How Studying Aristotle Saved Me from Bad Friendships

Mistaking a casual friendship for a deep, character-based one caused me a great deal of pain.

Have you ever invested heavily in what you thought was a deep, important friendship—only to discover that the other person never really valued you on anything close to the same level?

I’ve been there, and it’s a horrible feeling. In the couple of years before COVID, I had a friend who became a major part of my life. We spent multiple evenings each week at each other’s houses, playing guitar together, watching shows, and chatting about all manner of topics. We shared memories, experiences, and jokes. We bought each other birthday and Christmas gifts and made commitments to support each other in times of need.

Then the pandemic hit. We couldn’t see each other any more. I was sure we’d stay in touch, but my friend made no effort. After a few months, she told me that our “expectations were misaligned” and that she’d never regarded me as a close friend. We’ve barely spoken for the last four years, and it’s taken me most of that time to process the loss to a point where I can write about it.

Perhaps you’ve been through a similar experience. If you have, you may have thought, “How can I avoid this ever happening again?” It can even be tempting to give up on forming close friendships.

For me, however, COVID (and the lockdown life imposed in response to it) was a learning opportunity. Not only did it tell me who didn’t value me—it told me who did. It helped me realize that several people who I’d considered close friends were not, and a few who I hadn’t regarded as such were.

Shortly afterward, I joined a reading group studying the works of Aristotle. In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle does a deep dive on the nature of friendship, subdividing it into three categories:

1. Use Friendships. These are relationships with people you like but primarily associate with for some practical purpose, such as sharing a car ride or because you work together.

2. Pleasure Friendships. These are relationships with people you enjoy pleasurable activities with, such as watching movies or dining out, but would not maintain the relationship if it were not for those activities.

3. Character Friendships. These are friendships based on a deep admiration for the other person’s character and values. These friendships persist even when practical circumstances change.¹

All three types add value to our lives, but character friendships are by far the most important. Our fundamental values are what give our other values meaning (e.g. you may value both painting and literature because you value creativity), so by finding people who share those fundamental values we can both find people who will support all our values (not merely the specific interests they share with us) and who will encourage the kind of thinking and behavior in us that will help us achieve our values and live according to our principles.

I realized that the friendship I’d lost was a pleasure friendship that I’d mistook as a character friendship. After that realization, I looked at my other friendships and at those from my past, and I identified more cases where I’d set myself up for pain by making a similar mistake. I also found cases where other people had made the same mistake with me, causing me to feel pressured and overwhelmed.

So how do we avoid making this kind of mistake?

The answer involves correctly understanding and applying two critical concepts:

1. Honesty

Honesty isn’t fundamentally about telling people the truth. It’s about acknowledging and refusing to evade the truth at all times. In the case of friendships, we must be honest with ourselves about the nature of all of our relationships. Ask yourself: Does the other person admire me for who I am, or merely benefit from what we can do together? Does the other person respect and/or share my ideas about life? Would I still invest in this relationship if we moved apart or ceased to have a practical reason to see each other—and would the other person do the same for me?

Once you’re as clear and honest with yourself as you can be, seek the same from the other person. Never be afraid to talk honestly with someone about the nature of your relationship—if the other person doesn’t want to be honest with you or doesn’t share your characterization of the relationship, then that person wasn’t going to give you a life-serving relationship in the long run anyway.

2. Values:

Character friendships are built primarily on shared fundamental values, whereas use and pleasure friendships are built primarily on concrete or less abstract values. For example, a use or pleasure friendship may be built on such values as time-saving, food, entertainment, or even something as concrete as a particular game or TV show. A character friendship, on the other hand, is built on such fundamental values as integrity, rationality, curiosity, industriousness, and justice. These deeper values may be expressed through different concrete values (few of my close friends today share more than one or two of my particular interests) but they contribute to a fundamentally similar view of the world and sense of life.

Consider the most important friendships in your life today and ask yourself: Are they built on shared fundamental values? If not, you may need to recalibrate your level of emotional and material investment in them. But in the long run, this approach to friendships will help you build bonds with new friends on the solid ground of fundamental values, and those friendships will add enormous value to your life.

1. For a much more detailed discussion of Aristotle’s three types of friendship and how it helped me, see Chapter 8 of Reason for Living.

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