usefulness, pleasure, and virtue. Understanding each type of friendship will help us reflect upon our own friendships and, as a result, our identity.
Friends of Usefulness
Creating a LinkedIn page is a common practice for most young adults. Career counselors are quick to emphasize the benefits; each “connection” functions as a foot in the door for a potential employer. We can endorse one another and share information through a seemingly infinite network. The possibilities are endless.
But wait, there’s more! The entire human race can become a network of potential connections that can be useful for business growth or financial success. Our list of “connections” might start out with middle-school classmates, family members, or that random guy we met in a coffee shop. It then grows to “connections” with those we’ve never met: a coworker’s former coworker, a cousin’s current boss, an employee across the world who worked with a neighbor. We can judge our connections based on their ability to introduce us to more people or opportunities. In the end, the goal is success.
I invite you to think about this question: Would you say that you are friends with each “connection” on LinkedIn? Probably not. Does this mean that you should delete your account and boycott the service? No. We all know that these connections are not negative, per se. But it is important to realize that these “connections” do not constitute what most people would define as a strong friendship.
A vice-presidential candidate offers a perfect illustration of this type of mutually beneficial “connection.” Presidential candidates will carefully appoint vice-presidential candidates during an election season based on who will represent a pool of voters that the presidential candidates don’t reach on their own. The decision is a political move that has repercussions for each party involved. This “connection,” a friendship of usefulness, is mutually beneficial.
A similar type of contract, albeit unspoken, is visible on a college campus. Certain friendships are made early in the year that are beneficial for students. Crafty students will seek out the overachievers in a class and will try to gain access to their study guides in the days leading up to an exam. Underage students will befriend the floormate who owns a fake ID, or has an older sibling, to get their hands on a case of beer. We quickly learn who we must know in order to gain access to a particular party. These friends are beneficial as long as they get our names on the list.
Friendships of this kind are good only as long as they are useful, which means they can be discarded just as quickly as they are made. An employee can be fired in an instant. An acquaintance made during the first week of college can be unfriended in later years. For one reason or another, a good number of our friendships remain at this level of usefulness.
Friends of Pleasure
The term “friend with benefits” might come to mind when we see Aristotle use the phrase “friendship of pleasure.” Interpreting Aristotle in this modern way, however, would be inaccurate and an oversimplification of what he meant. He used the term “pleasure” to refer to any activity that causes enjoyment. Pleasurable activities, both romantic and platonic, form the basis upon which many of our relationships are made. Most meaningful relationships begin as friendships of pleasure.
Let us compare “pleasure,” a synonym for enjoyment in Aristotle’s thesaurus, to the philosophy of dating websites. Behind every successful dating website is a complex web of algorithms that determines compatibility based on the hobbies and interests of each member. A “match” is made based on shared activities that are enjoyable for both parties. The first date normally includes one of these common activities. Matched couples will go bowling, hiking, or simply meet over coffee.
People feel more comfortable spending time with a stranger when there is a shared activity. Consider planning a first date or a party: The itinerary normally revolves around an action. The simple acts of getting together for coffee, a meal, or a beer fall under this category. Most actions done in a group have a similar goal: enjoyment. Groups form when multiple people receive enjoyment from the same activity.
These groups can be a powerful source of identity. Students sign up for clubs, intramural sports teams, or service fraternities because they know that the club will plan activities. Coworkers will join volleyball leagues or prayer groups. The club exists to help the members come together.
Often all is well within the group until the members run out of things to do. Problems are prone to arise in a group when the shared activity reaches completion or is removed. Players on a pickup basketball team return to their respective apartments after the final buzzer. Parties are broken up and groups disband when the keg runs dry. In general, friendships of pleasure can easily lapse into confusion in the absence of a shared activity. Friends must start another activity if they want to stay together without things becoming awkward.
One community in particular comes to mind when we talk about shared actions among young adults: the gathering of friends for the sake of drinking (a.k.a., a party). In conversations among young adults on a Friday afternoon, the question “What are we doing tonight?” is the anthem of the weekend. Drinking alcohol is a shared activity around which many students and young adults gather because the convivial effects are conducive to pleasure. The ritual of the weekend begins with purchasing alcohol, continues at a party, and ends when the alcohol runs out.
Yet, the simple goal of pleasure can easily be abused when a deeper goal is absent. Friends become pleasure-seekers, focusing only on the enjoyable effects of the alcohol. They support one another in this quest for pleasure. It is no wonder that this pleasure can quickly turn into drunkenness; drunkenness results from our unquenchable thirst for pleasure. Drunkenness results from our unquenchable thirst for pleasure.
One way to deter someone from seeking a certain type of pleasure is by presenting other, more pleasurable experiences. For example, we may avoid drinking to the point of drunkenness if we want to avoid a hangover. We may abstain from overeating because we do not want to feel sick. That said, the desire to enjoy physical health, while it might be successful in deterring some from drunkenness, is not in itself sufficient for everyone — for some, getting drunk becomes the only goal worth striving for.
As noted above, gathering for the sake of a pleasurable activity has limitations. These limitations can be summed up in the thought of social justice advocate and renowned spiritual writer Jean Vanier. Vanier founded L’Arche, a faith-based community in which individuals with mental/physical disabilities live together with individuals without mental/physical disabilities. He contrasts two different groups that may form when people gather: collaboration and communion.7
According to Vanier, collaboration means “working together for a common goal.” Think about the common goals that are shared at the gatherings you attend. These goals can be constructive, such as working together, learning together, serving at a food pantry, or cheering on a sports team. Or they can be destructive, like a violent mob trying to attack a target. In both cases, Vanier would say that the downside of collaboration lies in the fact that we can gather without “really caring for each other or being bonded together in love.”8 According to his definition, even a constructive gathering can share a set of nondestructive goals that are not rooted in love.
The language that Vanier uses to define collaboration is identical to the language that we have used thus far to define a friendship of pleasure. The relationship is uncanny. With this in mind, we can confidently say that a friendship of pleasure is the result of collaboration. A common goal is shared: the pleasure itself.
We can readily observe the logic of collaboration in our relationships. Gatherings can be as innocent as a crowd at a basketball game or a potluck shared at an apartment. The common goals are entertainment, or laughter and happiness. But
