Essay on Love and Friendship: What is True Love?

Love, friendship, sympathy and likeness – these feelings are the brightest moments of our life. They become the source of joy and positive energy but can become the reason of big problems and disillusionment at the same time. It’s important to know the notions of these feelings and their characteristics to avoid possible mistakes. Very often lack of knowledge in this field can lead to misunderstandings and finally to poor or even tragic consequences.

Sometimes people mix love and friendship or love and passion or sexual attraction. All these feelings are important and reflect different aspect of our life but not all of them are enough to create a family. For non-professional it’s hard to give appraisal of such notions as love and friendship. Professionals also don’t share common opinion on this subject. Bruce King in his book Human Sexuality Today compares love and friendship finding differences and similarities. Both feelings – love and friendship closely correlate and interact, as they possess a lot of common characteristics.

First of all love and friendship is relationship, which requires time, effort and many other characteristics, which form mutual relationship. Both, love and friendship assume emotional involvement, care, respect and devotion. Both feelings undergo transformations with the flow of time and go through different stages. You can have several friends but situations of being in loving relationships with several people are very rare and are regarded rather like deviation, than something normal. This is one of the differences between love and friendship. Another incontestable difference between love and friendship is sexual attraction. Friendship usually doesn’t assume any sexual attraction at all and most forms of love (in the context of relationship between people who are in love) include sexual attraction. Love can be reciprocal or not, and in this field it’s expressed more like an attitude. It’s hard to imagine reciprocal friendship. It either exists or not. Friendship is rather a relationship, which emerges on the joint of several spheres i.e. emotional, mental, physical, etc.

Like we could make sure, it’s hard to explain the notion of love or friendship. It becomes even harder, when we start talking about the true love. There is no one distinct definition of true love. It’s a subjective feeling and means different things for different people. Like any feeling or attitude, it has an empirical nature and can be rather felt than explained. It’s a common known fact that words contain only shape of the thought or sense we put in them and giving explanation of true love and trying to put it into words we lose the main thing – empirical feeling. Being a feeling, true love can have different means of realization and possess different forms. For one person true love can be a complete involvement in the relationship and sharing every moment of life together. For another person true love can mean a complete freedom. And both will be right as true love can have so many manifestations that it makes it merely impossible to put it in rigid limits or some definite forms. To my mind, there is one thing, which distinguishes any healthy, positive relationship, whether it’s love or friendship. It’s a kind of relationship or feeling, which makes you happier, brings new positive emotions and feelings even in the periods of conflicts and misunderstandings, which are inevitable part of any relationship.

Sources

• King M. Bruce, Human Sexuality Today, 4th edition
• Blum, L.A., 1980, Friendship, Altruism, and Morality, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul
• Hoffman, E., 1997, “Love as a Kind of Friendship”, in Sex, Love, and Friendship: Studies of the Society for the Philosophy of Sex and Love 1977–92, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 109–119