Love and friendship, are they intertwined?

The Straits Times (Saturday), 14 Oct 2006, page S17 (Review)
True love? Look no further than friendship
By Tan Seow Hon, for the Straits Times

Excerpts from the article:

“While romantic love is what most of us gravitate towards, the happy secret is that true love may be found in other than what the ancient Greeks called eros or romantic love. Eros has been contrasted with three other types of love: philia (Friendship), storge (Parental love) and agape (God’s unconditional love as understood in Christian thought, or what St Augustine referred to as caritas or charity).

The sad truth, however, is that unfailing or true love of any sort between humans is a rarity in a postmodern world preoccupied with the self, where we are congenitally giving to our little goals of making ourselves feel good, and flee ant the first sight of trouble in our relationships.

Indeed, our unconscious emphasis on romantic love – seeing how the word “love” has been hijacked for this alone – sometimes belies self-centeredness and he preference for safe investments in that one person who would give love back to us, and who would hopefully prioritize us just as we prioritize him or her.

True, most of us profess that we do not think that romance is all we need… But our actions and thought patterns reveal the contrary. Finding one who believes in true friendship tend to be even harder than finding one who believes in true romantic love.

As C.S. Lewis once noted: ‘very few modern people think friendship a love of comparable value or even a love at all… to the ancients, friendship seemed the happiest and most fully human of all loves… the modern world, in comparison, ignores it.

But the very tone of the admission, and the sort of acquaintanceships which those who make it would describe as ‘friendships’, show clearly that what they are talking about has very little to do with Philia. It is something quite marginal; not a main course in life’s banquet; a diversion; something that fills up the chinks of one’s time.

Our downplaying of friendship in adult life is somewhat sad when, from our childhood days, we have had a tendency to veer towards a best friend. Most come to expect less of friends after disappointment and the experience of waning friendships as people go through different phases of life.

Still, most of us would not have any difficulty describing what we think ideal friendship consists of: Friendship involves free choice and particular persons; it involves reciprocity; the parties participate in it as an end in itself; it involves a commitment into the future; it involves a predominance of reactive rather than detached attitudes.

Of course, there exists friendships of varying intensities: Kant speaks of ideal friendships of disposition, in contrast to those of need or taste; Aristotle speaks of true friendships of character, in contrast to friendships of pleasure or utility. We do not share our deepest secrets with out business associates we may eat a satisfying burger with an acquaintance, but it is with our best friend that we think of sharing with great relish the description of our discovery of something mundane like delicious food.

That we de-emphasize friendship in adulthood should be a matter of regret, as friendship is potentially a rich relationship in which we experience true love.

In the West, there has long been two prevailing schools of thought about the value of friendship. The first was that friendship met one’s needs for human association and support, while the second was that friendship was a school of virtue in which one rises above instinctive self-interest and trains one’s character.

Perhaps neither view is complete. It is loathsome to treat another person solely as the means to satisfy one’s needs, as the friends becomes fungible like wads of cash: one wad is no different from the next; a friend becomes replaceable by another who can meet the same needs.

Nor can another human simply be someone on whom we practice goodness for our own sake, as our focus turns inwards to becoming good persons, when perhaps we do the infinite value of our friend justice only when compelled outward, relationally, by the other-directedness of love.

If it is true that love requires self-giving, putting others above one’s self and even laying down one’s life for others, it is unsurprising that we who count our interest first in a postmodern world run into immense difficulties giving true love to another human being. As one of my friends wrote even of her best friendship, she has seen ‘how inadequate Man’s love is, how small our means’.

At the end of the day, statistics aside, we cannot deny that our selfishness is one hindrance to finding true love. We may have all the opportunities in the world to know another person, but until we learn to prefer another, our budding relations will never fulfill their potential. May we remember Emerson’s words, that to form friendship, one must first be a friend. To find true love, be prepared first to love.