Section 6: Relations between these three kinds of friendship

Between annoying people and elderly people friendship arises less readily, inasmuch as they are less good-tempered and enjoy companionship less. For these are thought to be the greatest marks of friendship and to produce it. This is why, while young people tend to become friends quickly, old people do not. It is because people don’t become friends with those they don’t find enjoyable to be around. And similarly annoying people don’t make friends quickly either. But such people may have goodwill toward each other. For they wish one another well and aid one another in need. But they are hardly friends because they do not spend their days together nor enjoy being with each other, and these are thought the greatest marks of friendship.

One cannot be a friend to many people in the sense of having a complete or true friendship with them, just as one cannot be in love with many people at once (for love is a sort of excess of feeling, and it is the nature of such only to be felt towards one person). And it is not easy for many people at the same time to please the same person very much, or perhaps even to seem good to that person. In a true friendship, one must also acquire some experience of the other person and become familiar with them, and that is very hard. But with a view to utility or pleasure it is possible that many people should please one. For many people are useful or pleasant, and doing things useful or enjoyable take little time.

Of friendships of utility and friendships of pleasure, friendships of pleasure are the more like friendship, when both parties get the same things from each other and delight in each other or in the same things, as happens in the friendships among young people. For generosity is more found in such friendships.

Friendship based on usefulness is for the commercially minded. People who are supremely happy, too, have no need of useful friends, but do need pleasant friends. For they wish to spend their lives with someone. And although they can endure for a short time what is painful, no one could put up with it continuously, nor even with the Good Itself if it were painful to him. This is why they look out for friends who are pleasant. Perhaps they should look for friends who, being pleasant, are also good, and good for them. For so they will have all the characteristics that friends should have.

People in positions of authority seem to have friends who fall into distinct classes. Some people are useful to them and others are pleasant, but the same people are rarely both. For they seek neither those whose pleasantness is accompanied by virtue nor those whose utility is with a view to noble objects, but in their desire for pleasure they seek for entertaining people, and their other friends they choose as being clever at doing what they are told, and these characteristics are rarely combined.

Now we have said that the good person is at the same time pleasant and useful. But such a person does not become the friend of a superior, unless the person is superior in virtue too (since otherwise he doesn’t achieve proportionate quality as an inferior). But people who are superior both in social rank and virtue are not easy to find.

However that may be, the friendships of utility and pleasure we’ve been talking about involve equality. For the friends get the same things from one another and wish the same things for one another, or exchange one thing for another, for example enjoyment for usefulness. We have said, however, that they are both less truly friendships and less permanent.

But it is from their likeness and their unlikeness to true friendships that pleasure and utility friendships are thought both to be and not to be friendships. It is by their likeness to the true friendship of virtue that they seem to be friendships (for one of them involves pleasure and the other utility, and these characteristics belong to the friendship of virtue as well). But it is because the true friendship of virtue is immune from slander and permanent, while in pleasure and utility friendships these can quickly change (besides differing from the in many other respects), that pleasure and utility friendships appear not to be friendships. That is, it is because of their unlikeness to the friendship of virtue.