When they were over we had to hold a post mortem and draw conclusions for future use… We enjoyed one another’s society greatly: we Braves, we hunters, all bound together by shared skill, shared dangers and hardships, esoteric jokes – away from the women and children… certainly often had rituals from which men were excluded.

Long before history began we men have got together apart from the women and done things… We had to plan the hunt and the battle. But … we possess each friend not less, but more as the number of those with whom we share… increases.Ĭompanionship/Clubbableness: the matrix of friendship Above all, Eros (while it lasts) is necessarily between two only. Lovers are normally face to face, absorbed in each other Friends, side by side, absorbed in some common interest. Lovers are always talking to one another about their love Friends hardly ever about their Friendship. Contrasting the friendship and the love affair Kisses, tears and embraces are not in themselves evidence of homosexuality… On a broad historical view it is…not the demonstrative gestures of Friendship among our ancestors but the absence of such gestures in our own society that calls for some special explanation. It has actually become necessary in our time to rebut the theory that every firm and serious friendship is really homosexual… The very lack of evidence is thus treated as evidence the absence of smoke proves that the fire is very carefully hidden… Those who cannot conceive Friendship as a substantive love but only as a disguise or elaboration of Eros betray the fact that they have never had a Friend… There was not blood and guts enough about it to attract the primitivists. …it had not tearful smiles and keepsakes and baby-talk enough to please the sentimentalists. …all that had once commended this love now began to work against it. Friendship is…the least natural of loves the least instinctive, organic, biological, gregarious and necessary…The pack or herd…may even dislike and distrust it. And the possibility of going through life without the experience is rooted in that fact which separates Friendship so sharply from both the other loves. The first and most obvious answer is that few value it because few experience it. The modern world, in comparison, ignores it. To the Ancients, Friendship seemed the happiest and most fully human of all loves the crown of life and the school of virtue.

…very few modern people think Friendship a love of comparable value or even a love at all.

The 4 loves cs lewis