Think about your friends. The colleague you help out and who helps you, the group you go out with on Saturday nights, the person you would call at three in the morning. They are all friendships, yet we feel they are not the same. More than two thousand years ago Aristotle tried to explain why, and his words still speak to us today.
In the Nicomachean Ethics, written in the fourth century BC, the Greek philosopher devotes two whole books, the eighth and the ninth, to friendship. According to Aristotle there are three kinds of friendship. The first is based on usefulness: we spend time together because each of us gets something from the other. The second is based on pleasure: we enjoy being together because we have fun. The third, the highest, is between people who wish the other’s good for the other’s own sake, not for what they receive. The first two are not wrong, they are part of life, but they tend to end when the advantage or the fun ends. The third lasts, because it rests on who people really are. But it is rare and it takes patience: Aristotle quotes a proverb of his time saying that to truly know each other, people must have eaten a lot of salt together.
Modern science, in its own way, agrees. A large meta-analysis published in 2010 in PLoS Medicine by Julianne Holt-Lunstad and colleagues, pooling 148 studies, found that people with strong social relationships had a 50% greater likelihood of survival than those with weak ties. Real relationships are not just a pleasure: they are a form of health.
What can we take from this lesson? First, a little leniency: not every friendship has to be deep, and that’s fine. Then, some care for the few that truly are, made of shared time, listening and being present even when there’s nothing to gain. And finally, an honest question: not only who my third-kind friends are, but for whom I am one.
Today, try sending a message to one of these people, for no particular reason. That, too, is how we eat salt together.
Sources
- Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Books VIII-IX
- Kraut R., “Aristotle’s Ethics”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Holt-Lunstad J., Smith T.B., Layton J.B. (2010), “Social Relationships and Mortality Risk: A Meta-analytic Review”, PLoS Medicine, 7(7), e1000316
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