This is another small-sized volume, of about 150 pages. While falling in love rises out of the nascent state and takes possession of the individual before s/he has been able to ascertain whether love is reciprocated, friendship grows gradually, meeting after meeting, on the basis of the reality principle. A (true) friend is someone who understands you, whom you can confide in and trust, who is on your side and stands up for you. Friendship is therefore a moral kind of love. Hence the definition: friendship is the ethical form of eros. Consequently, if a friend betrays your trust, the friendship is destroyed and cannot be rebuilt.

While falling in love is uncertainty and trepidation, friendship is certainty and trust. Time is fraught and intense when one is in love, whereas in friendship it can scatter like grains of sand. Lovers suffer if they are separated and when they come back together they want to know everything the other has been doing, whereas two friends meeting again even after a long time feel as if they are picking up a conversation where they left off. While falling in love is exclusive, friendship is a network. We can have more than one friend, and s/he in turn has others, and so on.

Contrary to what many people think, friendship is present in both male and female, child and adult, and its structure is always the same.