I have always been socially awkward. With my uncanny ability to be frank, coarse, sarcastic, and condescending all at the same time, I am pretty sure I have warded off people with outstanding breeding and taste, and attracted everyone else left over to be my friends (I'm going to get shot for making this statement). That being said, I suppose I could never trade these friends away, who over the years have shared parallel journeys with me in the matter known as life.

Friendship essentially involves a distinctive kind of concern for your friend, a concern which might reasonably be understood as a kind of love. Philosophers from the ancient Greeks have traditionally distinguished three notions that can properly be called love: agape, eros, and philia. Agape is a kind of love that does not respond to the antecedent value of its object but instead is thought to create value in the beloved; it has come through the Christian tradition to mean the sort of love God has for us persons as well as, by extension, our love for God and our love for humankind in general. By contrast, eros and philia are generally understood to be responsive to the merits of their objects—to the beloved's properties, especially his goodness or beauty. The difference is that eros is a kind of passionate desire for an object, typically sexual in nature, whereas ‘philia’ originally meant a kind of affectionate regard or friendly feeling towards not just one's friends but also possibly towards family members, business partners, and one's country at large (Liddell et al., 1940; Cooper, 1977a). Given this classification of kinds of love, philiaseems to be that which is most clearly relevant to friendship (though just what philia amounts to needs to be clarified in more detail).