That isn't really friendship.
Friendship is a commitment we make. It is unconditional, and should not be made lightly. It is my honor that is at stake when I choose to call someone friend.

I don't agree with your value point system regarding friendship.

and I certainly don't agree that a relationship = friends + sex.

Commitment? No! Unconditional? We are not babies anymore, we judge and only base someone on how much value they have. Even a daughter or a son have the ability to denounce their mother if she does something that makes her lose her value. However, because they are the offspring of their mother, they still obligate themselves to return to their mother and forgive her and restore some of her value points. Can you continuously satisfy your friend? Even a 20 year old friendship can suddenly end if ONE thing causes you to lose all the value your friend had put on you. ONE thing! Defeating so much more? Talk about currency exchange.

This is how we were taught to be. It is not natural.

The sum is greater than the parts. A change in quality. But the basic quantitative equation gets one there nevertheless.

then what is the difference between a relationship and friends with benefits?

A failure to recognize quality. A deafness. A blindness. A numbness. In the heart or wherever. Some kind of impairment. A disability. Perhaps willed like a closing of ones eyes to the truth. The friendship cannot not change qualitatively unless everyone involved keeps their eyes closed the whole time.

I don't buy it. A person can love a friend in a way that is purely friendship and have sex with them in a way that is purely sexual and still have a valuable friendship with them in which there is comfort and trust. Yet it never develops into a relationship where romantic love is involved. it can happen. trust me.

Never worked that way for me. I suppose its possible but for me it has always either ended the friendship or began the relationship. Granted perhaps I have a smaller sample set than you do in which case I will defer somewhat to your evidence yet still remain somewhat skeptical until I experience what you are talking about first hand.

I have only one experience, actually. I'm not saying it's a likely scenario, I'm only saying that a relationship is more than just friendship and sexual intimacy.

Things often happen that way,in life, sure. The principles of friendship, however, are that which I have stated, at least. Human beings have difficulty being principled, especially in our present society of self .

There is still such a thing as honor, it is it's own reward.
I don't honor anyone for themselves. I practice honor for myself.
It's a way of living for self, without selfishness.

The best part of being human is that we aren't stuck with being natural.
Nature really isn't that pretty when you are being eaten.

ITS GREED AND SEXUAL DESIRES!

You tell yourself that you want to have your soul mate, but be honest, you want sex, and you want someone to be around you. Its for your own good. You also want the woman thats the most valuable to you. A woman who does things that you agree with and that makes you happy.

Most relationships end in divorce because the sex eventually loses its ability to raise the value, and the couple know each other for so long that they start coughing up truths and getting irritated with each other.

Trust me, if a man found the perfect soul mate, then the woman must have been very willing to remain married and not leave.

You make a lot of assumptions. Your first assumption is that I'm a male. But I'll let that slide. Onto your more important assumptions. What is a soul mate? I don't really buy all of that stuff, either. I don't believe that there is any magic involved in loving a person. There's no "soul mate." You aren't meant for one person and one person only. People meet, they develop a relationship, and then they work hard in order to maintain that relationship. That's all it is.

"A person who does things that you agree with." No, not necessarily. I want someone who thinks for themselves and has a mind for individualism.

"Someone that makes me happy." In general yes, but my friends make me happy as well as people that I am romantically involved with, much in the same way.

And though sex is important to a relationship, I doubt it is the only thing that has the ability to "raise value," as you are so keen on defending, in a marriage. And why do you assume that the woman is the one who much be "very willing...?" What is that about?

Or less?????????

What if your friend doesn't hold up his end of the friendship? Or suppose something worse - he does things that are harmful to you. Can you exit the friendship with honor? What exceptions, if any, do you make to friendship being unconditional?

You are all a little mixed up.
There are four loves,
Affection,
Friendship,
Eros,
Charity.

Some lead onto others some lead away.
Some are stationary,
some are progressional.
But each and all are seperate and singularly experienced.
Try not to mix them up, just try to define the progression or regression.

Friendship;
"But very few modern people think Friendship a love of comparable value or even a love at all"

This was published in 1940-50 but all of what you will read soon will clear this up.
I am with Lewis here no one in our 'modern' society has a firm grasp of what Friendship is.
Let alone 'modernist' mistaking love for romance.

"To the Ancients, Friendship seemed the happiest and most fully human of all loves; the crown of life and the school of virtue. The modern world in comparison ignores it."

"Friendship is- in a sense not at all derogatory to it- the least natural of the loves; the least instinctive, organic, biological, gregarious and necessary. It has least commerce with our nerves; there is nothing throaty about it; nothing that quickens the pulse or turns you red and pale. It is essentially between individuals; the moment two men are friends they have some degree drawn apart together from the herd. Without Eros none of us would have been begotten and without Affection none of us would have been reared; but we can live and breed without Friendship."

The species biologically considered, has no need of it.

The pack or herd- the community- may even dislike and distrust it"

We must try to remember that Friendship has little to do with the nerves and more to do with solodarity of the mind and interests.
(Think like a 1950s English gentleman, not a child of the gratifist century)

"This (so to call it) 'non natural' quality in Friendship goes far to explain why it was exalted in acient and medieval times and has come to be made light of in our own. The deepest and most permanent thought of those ages was ascetic and world-renouncing. Nature and emotion and the body were feared as dangers to our souls, or despised as degradations of our human status. Inevitably that sort of love was most prized which seemed most independant, or even defiant, of mere nature. Affection and Eros were too obviously connected with our nerves, too obviously shared with the brutes. You could feel these tugging at your guts and fluttering in your diaphragm. But in Friendship- in that luminous, tranquil, rational wolrd of relationships freely chosen- you got away from all that."

Think about that word 'rational', a Friend was and truthfully expositioned is rationality over emotionality.
It deals in the facts not in the fictions. (that is bit misserable of me for saying)

"This alone, of all the loves, seemed to raise you to the level of gods or angels"


"But then came Romanticism and 'tearful comedy' and the 'return to nature' and the exaltation od Sentiment; and in thier train all that grew wallow of emotion whcih, though often criticised, has lasted ever since. Finally, the exaltation of instinct, the dark gods in the blood; whose hierophants may be incapable of male friendship. Under this new dispansation all that had once commended this love now began to work against it. It had not tearful smiles and keepsakes and baby-talk enough to please the sentimentalities. There was not blood and guts enough about it to attract the primitivists. It looked thin and etiolated; a sort of vegetarian substitute for the more organic loves."

Then came forth programes and ideologies like 'Friends' which is a misnomer by many degress. Dealing more in the other loves than what true Friendship is.

"Friendship's certificates ar enot very satisfactory. Again, that outlook which values th ecollective above the individual necessarily disparages Friendship; it is a relation between men at their highest level of individuality. It withdraws men from collective 'togetherness' as surly as solitude itself could do; and more dangerously, for it withdraws them by twos and threes. Some forms of democratic sentiment are naturally hostile to it because it is selective and an affair of the few.
To say 'these are my friends' implies 'those are not'
For all these reasons if a man believes (as i do) that the old estimate of Friendship was the correct one, he can hardly write a chapter on it except as a rehabilitation."

All comes form C.S Lewis 'The Four Loves'

(Will be back with more later, i need to go out.)

But surfice to say some of you know some parts of Friendship and some other parts.

But over all i think 'Friendship' here has the littlest to do with modern love than any of the other loves.
I truly believe true friendship is a dying possition and even a study.
We could all here if we were not openly emotionly attached call it a place for Friendship. But i will come back soon and explain this better, i have to go out for a while.
Friendship is actually more accademic, but will come to that later.
In the meantime, enjoy this poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson which both i and Lewis agree describes 'Friendship' better than i can.
Poets' Corner - Alfred, Lord Tennyson - In Memoriam

---------- Post added 05-02-2010 at 04:08 AM ----------

I love you all in one form or other.

Usually Charity:lol:

Just quickly because i promised;
C.S. Lewis 'The Four Loves'
"Those who cannot conceive Friendship as a substantive love but only as a disguise or elabouration of Eros betray the fact that they have never had a friend"
Friendship may be the hardest love to gain or find, the most expensive, but is it the love most worth payment?

"The rest of us know that though we can have erotic love and friendship for the same person yet in some ways nothing is less a Friendship than a love-affair."
Progression and regression of Friendship, not both at the sam etime.
Can we ever experience more than one love at the same time,
can one be both selfishly in love and selflessly loved?

"Lovers are always talking to one another about their love; Friends hardly ever talk about thier friendship"
Friends hardly talk about love becaus ethey ar enot trying to progree or regress it.
Friendship may be the perfect love?
.
"Lovers are normally face to face, absorbed in each other; Friends side by side, absorbed in common interest."
Yes you can nothing in common with the othe rhtre eloves but with friendship this is a must.

"Lamb says somewhere that if, of three friends (A,B and C), A should die, then B not only loses A but 'A's part in C', while C loses not only A but 'A's part in B'. In each of my friends ther eis osmething that only some other friend can fully bring out.
By Myself i am not large enough to call the whole man into tactivity; I want other lights than my own to show all hi sfacets.
Now that Charles is dead, I shall never again see Ronald's reaction to a speacifically Caroline joke. Far from having more of Ronald, having him 'to myself' now that Charles is away, I have less of Ronald.
Hence true Friendship is the least jealous of loves. Two friends delight to be joined by a third, and htree by a fourth, if only the new comer is qualified to become a real friend."
They can then say, as the blessed souls say in Dante, 'Here comes one who will augment our loves'. For in this love 'to divide is not to take away'."
Friednship truly is the most productive love.

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

I second Dave's comment. From and evolutionary perspective an organism; and yes that does also include us, for religiously brainwashed or any anthropocentric's :sarcastic: in this thread, and organism will move away from an entity that causes displeasure:brickwall: and toward:bigsmile: an entity that causes pleasure. The simplest action of a human hand quickly pulling away from the hot flame can be equated to how we 'naturally' go about our sociodynamics actions and respones in a relationship.

We move toward that which is pleasurable to us (the majority of the time), we move toward those that make us happy, that provide us with something, anything really, that is of some benefit to us. Self-preservation my friends, self-preservation, and many humanists may disagree but this is the fundamental driving force behind our actions in relationships. People who make us laugh, people who makes us happy, people, whose mere presence, can sometimes trigger thousands of minute neurological impulses that flood our body with dopamine and oxytocin. A mouse to the cheese, a rabbit to the carrot, for you can lead a dog round in circles, if you tempt it with a bone.

What I am getting at here is that, if these things are true, which there is an overwhelming amount of evidence for, then are we fundamentally selfish beings? Self-preservation is ultimately a selfish drive. Think of your last partner, can you honestly say that you would leave them forever, if you new that there was someone out there who could treat them better? Love them better? I doubt it, we are too hung up on our own emotional high to ever relinquish something so euphoric. In the intermediate phases of the initial infatuation and most likely from that point onwards, we are obessed with these feelings. I recently asked a lesbian friend of mine, why she was so interested in a girl she had just started dating? I got the typical response that I expected "because she makes me feel good". Emphasis on the 'me' part. Is it wrong? to be selfish? shouldn't love, or rather, the most pure form of love, be about wanting the best for the other person, wanting to please them and make them happy? We are selfish, we do not have to be, but we are, naturally, either embrace it or try to change it.