How Would Aristotle Look at Friendships Today?

Aristotle, writing more than 2,000 years ago, held the concept of friendship in great esteem. Many of his components of friendship can be applied today and viewed with a lens that considers the trying times in which we all live. We need friends more than ever.

The friendships that Aristotle described in Nichomachean Ethics are based on the idea that true friendships require great effort to be maintained. They should not be taken for granted. Aristotle's five components are as follows:

1. Given the time to dedicate to a friend, you can only have a few true friendships.
2. Friendships can only be between peers. If someone has something, financially for example, to gain from someone else, that imbalance prevents it from being a true friendship.
3. Friendships need to be long-standing. You cannot have a meaningful friendship with someone you have just met as a seatmate on a bus or plane.
4. One has to have "shared salt" with someone to have a friendship. This is not a reference to "breaking bread" with someone. Rather, it means that you have gone through a tough experience together, like serving in battle.
5. One has to be ethical to be a friend to another.

More recently than in Aristotle's time, I found four levels of friendship emanating from my research, and described this in Buddy System: Understanding Male Friendships.

From interviewing and surveying hundreds of men, I found we have must friends—people we must contact if we have a life-changing event like a death or winning the lottery. These are people we would reach out to in the first 24 hours. Depending on one's inner circle, this may be a small group.

Then we have trust friends. These are people we know and enjoy being with and trust but are not in that immediate circle. We may see them at a party or event and have a great convo with them, but they are not people we would immediately reach out to if there was an extraordinary event.

A wider circle are just friends. These are acquaintances, maybe from work, school, or the neighborhood, whom we might grab a bite with or stop and chat with; however, we are unlikely to make plans to be with them.

Finally, we have rust friends, people we have known forever. They could be high-school buddies we see at reunions every five years, and we revert to who we were back then. But, they can also be in our must or trust group. For many people, it is those oldest friends that are so important.

You and your friends

What would Aristotle think of you and the friendships you have?

As for Aristotle's first point, that one can only have a few friends, how many friends do you have? Do you give them the attention they need? True friends require time and nurturing.

As for Aristotle's second point, friendships can only be between peers. Are you friends with your boss or with someone who works for you? If so, it cannot be a valid relationship as someone may be using someone else. It has an imbalance to it.

Ari's third point is that friendships need to be longstanding. I differ with him here. In a mobile society, and as one ages, this tenet may require modification. We can establish meaningful relationships with people we might not have known from childhood. Moving into a new neighborhood, one should be open to finding new support systems and not be tied to the belief that only my friends from when I was in high school or at my first job can truly know me.

The fourth point, that friends need to have shared salt, is interesting. People with challenges may bond over those experiences. Parents of children with challenges, be they academic, physical, or emotional, may bond around their shared experiences of raising those children. I believe that people can also bond over shared joyous experiences, playing together on a winning sports team, serving in the military, or working for years on a research project can also bring friends together. This may be called shared experience.

The fifth point is that one must be ethical to maintain a friendship. I will leave you to decide as you observe the bonds between others.

Must friends

As for the must, trust, just, and rust categories, I hope you have enough friends in at least the must category.

Takeaways

What do we take from this? We learn about ourselves by observing ourselves and the lives of others. Great men and women, whoever we believe they are (Martin Luther King, Ruth Bader Ginsburg), can be guides for how to interact with others and live our lives. People with strong social networks live longer, happier, and healthier lives. Whether we do or do not want to model our friendships after Aristotle's concepts, they should at least be considered. Even considering their friendship, we may be closer to understanding our own.