriented differently, defying norms. He too struggles with intensity, as when he backtracks after the bracelet moment, illustrating that men also suffer under the pressure to define relationships.
• Elizabeth Thompson: Initially a rival, she later shares the secret of Gabe’s “peculiar foot‑tapping kiss,” a private memory that binds the two women. Her arc shows that platonic solidarity between women can transcend romantic competition, reframing the love triangle as a shared legacy.
• Casey and Will: Their engagement offers a counterpoint. Their relationship is clearly romantic and headed toward marriage; their clarity throws Julia’s uncertainty into sharp relief, but also proves that clear labels can coexist with the messy love she embodies.
• The Medical ID Bracelet: A symbol of protection, care, and unuttered devotion. Julia made it to save Gabe’s life; it ends up as the missing piece that might make her loss legible. Its disappearance mirrors the vanishing of a mutual understanding between them.
• The Shower Water: In the evidence, Julia thinks of “a mouth gulping in water, a goldfish out of a bowl, a man on a shower floor,” linking water imagery to Gabe’s death and her own breathlessness. Water often symbolizes emotion and the blurring of boundaries—just as the shower floor becomes the site where romantic and tragic love collapse.
• The Desert (Joshua Tree): The landscape where their consummation finally happens. Its vast, undifferentiated space reflects the love that defies neat borders, and also the arid loneliness of grief when connection is lost.

Conclusion: Embracing the Unresolved Chord

Loved One argues that the truest love often lives in the hyphen between “romantic” and “platonic.” Julia’s resolve to say “I love Gabe” in the present tense is an act of reclamation—not of a title, but of the full, messy, unlabelable reality of what they shared. The novel does not provide the comfort of a retroactive label; instead, it offers the more challenging comfort of acceptance. Love is not diminished because it lacks a name; it is, in fact, larger than any name can contain.

Study Questions and Answers

1. How does the eulogy scene establish the central conflict between romantic and platonic love?
   Julia must publicly eulogize Gabe as a friend while concealing their recent sexual encounter and the romantic undercurrents of their relationship. This performance of platonic grief isolates her and highlights the insufficiency of available labels to express her loss.

2. In what ways does the medical ID bracelet function as a symbol of unstated love?
   The bracelet is a practical item that Julia pours extraordinary care, skill, and emotional investment into, going far beyond what a casual friend would do. Gabe’s promise to never take it off elevates it to an unspoken vow of permanent connection, yet neither labels it as romantic, leaving their bond in a liminal space.

3. Why is Julia’s correction from “I loved Gabe” to “I love Gabe” thematically significant?
   The shift from past to present tense dismantles the idea that love ends with death or definition. It asserts that her love for Gabe transcends the need for a romantic/platonic label, existing as an ongoing reality independent of his physical presence and their unresolved status.

4. How does Elizabeth’s role complicate the notion of a “love triangle” in the novel?
   Elizabeth and Julia initially seem positioned as rivals, but they ultimately bond over shared private memories of Gabe. The novel deconstructs the trope of the catty love triangle by showing that two women’s love for the same man can coexist and even become a source of mutual comfort, rather than competition.

5. What does Julia’s grief reveal about the social need for relationship labels?
   Without a title like “girlfriend” or “wife,” Julia’s mourning is disenfranchised—her pain lacks a recognized script, making her feel fraudulent and unsupported. This exposes how labels provide social legitimacy for grief, while their absence isolates those who love in non‑normative ways, compelling them to either perform a familiar role or suffer in silence.