Real Friends, Fake Friends, and the Friend Who Stays

I had a season in my early twenties when I was great fun at parties. People wanted to be around me — for a while. Then I went through a stretch when I was drinking too much, missing things I shouldn't have missed, generally being someone you'd cross the street to avoid. Most of the people who'd been at those parties evaporated. Some of them, I realized later, had been actively coaxing me to drink more, because they liked the version of me that was a good time.

A couple of people stuck around. Most didn't.

That experience, painful at the time, turned out to be one of the cleanest illustrations I've ever had of an argument Aristotle made about 2,400 years ago. In Books 8 and 9 of the Nicomachean Ethics, he claims there are exactly three kinds of friendship — and only one of them is the real thing.

This is also the video that picks up a question I left dangling in the post on love at first sight: what kinds of love are there, and which kind could a first impression possibly be? Here is the part of the answer that I owe you.

The Three Kinds

For Aristotle, we love things for one of three reasons: because they're useful, because they're pleasant, or because they're good. Friendship is a kind of love, so friendships sort the same way.

Useful friends are friends because of what you can get from each other. Money, opportunities, access, status. The relationship is often real and sometimes valuable — Aristotle isn't moralizing — but the object of the love is something external to the friend, and when that external thing goes away, so does the friendship. The networking contact who stops returning your calls when you switch industries was a useful friend. So was the partygoer who came around when you had something to offer and disappeared when you didn't.

Pleasant friends are friends because you genuinely enjoy each other's company. They're funny, you share a hobby, you make each other laugh. This is closer to the real thing — the friend is being valued for something internal to them, some feature of who they are. But that internal feature is still incidental. Tastes change. Hobbies change. Two kids who were inseparable in elementary school drift apart in middle school because one joins the dance team and the other plays club volleyball, and there are no more long afternoons of shared playground games to hold them together. Nobody did anything wrong. The thing the friendship was built on just stopped being there.

Perfect friends are friends because of who the other person is. Not what they own, not what they can do for fun, but their character. The friend is loved for their virtue, their integrity, the quality of their soul. On Aristotle's analysis this kind of friendship has two features the others lack: it benefits both people deeply (genuinely good people make each other better), and it doesn't dissolve when external circumstances change, because the thing it's built on isn't external.

The Subject of the Love

Here is Aristotle's sneaky move. To love something because it's good, you have to be the kind of person who recognizes and desires the good. You can be ugly and love beauty; you can be broke and love wealth. But you can't be bad and love goodness — because if you really saw goodness for what it is, you'd want it, and wanting it would start to make you better.

So perfect friendship is only available to people who are themselves trying to be good. Two people of integrity recognize the integrity in each other and want to be near it. They become, in Aristotle's phrase, second selves — when one of them succeeds, the other feels it almost as their own success. (I'm not nearly as bummed about a bad surf session if my son catches the good waves I missed. The two of us share the day even when only one of us is having it.)

This makes the friendship rare. Most people aren't that virtuous, and even the ones who are don't run into each other often enough to form many such friendships. Aristotle thinks you'll probably only have a handful of these in a lifetime, and that's if you're lucky. The other friendships you have — and you'll have many — will mostly be friendships of pleasure and utility. That isn't a failure. It's just how the categories fall out.

The Test

The diagnostic question Aristotle gives you, even if he doesn't put it this way: what would happen to this friendship if the other person stopped being useful or pleasant?

If the friendship would end, it was a friendship of utility or pleasure. Not bad, but not the real thing.

If it would survive — if you'd still want this person in your life when they couldn't help you anymore, when they weren't fun anymore, when they were just them without the accessories — then you've found something rare.

The friends who stayed when I wasn't fun anymore didn't stay because they were saints. They stayed because the friendship was built on something other than the version of me they liked to party with. It was built on me. That's the test. It hurts when you fail it, and it costs more than you'd think when you pass it. But you can tell the difference.

A Missing Fourth?

Notice what Aristotle's account can't quite give you. Even perfect friendship is conditional on the friend's continued goodness. If the friend turns bad, Aristotle thinks you can — and probably should — walk away. The love of perfect friendship is loyalty to the person they are when they are good. It isn't unconditional.

Is there a fourth kind of love — one for the person regardless of merit, regardless of whether they've stayed virtuous, regardless of whether they have done anything to earn it?

Aristotle doesn't have one. Other traditions, very famously, do. But that's the next video.

Watch the Full Video

In the video I walk through Aristotle's three kinds in more detail, share the story of my high school principal Tim Quinn, and address the objection that even perfect friendship is secretly just a kind of selfishness in disguise.