WHEN FRIENDSHIP BECOMES LOVE

By Amy L. Chaves

June 9, 2000

        One of the common questions that beset people is when to draw the line between friendship and love.  Just what is friendship?  How is it distinct from love?  When does friendship turn to love?  I do not mean to sound like a philosopher who attempts to analyze these two aspects of human experience in a phenomenological sort of way.  I leave that to the phenomenologists to try to bracket subjective experience in order to arrive at the fundamental essence of friendship and love.  However, if I sound like a philosopher then let it be.  Philosophy has always been the result of life-experiences.  Perhaps philosophy, the search of wisdom, can enlighten us in this regard.  I also do not want to be a psychologist who tries to assess these two affective dimensions.  Human relationships are more often too complex and broad to be understood solely by the psychological method.  Perhaps, in a candid manner I would like to draw from my own experience hoping that in the process I might answer some of my own questions.

            Friendship is a process of becoming consciously aware of another person.  It is initiated when one becomes consciously aware of the other’s presence:  his looks, his voice, his way of writing, his funny stories, and his sad tales.  It is a form of connectedness and bonding with another human person.  This connectedness and bonding is both an invitation and a response to that invitation.  “I want you in my world but you must be willing to enter.”  It is a sharing of world based on this awareness of the other—his uniqueness, his appeal, his invitation, and the response he needs.  Love is all of these and more.

Love is noticing and focusing. “Where your attention is, there will your heart be also.”   It is a decision.  The decision to pay attention to someone is the first sacrifice, the first gift we make in the name of love.  Paying attention is the bedrock opposite of taking for granted an individual.  Thus, we can’t help but be selective in our loving.  We cannot love many people simultaneously in our lifetime.  To do so would mean to risk not paying attention, which is a major cause of death in a long relationship.

        Friendship is being attracted to certain qualities of the other: his wit, his enthusiasm, his body, and maybe his charm.  It is liking what the other has.  It is an endeavor to appreciate the other for the other’s wonderful traits and personal value.  It is a form of entering the other’s world and liking what is inside that world.  Thus, friendship is a form of valuing.  Love is all of these and more. 

Love is desire.  It is Eros.  It is noticing that I am separate from you and, wanting to close that separation, I desire you.  I am essentially incomplete, fragmented, until I have you in my life.  This desire or Eros is metabiological: it is ontological and therefore rooted in our being.  When I desire you, I do not just desire you bodily.  I also desire your being.  I desire you for your being you.  Thus, this desire is insatiable because it is rooted in valuing the other as a special person, as unrepeated and irrevocably wonderful.  It knows no end, knows no boundaries.

Friendship is seeking for more knowledge about the other—Who are you?  What brings you here?  Are you married?  What work do you do?  It is a form of questioning based on what makes the other different and interesting.  It is taking each layer of the other’s self carefully until the other is known for who he is, not just for what he has.  The other is therefore constantly known and constantly appreciated.  Thus friendship grows.  Love is all of these and more.  

        Love is a fire whose intensity and ability to warm us is determined by the degree of knowledge we add to the flame.  Curiosity in love is foreplay.  Love is not satisfied with casual information or the touch of a hand.  It desires to enter into the world of the beloved.  It seeks to know the depth, width, and height of the other’s world.  The best lover is one who becomes a private investigator, constantly learning about the other in a way that also enlarges his capacity for empathy and understanding.

        Friendship involves touching—shaking hands, patting the other’s back, holding hands, and even hugging.  Human beings are creatures not only of the spirit but also of the skin.  Our body is the center of a multitude of sensations, pleasurable or otherwise.  Between friends, touching is a form of communication.  When you hug me because you understood me, I know that I am graced by an understanding friend and your touch becomes my comfort, my refuge.  Love is all of these and more.

        Love is sensuality.  It is not satisfied with just a pat, a touch or a hug.  It opens itself to the possibility of sexual communication which is a total surrendering of one’s self to the other’s physical invitation, “Be with me.”  Being with the other in the sensual context is “making love.”  It is not just sex.  It is neither manipulative nor  exploitative.  Making love is enriching, deepening, and expansive.  It is earth shaking because all the senses are involved.  However, it is not just two bodies loving but also two hearts, two minds, and two souls.

        Friendship involves empathy.  It is the ability to “stand under” the other’s world and feel with the other.  It is looking out at the same window, at the same world, using the other’s eyes as your own.  It is allowing you to become the other while bracketing your own ego, values, and views.  It requires the combination of self-awareness and self-forgetting. The greater our emotional depth, the greater our capacity for empathy.  Love is all of these and more.

        Love is sympathetic enjoyment.  It gradually turns the heart into an echo chamber, in which the suffering and joy of two persons entwine to form a single systolic-diastolic rhythm.  In this level of relating, I travel beyond simple pleasure and enter into another person’s self-understanding, self-valuing, and self-enjoyment.  I vicariously share his self-love.  In some small measure I appreciate him in the same way and for the same qualities that he appreciates and enjoys his own existence.  Thus, I love the way he loves himself, and the way he values himself.

        Friendship is responsibility.  It is being able to respond fittingly to a friend’s need and to a friend’s situation.  It is reading the message in between the lines of a letter, knowing the meaning in the inflection of one’s voice, hearing and seeing that which is invisible to the eye.  Friendship is saying yes before the question is asked or saying no to an imagined harm.  It is providing calm when a storm threatens as well as giving space when private comfort is needed.  Love is all of these and more.

        Love is active caring.   Caring moves love from feeling to action, from self to other, from getting to giving. When we care, we take responsibility for and seek the well-being and fulfillment of another person.  It carries us beyond the sweet spontaneity and intoxication of romance into the realm of consideration and thoughtfulness.  It is because I love you that I want you to be happy.  When translated into action, it means I am willing to suffer for your happiness.  It allows me to release you to the flight of wings that will carry you far from me or towards me, knowing that it is only in freeing you that you can become your own person.

        Friendship is forgiveness.  It hinges on the truth that to be human is to be flawed, broken and fragmented.  It is recognizing the state of “fallenness” of the other and yet at the same time expecting that he is capable of rising up to the occasion when the need to be whole is called for.  Friendship recognizes not how many times the other falls but how many times the other has stood up after each fall.  It is saying, “Yes, I forgive you” when the other repents.  Love is all of these and more.

        Love doesn’t demand for forgiveness.  Forgiveness may be asked but  love doesn’t demand that it should be asked.  Love completely understands therefore there is nothing to forgive.  I am not above you.  I realize my own limitation, my own brokenness.   I also make mistakes, perhaps even more than you do.  So there is really nothing to forgive.  I have no right to limit you by my own understanding of what is right and what is wrong.   Since I love you, I pass no judgment on you.

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        I may not have been able to cover all the important aspects of love and friendship in this paper.  In some other time, equipped with more experience and lessons in life, I might be able to widen this scope.  Until then, you the reader will decide for your self whether your friendship has turned to love or not. I hope to hear you mutter, after reading this article, that “All is well in my world.”  It will make me happy knowing you have either one or both.

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