Well, you're either lovers or you're wanting to be lovers or you're trying not to be lovers so you can be friends, but any way you look at it, sex is always looming in the picture like a shadow, like an undertow.
Diane Frolov e Andrew Schneider, American screen-player writers, in Northern Exposure, Get Real, 1991

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.

Love is an abstract term which does not fall within a specific definition. For some it is finding the right person while for some others it is a unique feeling. The sum total of the variegated feeling and ideas would lead to the simple deduction that love is end product of a desire to have a partner, a partner who compliments an individual's desires, feelings and emotions.

Difference Between Love and Friendship What is friendship, and love? Is there a difference? These are two of the questions that have always intrigued most people. Unfortunately, precise and concise answers to such a question cannot be given. The least that can be said about these two is that both complement each other and that friendship is a subset of love! Friendship

So what exactly is friendship? How do we define it? Why do we call a person our friend? When do we call someone a very good friend? These are questions to which answers can be sought but then they are case specific.

Friendship is not a state of mind, it's an act. It's something you do, it's not about whether you're good or not, it's not a reflection of you, it's a balanced relationship between people. It varies from person to person. But to define friendship loosely one could say that:

We call those people our friends whom

* We care and are ready to help us during times of distress

* With whom we share most of our thoughts

* We can always count upon our during an emergency

Friendship and love are not quite the same thing, although there's a lot of love around friendship. We are always sure that our friend will understand why we acted in a certain way. We need not explain anything to our very good friends. The friendship is so deep and the relationship is so intimate, that most of the things are automatically understood by our friends.

Love
The primary aspect in love, which makes it stand apart from friendship, is that the two individuals share a certain intimacy, which is greater than friendship

* A primary element in love is the physical element. Friendship has its boundaries defined and no matter how close you are with your friend, it is devoid of physical intimacy. The individuals look at an emotional quotient, which also involves their sexual attachment with each other. This is a vital difference between friendship and love

* In love, individuals generally have only one partner as against friendship. You may have numerous people whom you could call friends/ good friends but there exists only one person with whom you are in love

* A loving relationship makes one so much attached to the other, that one gets pained if his/her beloved is hurt!

* Friendship may last for a life time as does love and relationship but then the time spent by the individuals with each other is high in love / relationship as compared to friendship Life without love is like a year without spring. One could say that love is friendship plus physical closeness.