Reflection Paper About Friendship

C.S. Lewis begins this chapter, about Friendship, by saying that Friendship love is the least necessary out of the four loves; it is not a love that is required for survival. Friendship love requires a person to choose whether or not they want to love another. Despite this rather depressing fact, we often choose to share Friendship love with those who have similar desires, interests, or beliefs. However, C.S. Lewis argues that true friendship is hard to come by. Most of the friendships that we have would be categorized, by Lewis, as Companionship. From my understanding, companionships are between two friends. When a third person is added, this companionship becomes a friendship. Nevertheless, the members of this companionship or friendship have similar goals, interests, beliefs, etc.

Lewis suggests that Friendship love is the least jealous of all of the loves because when we are building friendships, we are asking for more people to join our group. The more people we share commonalities with, the more our group of friends begins to feel like a family. We need to be careful, however, because we can quickly lose sight of the purposes of friendship and begin developing a closed-minded

There are still many parts of this chapter that confuse me, such as the difference between companionship and friendship, but for the most part, the rest of the chapter was comprehensible. Lewis touched on some really interesting points about the need of friendship in our lives. He argues that we do not need friendships in order to survive, but I beg to differ. For starters, many of the friendships that I am blessed to be a part of are almost categorized as familial friendships. In other words, I view many, if not all of my very close friends as family; I would do anything for them! This begs the question, if I view my closest friends as family, is my love for them considered affection