Friendship First

Dr. Janice Chik Breidenbach

“When either Affection or Eros is one’s theme, one finds a prepared audience. Very few modern people,” writes C.S. Lewis in The Four Loves, “think Friendship a love of comparable value or even a love at all.” Certainly, compared with sexual or romantic love, friendship (or what the ancient Greeks called philia) receives little attention, and is even accorded commonly a lower status than eros – as people imply when they insist that a relationship is “merely Platonic”. Alternatively and arguably worse, some people seem to think that every close friendship is actually romantic – in parts of America, two men can hardly enjoy a coffee together, nor two women linking elbows go rollerblading down the street, without being thought culturally transgressive (or something worse). And yet, as Lewis affirms, “to the Ancients, Friendship seemed the happiest and most fully human of all loves; the crown of life and the school of virtue”.

In his treatise on friendship, Aristotle defends friendship not only as a kind of love distinct from romance, but as a virtue in its own right. For a morally good person, a friend is “another self” – someone like you – to whom you wish good things of the best kind: further moral excellence, which leads us to true happiness. This does not mean that we cannot be friends with morally bad people: as Prof. Alice Ramos (St. John’s University) recently explained in the Philosophy Department’s Annual Aquinas Lecture at AMU, we can love a bad person, not because of the bad in them, but because of the good that exists in them potentially. For instance, it is possible, St. Thomas Aquinas argues, that a bad person might acknowledge his badness and thus be beloved: not for his badness, but for his goodness in acknowledging his badness. Goodness is “the proper cause” of love: that is, true love is motivated by the presence of the good in another, and there is some good in everything, insofar as created existence itself is good. In this matter, the good person, as well as the Christian, is given a higher standard for living in the world, even among those with whom we disagree or dislike: “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another” (John 13:35).

The popular culture prioritizes sexual love over this form of authentic friendship, and therefore degrades both – as well as ourselves. The pathway to a cultural recovery of true happiness, therefore, requires that we re-establish the original order of human relationships: friendship must always come first, and it must remain a primary force in our daily lives. In an essay that recently ran in the NYT, Kimberly Harrington recounts her “post-separation, pre-divorce living arrangement” that surprisingly led to more conversation and understanding than she and her husband ever enjoyed while “happily married”. Within this modern “divorced household”, “very little has changed for our kids…other than they get to see their parents learning to become real friends”. Sadly, this is too little, too late, as she writes: “From the time we’re teenagers, navigating our first romantic relationships, we dread hearing the phrase ‘we’re just friends.’ Our culture reinforces the idea that friendship is a lower, less desirable, and less meaningful form of relationship than marriage.”

It is time we revitalized the ancient idea that friendship is a virtue within our control. In this respect, friendship is more humanly powerful than erotic love: for we are able, no matter the circumstances, to will the good for another, simply because the other is a person like you, and worthy of the greatest good of happiness. J.R.R. Tolkien once wrote, “Nearly all marriages, even happy ones, are mistakes…the ‘real soul-mate’ is the one you are actually married to. You really do very little choosing: life and circumstance do most of it”. What we can choose, however, is to love another as an authentic friend, as even that woeful NYT writer finally affirms: “Sometimes marriages can do more than dissolve. They have the power to evolve.”