Friendship, love, lovers and sex

Friendship has very little or nothing to do with sex. Friendship is different from many kinds of love exactly for that reason. And yet, in one way or another, sex may intervene in our concepts and practise of friendship.

We all know how sex can disturb the relations between a man and a woman. Unrequited sexual feelings can cause retreat of the partner that is desired but who does not feel desire. And that can interrupt the friendship’s development, or represent its ending.

When Lord Byron wrote that «Friendship is love without his wings», he was comparing friendship with romantic love, or at least with the current couple’s love. The «wings» he talked about were the wings of love between men and women – something necessarily connected to sex and the dreaming and enchantment it can imply and inspire. Something that doesn’t exist in friendship.

When in classic Greece and Rome an author such as Aristotle defined friendship as «one soul inhabiting two bodies», apparently he was conceiving friendship independently of sex and man and woman’s love relationship.

And in a way he was. But we shouldn’t also forget that Aristotelian friendship was connected to the active devaluation of woman and the couple’s love. Women were, for Aristotle and most of his male contemporaries, inferior beings («Women are defective by nature (…). A woman is as it were an infertile male».)

The couple’s love – and the lyrical and romantic love in particular – is largely underestimated and even denied by Aristotle. His friendship – restricted to men – was misogynistic. Though in a subterranean way, sex (or its devaluation) did inspire the Aristotelian concepts of friendship.