Then we have the “deep” friendships that approach Lewis’s “face-to-face” orientation yet do not quite conform to his understanding of eros. Here the two people take delight not just in their common interests but in each other, bound by a strong mutual affection and care transcending the pub and the sporting arena.
These are the friends that come to each other’s aid when needed, who are willing to sacrifice a measure of their own happiness—or perhaps even more than that—to increase the well-being of the other. As Jesus himself said, “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13). Such friends easily profess their love for each other, encouraging each other in their respective pursuits and finding joy in the other’s victories and successes. In a normal lifetime, such friendships are likely to be few. In some respects, they approximate the relationships among family members and thus partake of what Lewis calls affection.
By their very nature we cannot enter many such friendships, something Aristotle recognized already 2,500 years ago. Childhood friendships enduring into adulthood seem more likely to attain this high level of commitment than those formed later in life. My 90-year-old mother was recently visited by a childhood friend whose family had brought her into the Christian faith when they were young. They have been friends since 1939—for eighty-two years! Or we might think of the lifelong friendship of the Reverends John Ames and Robert Boughton in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead novels.
In our society, we tend to neglect such “face-to-face” friendships, which are difficult to sustain over the long term, in part because of our rootlessness and mobility. Huge numbers of people live far from their respective birthplaces, often losing the friendships formed when they were young. Moreover, the larger society’s lopsided focus on sex tends, following Freud and his heirs, to ascribe a sublimated sexual interest to ordinary close friendships. Even Lewis recognized this factor more than sixty years ago, and it has arguably intensified since then. In this respect, our society’s general tendency to confuse categories and to blur boundaries conspires to increase the epidemic of loneliness in our society.
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