Friendship begins when one person, gazing upon something he or she loves, turns to the person next to him or her and finds that person loving it as well. “What? You too?” are the words announcing the birth of a new friendship.
It is significant that friendship has this “side-by-side” quality because that is what marks it off from the only form of love our media culture seems capable of acknowledging: eros.
The difference is that the posture of eros is not side-by-side, but face-to-face. Eros properly wants to look upon the face of the beloved. “She has the most beautiful face in the world!” are the words of eros. The typical words of friendship are: “Look at that! Isn’t that beautiful?” — and are spoken not about your friend, but about the thing you and your friend(s) love.
That “(s)” is also vital. Because eros is properly a closed set. I don’t want another man to love my wife the way I love her, and she doesn’t want another woman to love me as she does. But with friendship it’s the more the merrier. When one close friend comes to the house, it’s a fine visit. When five close friends come to the house, it’s an intimate gathering of laughter, shared jokes, old songs, wine and memories that glow like gold.
Sadly, our culture is now radically crippled in its ability to distinguish friendship from eros. The tedious routine in our culture is to reduce every form of love — including friendship — to eros. So, as we were instructed in When Harry Met Sally, “men and women cannot be friends” because the “sex thing” gets in the way. Here is a particularly brutal reductionism that forces all friendship to be eros and all eros to be simply and solely sex.
Does erotic attraction frequently complicate male/female relationships, including friendships? Of course. But it is simply not the case that “men and women can’t be friends.” History (and very likely our own personal experience) demonstrates plainly that they can be. Indeed, we have probably even known men and women who were in an erotic married relationship yet who were also friends — who loved, not only each other, but something else for which they shared a passion. Such “married friends” are one of the great joys in life, and joining their circle of friendship (though not, obviously, their marriage) can be one of the loveliest experiences of love in the world.
Our culture’s hostility to friendship and our ugly tendency to reduce it to eros or mere animal sexual desire is even more acute and destructive when it comes to friendships between people of the same sex. It is now routine to declare that any close friendship between two persons of the same sex is “really” homoerotic. This blind insistence on casting all friendships in the mold of eros is soul-crushing, because it short-circuits the truly vital and nourishing role that true friendship plays in a healthy human life.
Precisely the joy of friendship is that friends are, if you will, not thinking about each other, nor seeing themselves reflected in the eyes of the other. Eros, properly, has the other as the object, and (as a sort of side benefit) we discover that we can be precious because we are precious to the one we love. In friendship, all this sort of thing is out of place.
Friendship is emphatically about something other than our friend. Friends come together because they share a common love for stamp collecting or Civil War re-enactment or politics or literature or God. Friends can become lovers and sometimes do. But friends, as friends, dwell in an entirely different kind of love from eros and, very often, would be appalled at the thought of their friendship ever being eros.
Next time, let’s look at some great friendships.
Mark Shea blogs at
NCRegister.com.
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I believe that this “side by side” definition of friendship is a very male perspective. CS Lewis used a similar definition in his book on the four loves - that friendship is about 2 people who are looking out at the world and appreciating the same things, rather than appreciating each other.
As a woman, I do not agree. Friendships for me are about “face to face” love without a sexual component, regardless of whether the friend is a man or woman. I don’t find this kind of friendship to be problematic or un-authentic, regardless of the person’s gender. I want to know them deeply and directly, I usually form an intuitive bond with my good friends that has little to do with “looking at the world”. I want to look at the face of my friends and have a meaningful connection to them.
Perhaps this kind of intimacy is harder for men to separate from eros? I don’t know too many women who would relate to the kind of definition of friendship you use here.
Thank you so much for this article. I often thought of your premise, but never knew quite how to articulate it. Beautiful summation that our society has been spoon-fed “a particularly brutal reductionism that forces all friendship to be eros and all eros to be simply and solely sex.” Let the defense of friendship commence!
As I understand, this article explains why married people raise children: they can only spend so much time looking at each other, so they have kids to look at the kids together. One reason why married people have kids: so they can learn to be friends.
Yes, I have been aware that friendship itself is under attack with the sexualizing of the children in our society.
I have heard about the greek distinctions of love. There is storge, philia, eros, and agape. These would be ranked in order with agape being “unconditional love” but not exactly (depends on which website you use for the definition).
In the dynamic of “face to face” vs. “side by side,” I’m wonder where the concept of unconditional love comes into play. Certainly, there is unconditional love for your children just as much as there is for your brother, your friends, and your spouse. We say that the nature of the love is different but aside from the issue of romance (and sex), is it all that different? Do we not want the same things we would want for our children, our brothers, our friends, our spouse?
I personally found that creating different categories of love did not properly demonstrate how universal unconditional love could be. So, instead, I’ve created 3 “levels”.
Level 1: Passive unconditional love where you love people unconditionally but you are willing to take action if you are asked and only if you feel it is in their best interests. This would be the love we have for strangers or people we recently met.
Level 2: Active unconditional love where you love people unconditionally and take an active stance in their well being and livelihood. This would be the love we have for friends, family, etc.
Level 3: Romantic love + Active unconditional love where you already satisfy level 2 but the person is the type of person you can raise a family with to create life, love, and happiness. It is a commitment with another to journey through life through good times and bad.
This is not to discredit the article’s distinction of “face to face” vs. “side by side”. Instead, it is to suggest that the dynamic discussed in the article is not necessarily an absence of friendship and an over exhalation of eros, but rather the absence of unconditional love, even at the level 1 stage.
With this framework, we ask, “Should I love the person unconditionally” first. Afterward, we ask “can eros come into play for a lifelong commitment?” second. When it comes to any two people, the first question should always be answered with an emphatic “yes” as we are asked to love our neighbors unconditionally. When it comes to the second question, other factors come into play. Perhaps the person is too young, or the person is married, or the person is not in a place to make that type of commitment, etc. If we say “no” to “Level 3”, Level 2 still exists and there is no reason why a “no” in Level 3 precludes a “yes” in Level 2.
When people say that men and women cannot be friends, they are saying that unconditional love cannot exist between men and women. For them, there is no Level 2, only Level 3, or Level 3 precludes Level 2. However, who are we to tell them that they are wrong? Eros is exalted because people have forgotten that unconditional love exists without eros (Level 2). This could be a failure on our part to demonstrate unconditional love exists or a failure on their part to recognize it is there.
I feel this framework helps identify the source of the contention mentioned in the article. By splitting love into this fashion, I feel that it simplifies the issue in a way that incorporates the idea of unconditional love and avoids problems associated with qualitative splicing of love into discreet categories. Discreet qualitative categories (as the greeks have done) allows us to shift our opinions and attitudes over time. When the question is simply unconditional or not unconditional (infinite or not infinite), the reasons of “why” fall into place and the direction of “what to do” is very clear: Love unconditionally.
Good article.
Everything today gets tangled with sex … A modern tragedy.
Friendship was a subject that fascinated the ancients. Cicero, Seneca, and Plutarch all wrote interesting essays on the nature of friendship and what it means to be a friend. All had high regard for true friendship – and none of them made gender distinctions or claimed that inter-gender friendships were a problem.
As Cicero wrote:
“All I can do is to urge on you to regard friendship as the greatest thing in the world; for there is nothing which so fits in with our nature, or is so exactly what we want in prosperity or adversity … and with the exception of reason, I am inclined to think nothing better than this has been given to man by the immortal gods”.
Like @sally r, I don’t find the side-by-side/face-to-face distinction rings true with my experience. For example, I find that married couples tend to love one another best when they love something - or someone, such as their children - together. Meanwhile friends often express their friendship by sharing something with the friend: “I thought of YOU, I want YOU to have this.” I think there are side-by-side and face-to-face dimensions to both friendship and erotic love.
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The different “flavors” of different kinds of love are hard to articulate, and I don’t really have anything better to suggest. It’s not that sbs/ftf is wrong, so much as it is incomplete. You may have to write a whole ‘nother book to explore all the nuances!
Wonderful! Oooh…for next time…St. Francis and St. Clare, please!
While the ancient Greeks had their definitions of love in it various factes I do not think they are the last word of the topic. Defining friendship is best done by looking at our experience of it..and we know that there is not simply one kind of friendship (just as there is not just one kinf of ‘love’). Side-by-side, face-to-face…they say something but mnot enough. The classical scriptural example of David and Jonathan certainly slaps the side-by-side definition in the face. Those two loved each other intimate and deeply as friends, finding somehting within the other that spoke to the heart of each. They were not friends simply because they shared some common demoninator that captured their affection or attention. I think that while it is true that sex may be intruding in friendships, I get the feel that this article is over-reacting by not allowing any interpesonal affection and communion of persons to be at the heart of friendship. This definition of friendship to me is very clinical, utilitarian and ultimately sterile. It seems to speak more of members on a same team or of a same club than of the realtionship we would call friendship.
Interesting article. While I can relate to the ftf/sbs distinction, Eric’s three levels makes the most sense to me. I have friends of both sexes, as well as a wife and children. For the most part none of us talk about the nature of our friendships though we seem to understand them. It’s refreshing to find a discussion of non-sexual relationships, which can be so valuable.
@Eric- all love is unconditional. Or should be. The four types of love in Greek refer to *specific* relationships. Storge, for instance, is the natural love one has for one’s *close relatives*, including children. Phila is friendship- close friendship. Eros is romantic and rightly between a man and wife in Christian terms (though originally included Greek homosexuality). Agape is unconditional certainly, but is also *love for all of one’s species* unconditional- love for human beings merely because they are human, regardless of any external factors.
@Ted Seeber
Thanks for taking the time to reply.
I’ve read many different interpretations of “Greek words for love”. I’m not sure which is the correct one. For my response, I was using the wikipedia definition as a baseline: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_words_for_love
From what I understand, only agape represents unconditional love. The others seem to be lesser forms compared to agape (Eros being sensual in nature, philia being dispassionate, storge being instinctual, built in, or natural, seemingly without thought). I could be wrong if there are better sources than wikipedia (which I know they are). My contention is the trouble that comes with creating different categories for love saying that they are all different. To me, they are not. Saying that they are just creates more categorizes and allows those categories to be manipulated to what we have now: Confusion. I feel that when I use the framework I proposed, it simplifies the issue and helps me understand more about others.
It is an obvious observation to one who is seriously religious that friendship is reduced by the popular culture to ‘eroticism.’ It is a less obvious observation that outside of the popular culture, friendship is in danger of being reduced to a strictly ‘side-by-side’ dynamic. As “Eric” pointed out, that type of definition doesn’t really coincide with our experience.
Pope Benedict XVI even writes in his first Encyclical, God Is Love, that within God is the fullness of love—that even God’s love is in a sense, ‘erotic.’ What does that mean? That God has a love that reaches out for and longs the other. The Father’s Heart, in a sense, is not satisfied without my love. This is an ‘eros’ that is not divorced from ‘agape’. However, an ‘eros’ divorced from ‘agape’ is what we see in the ‘common mentality,’ while an ‘agape’ divorced from ‘eros’ is what we often see attempted in ‘religious’ circles. I believe that the latter is a reaction to the ‘common mentality’—a reaction sprung from fear—because, in general, people are uneducated about their sexuality and don’t know how to relate to each other as men and women. To recapture how to love as a man/woman, it is necessary to first receive the Father’s love. When I first receive His love, I know what it means to be loved and to love as a son. I then know how to love my neighbor.
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