Last updated: November 3, 2026

Aristotle distinguished three kinds of friendship in the Nicomachean Ethics: friendships of utility, friendships of pleasure and friendships of virtue, in which people love each other for who they are and wish each other well for the other’s own sake. Only the third kind is complete and lasting, and Aristotle insisted that it is rare and slow to form, because it needs time, familiarity and, above all, a shared life. Living together, he wrote, is the most characteristic activity of friends. That is why his theory explains so well why friendship is hard for modern adults: our lives are organised in ways that make sharing days with friends the exception rather than the rule.

This post goes through what Aristotle actually wrote about friendship, separates it from the popular “three types” infographic, and asks what his account says about the much-discussed loneliness of modern life. It also looks at who was left out of his picture, and at what Schopenhauer’s porcupines and Seneca’s letters add to it.

The Bell Curve of Friendship

The meme uses the bell curve format, in which the simplest and the most sophisticated positions end up close together while the anxious middle disagrees with both. On the far left, a contented simpleton says: “I’ll just see my friends more often.” In the middle, a weeping figure insists: “Honestly people just don’t prioritize friendship anymore, it’s a choice.” On the far right, a hooded sage in a brown cloak pronounces: “We need to live in the same building or this doesn’t count as friendship according to Aristotle.”

The joke is that the left and the right agree. Both locate friendship in physical presence, in time actually spent together. The middle position, the one most people hold, treats it as a matter of willpower and priorities. Aristotle sides with the edges. For him friendship is not primarily a feeling you have or a decision you make, but an activity you share, and activities need a place and time. The hooded sage exaggerates, as sages do, but less than you might think.

Why Aristotle Thought Friendship Matters

Aristotle devotes two of the ten books of the Nicomachean Ethics, books VIII and IX, to friendship, more than to any other single virtue. He opens with a sentence that is still one of the strongest claims ever made for it: without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods. Rich people and rulers need friends most of all, he adds, because what is the use of prosperity without the chance to do good to someone?

The Greek word he uses, philia, is broader than English “friendship”. It covers the bond between parents and children, spouses, fellow citizens, business partners and members of a club, anything in which people are attached to each other and wish each other well. That breadth matters. For Aristotle, human beings are political animals, made to live in communities, and philia is the glue that holds communities together. Lawgivers, he even says, care more about friendship than about justice, because where people are friends they have no need of justice, while the just still need friendship.

Aristotle was not the first to ask what friendship is. His teacher Plato wrote a short dialogue about it, the Lysis, in which Socrates and two boys try several definitions: is a friend the one who loves, the one who is loved, the like who loves the like, or the useful? Every answer collapses, and the dialogue ends with Socrates joking that they consider themselves friends without being able to say what a friend is. Aristotle’s two books can be read as a patient attempt to answer the question Plato left open, by sorting the different things people mean by the word instead of searching for one definition.

The Three Types of Friendship

The most famous part of the theory is the classification. People love one another, Aristotle says, for one of three reasons: because the other is useful, because the other is pleasant, or because the other is good. Each reason defines a type of friendship.

The first two are not fake friendships. They are real, common and often valuable, and Aristotle calls them friendships by resemblance to the complete kind. Their weakness is that they are incidental: you are loved not for who you are but for what you provide, so the friendship dissolves when the usefulness or the fun runs out. Friendships of virtue include both benefit and pleasure, since good people are useful and pleasant to each other, but they do not depend on them. Each friend wishes the other well for the other’s sake, and this is what makes them stable.

In modern terms the types are easy to recognise. The colleague you get on with because you cover each other’s shifts is a friend of utility; the people you meet at the climbing gym or the pub quiz are often friends of pleasure. Nothing is wrong with either, and Aristotle notes that such friendships can grow into the complete kind when, over time, people come to value each other’s character rather than the service or the fun. What he warns against is mistaking them for the complete kind, and then feeling betrayed when a change of job or hobby ends them.

Friendship of Virtue: Rare, Slow and Worth It

Popular summaries usually stop at the table. Aristotle does not. He adds that complete friendships are rare, because good people are few, and that they take time. The wish for friendship, he writes, arises quickly, but friendship does not. People cannot know each other, in a Greek proverb he quotes, until they have eaten salt together, which means sharing many meals over a long period. Only then does each appear lovable to the other and gain the other’s trust.

He also offers the most famous phrase in the history of the topic: a friend is another self, heteros autos. The good person is related to his friend as to himself, wishes the same things for him, takes pleasure in his company and shares his joys and sorrows. This is less sentimental than it sounds. It means that friendship of virtue is an extension of the healthy relation to oneself that Aristotle calls proper self-love, the love of the best part of oneself, reason and character, rather than the grasping self-love that wants money and honours. Only someone at peace with himself, he suggests, can be a good friend to another.

Why would a good and self-sufficient person need friends at all? Aristotle’s answer in book IX is subtle. We are better at seeing the actions of others than our own, and in a good friend we can watch goodness at work, as if in a mirror, an image the later Aristotelian treatise known as the Magna Moralia makes explicit. Life itself, for a human being, consists in perceiving and thinking, and to perceive that a friend exists and acts well is part of what makes our own life feel worth living. Friendship is not a means to happiness; it is a part of it.

“Living Together”: What Aristotle Actually Said

This is where the hooded sage in the meme comes from. In book VIII Aristotle says that nothing is as characteristic of friends as living together, suzēn. People who approve of each other but do not spend time together, he writes, are more like well-wishers than friends. Distance does not destroy friendship outright, but it interrupts its activity, and if the absence is long it seems to make people forget their friendship. He quotes a proverb to make the point: many a friendship has lack of conversation broken.

What “living together” means is debated. For Aristotle it is less about sharing an address than sharing activities: some friends drink together, some play dice, others exercise, hunt or study philosophy together, each spending their days in whatever they love most in life. Scholars disagree about whether letters, or today video calls, can sustain the shared activity he has in mind. But the core is clear. Friendship of virtue is not a status you achieve once; it is a practice that has to be kept up, in person, over time.

Aristotle draws a practical conclusion that sounds almost brutal. Since complete friendship requires living together and knowing each other well, one cannot have many such friends. People with many friends, who are intimate with everyone, are thought to be no one’s friend. He compares the right number to the size of a city: ten people do not make a city, a hundred thousand are too many, and the right number lies somewhere in between, as many as you can live with.

Why Making Friends as an Adult Is So Hard

Modern research has rediscovered Aristotle’s salt. In a 2018 study the communication researcher Jeffrey Hall estimated that it takes roughly 50 hours spent together for an acquaintance to become a casual friend, around 90 hours to become a friend, and more than 200 hours to become a close friend. Hours, not intentions, made the difference. The evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar has argued that our circles come in layers, with only about five people in the innermost layer of intimate friends and about fifteen in the next, numbers that look remarkably like Aristotle’s small city.

Now look at how adult life is organised. School and university supply hundreds of hours with the same people almost automatically. After that, work, commuting, child care and moving for jobs eat the time and scatter the people. The American Survey Center on American Life reported in 2021 that the share of Americans saying they have no close friends had risen from 3 percent in 1990 to 12 percent, and in 2023 the US Surgeon General issued an advisory on what he called an epidemic of loneliness and isolation. The meme’s middle figure blames individual choices. Aristotle would point to the structure: if friendship requires shared days, a society that leaves no shared days will have fewer friends, whatever people prefer.

The sociologist Rebecca Adams, who studies friendship, has summarised three conditions that sociologists have long seen as crucial for making close friends: proximity, repeated and unplanned interactions, and a setting that encourages people to let their guard down and confide in each other. All three are built into student life and gradually disappear from adult life. Aristotle would have recognised the list immediately. It is a modern description of what he meant by living together.

That does not make individual effort pointless. The left side of the bell curve has a point too: seeing your friends more often is exactly what Aristotle recommends. But it explains why advice that treats friendship purely as a matter of motivation often fails. The people who manage to keep close friends as adults tend to build regular, shared activities into their lives, a weekly game, a shared allotment, a standing dinner, the modern equivalents of drinking, hunting and philosophising together.

The Porcupines and the Letter Writers

Aristotle was not the last philosopher to think about closeness and distance. Arthur Schopenhauer told a parable in Parerga and Paralipomena (1851) about a group of porcupines on a cold winter’s day. They huddle together for warmth, prick each other with their quills and move apart, then grow cold and huddle again, until they find a moderate distance at which they are tolerably warm and only slightly pricked. Human society, he suggests, works the same way: our need for company drives us together, our many disagreeable qualities drive us apart, and politeness is the moderate distance we settle on. Freud later borrowed the image. Where Aristotle sees friendship as the fulfilment of human nature, Schopenhauer sees it as a compromise between loneliness and irritation.

The Romans offered another answer: friendship by letter. Cicero wrote a whole dialogue on friendship, Laelius de Amicitia (44 BC), largely following Aristotle, and his letters to his friend Atticus are among the most intimate documents of antiquity. Seneca’s letters to Lucilius are explicitly an exercise in friendship across distance; he tells his friend that a letter brings real traces of an absent friend. Whether that is enough is the old version of the question whether online friendship counts. Aristotle would probably have said that it sustains friendship better than silence, but cannot replace the shared activity that builds it.

Who Was Left Out

A critical reading has to note who Aristotle’s friends were. The friendship of virtue he describes is between free, male citizens of roughly equal standing, with leisure for shared pursuits. Women appear mainly in the context of marriage, which he treats as a friendship between unequals. Of slaves he says that there can be no friendship with a slave as a slave, only as a human being, a qualification that reveals both the limits of his society and a crack in its justification. The conditions for his highest friendship were privileges.

Aristotle did discuss friendships between unequals, such as parent and child, ruler and ruled, husband and wife, and he proposed a rule for them: the better party should be loved more than he loves, so that the inequality is balanced by affection. Where the gap becomes too great, friendship ends; no one, he says, would claim friendship with a god. It is a hierarchical picture, and modern readers rightly find parts of it unacceptable, but it is also an honest attempt to think about the many relationships that are not between equals.

Later thinkers widened the picture. Montaigne, in his essay “Of Friendship”, described his bond with Étienne de La Boétie in terms that go beyond Aristotle’s balanced account: if pressed to say why he loved him, he could only answer, “because it was he, because it was I”. Modern philosophers have extended friendship across gender and class lines that Aristotle took for granted, and asked whether his emphasis on virtue makes friendship too much like a moral achievement and too little like a gift. Those debates do not refute his central point. They suggest that the time and shared life he required should be available to everyone, not just to citizens with slaves to do the work.

Is Friendship Selfish? “O My Friends, There Is No Friend”

One more puzzle runs through the tradition. If friendship makes my life better, is it ultimately about me? Aristotle’s answer is that the question sets up a false opposition. The good person loves himself in the right way, and that self-love naturally overflows into wishing good for his friends for their own sake, even to the point of sacrificing for them. In book IX he says that the good person will give up money, honours and even his life for his friends, gaining for himself the nobler thing.

Aristotle’s rival Epicurus faced the same question from the other side. He openly said that friendship begins in usefulness, since we need the help of others, but insisted that it becomes worth choosing for its own sake, and that of all the things wisdom provides for a happy life, friendship is by far the greatest. The two schools disagreed about almost everything else, but on this they converge: friendship may start in need or pleasure, and at its best it outgrows both. Epicurus’ own community of friends is described in Epicurus on Death and Happiness.

Diogenes Laërtius preserved a strange saying attributed to Aristotle: “O my friends, there is no friend.” Its meaning and even its correct reading have been debated for centuries, and Jacques Derrida built a whole book, The Politics of Friendship (1994), around it. One plausible reading fits the rest of Aristotle well: the perfect friend is so rare that the word is almost always used for something less, and those we call friends are usually friends of utility or pleasure. Seen that way, the saying is not cynical but demanding. It tells us that complete friendship is worth the time it takes, precisely because it is so rarely found.

What Aristotle Would Ask of Us Today

Read fully, Aristotle’s theory is less a guide to choosing better friends than a description of what a life, and a society, must provide before deep friendship is possible: shared time, shared activities, proximity and a degree of equality. That is uncomfortable for a culture that likes to turn ancient wisdom into individual hacks. The honest translation of Aristotle into modern advice is not “find your tribe” but “arrange your days so that someone else is in them, regularly, for years”.

It is also, in its way, encouraging. If friendship fails because of structure rather than character, then the remedy is not to become a different person but to change the arrangements: live closer, meet regularly, share something you both love doing. The hooded sage in the meme is half joking, but the joke has a point. If you want more of Aristotle on how to live, see his quarrel with his teacher in Plato vs Aristotle, and for the opposite view of other people, Sartre’s “hell is other people” in Existentialism for the Edgelords. And if all your friends are, in the strict sense, dead philosophers, the shirts below were made for you.