(This is the continuation of last week's article.)

Many different aspects of friendship deserve to be discussed. While I have already made clear the intimate nature of friendship, confiding in them, we are still unclear as to how to gain these friends.

The best and perhaps hardest answer is that there is no one answer. At least, no one answer for how we come across our friends – we stumble upon them as if by accident. This is circumstance. However, once met, should you make every person a friend, going beyond mere circumstance? Obviously not: think of how many different people you meet in a day, all the different levels of acquaintance. If intimacy is at least partially defined by rarity, then making a true friend of everyone makes "true friends" meaningless.

But let us say that you have indeed found someone whom you are willing to trust as a friend. What happens? You have made a judgment and have now entered a kind of 'mutual cycle' of judgment and trust. This never happens instantaneously, which is why I call it a cycle; the mutual trust and judgment continually grows and strengthens the members of the friendship, the whole becoming more than the parts.

This also answers the question of degree. You might call some people friends but others better friends. We can rightfully make this claim because different people might be at different places in the cycle. You trust one friend more than another, but they are both friends.

Keep in mind that trust and judgment are not static. By this I mean that your judgments and your sense of trust will change over time, in part thanks to your friends. They will shape your judgments even as you judge, and trust is a mutual sculptor of the mind. This transformation should be to the betterment of both parties, but to what end? I assume that the chief end of friendship (while the chief end of man is a different story) is happiness. Or rather, we desire to be happy, and friendship is a fulfillment of this desire.

But happiness does not equal emotional pleasure or constant affirmation.

If you seek friendship only to be affirmed in everything you do or to be liked without any thought to virtue, you will not find friends; you will find toadies, people you have bought rather than gained as friends. Now, friends can affirm – that much is obvious. But there must be a corrective element in the friendship, hence judgment, hence concern for virtue. Is a friend really a friend if they will not offer you advice when you are in the wrong? Perhaps there exist some who have perfect self knowledge and so are able to correct themselves at a moment's notice.

I have not met these people.

We need friends. We need to love, we need to be loved. We need correction, we need advice. We must help them as they would help us. Virtue and good living are themselves debatable topics, but friends are indisputably necessary for these and for the human experience as a whole.