"Platonic love" is limerence?

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Plato's idea of "platonic love" from The Symposium was a complicated idea, involving ascending mental states. It's a modern thing (a semantic drift) that the word "platonic" came to mean "friendship" or "nonsexual" love.

Plato's writing is often interpreted as a philosophy of love (ascending toward perfection), but other parts of his writing make it sound like he's talking about limerence between men, or men and boys, as in a story about Alcibiades' love for Socrates. (The Greeks did not view this as "gay"; rather, it was a cultural element endemic to Greek society.) Plato's ideas are complicated because they are given in the form of a dialog, as an argument between several viewpoints.

Later, Plato's ideas indirectly influenced courtly love (the medieval conception of limerence), through Arab poetry and philosophy.

Sharon Brehm (Intimate Relationships, 1985) interprets platonic love this way, as being essentially limerence.

This book is readable on the Internet Archive with an account creation. Brehm also has a 1988 book chapter on limerence (she says), but she uses the term "passionate love" after Stendhal's writing. Later she was a president of the APA.

ANCIENT GREECE    In ancient Greece, love and marriage were usually thought of as quite separate experiences. The Greeks certainly had a clear notion of passionate, romantic love, as we can see from this quote from Sophocles:

. . . Love is not love alone,
But in her name lie many names concealed;
For she is Death, imperishable Force,
Desire unmixed, wild Frenzy, Lamentation.

But this was love outside of marriage, and quite frequently, this was homosexual love. Moreover, while the intensity of love gave poets and dramatists much of their material, the quote from Sophocles reveals that passionate love was considered to be less than totally desirable. In fact, passionate love was typically viewed as a form of madness.

One of the few more positive conceptions of passionate love in ancient Greece was that of platonic love, in which the lover attained transcendence and ecstasy through nonsexual adoration of the beloved. This kind of love was reserved almost exclusively for love between two men. Though there are examples in Greek literature of loving marriages (e.g., Odysseus and Penelope), these examples are rare and tend to be based on quite early periods of Greek culture (Bardis, 1979). Indeed, according to sociologist Safilios-Rothschild (1977), it is still widely believed in Greece that marriage destroys love. (Brehm, 1985, p. 96)

Earlier in that book, Brehm (1985, p. 92) also cites Tennov for her description of the characteristics of passionate love.

Tennov herself (Love and Limerence, p. 172) actually seems to imply that Plato wrote about limerence too:

Writers have been philosophizing, moralizing, and eulogizing on the subject of "erotic," "passionate," "romantic" love (i.e. limerence) since Plato (and surely long before that).

Note that she just says "since Plato", not something like "since the time of Plato".

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