Of all the types of friendships, those we call “best friendships” are the most dangerous. Yes, best friends are those who we call when we’ve had a bad day, who comfort us in our sadness and rejoice in our gladness, and who listen patiently and empathetically to our hopes and disappointments. Best friends are the kind of people we may not talk to for months, and yet when we see them next, we pick up right where we left off. We call these friends “best” because they speak to some of our deepest longings in life—our desire to feel heard and to feel safe, to have our interests understood and our values supported.

But if this is all we strive for in our friendships, we have deeply misunderstood the nature of friendship and happiness to which we are called as Christians. In fact, this vision of friendship almost lulled me (Douglas) into a permanent spiritual malaise.

Until I was quite far into adulthood, my approach to friendship was simple: I thought friendship was founded only on shared interests, perspectives, pastimes, and care, so I sought out people who were like me, who shared my predilections for politics and partying. I surrounded myself with politically vocal and prolific drinkers, and to my delight, they were eager to support me in my views and aspirations, my fears and struggles. That might not sound so bad. And yet the support these friends were giving me was the last thing I needed. My views were judgmental and simplistic; my aspirations were worldly and self-centred. My fears and struggles were misdirected, self-inflicted, and disconnected from meaningful pursuits. I was careening toward an aimless life in an existential echo chamber, and I had no idea.

At the same time, something was happening to me that I did not understand and certainly could not articulate at the time, though I noticed its strangeness. People began entering my life who called themselves “Christians,” and there were more of them than I was comfortable with. Christianity was obviously a vestige of backward moral thinking and the fear-driven superstitions of simple people. But these Christians, whom I came very quickly to respect and admire, believed all of it. They talked about their lives in constant reference to the example set by Jesus, examining their behaviour, their decision-making, their relationships, and their weaknesses with utter vulnerability and always against a standard of ultimate goodness. I was later to learn that these Christians were atypical, not in their love for God, but in their commitment to friendship as a vehicle for transformation. I was shocked to see how valuable these kinds of relationships were and how their commitment to spiritual and moral growth was nearly absent from my other friendships.

At the end of this road was my conversion. God was clearly after me, and he chose these friendships to be the vehicle of my transformation. Of course, there were other important moments on my way to Christ: C.S. Lewis’s incisive apologies of the faith were critical, as was Terrence Malick’s film Tree of Life, which jolted me out of the dogmatic slumber of (un)critical rationalism (as I now call my old paradigm) and caused me to attend church for the first time in more than two decades. But the critical element—other than God’s love of such an unworthy soul as mine—was these unique friendships that made moral and spiritual aspiration the heart of the matter.

Here’s what I learned: For all the comfort and security that best friendships offer us, there is another vision of friendship that fills our lives with purpose, meaning, and love. This vision offers much greater goods—goods that may even save our spiritual lives. In fact, the more we overlook these greater goods, the more we cripple our capacity to love the very people we cherish most.

Several years later I found the philosophical explanation of this life lesson in Aristotle’s famous paean to friendship laid out in the Nicomachean Ethics. The great philosopher of antiquity did not use the term “best friends” to describe what he considered the supreme form of friendship. He called them “perfect” or “complete” friendships—teleia philia. Teleia is an adjective derived from the noun telos (goal or end) and means “goal-like” or “consummate.” What makes a friendship more or less complete in Aristotle’s sense is whether it helps us achieve the highest goal in life: virtue. For many, the word “virtue” connotes performing onerous moral duties that detract from our happiness. But for Aristotle, the virtues are inexhaustible sources of joy and satisfaction. When we act generously or justly, we experience a deep resonance with the world around us, one that causes us to feel a profound and enduring pleasure that well exceeds the enjoyments of the flesh.

Aristotle, along with almost all the ancient non-Christian and Christian thinkers, thought that virtue is excellence in living. But just as it is difficult to become an excellent pianist or painter, it is difficult to become an excellent liver of life. Acquiring the virtues requires practice and perseverance. We’re apt to falter and fail, so we need persistent moral inspiration. This is where our friends come in. Complete friends educate us in myriad ways about how we can make our lives more worth living.

Complete friendships are worth striving for because they challenge us to something higher. They inspire us to honesty, integrity, courage, generosity, joy, hope, and sacrifice. Of course, complete friends listen empathetically when we are suffering, but they also help us discover how our suffering might make us more humane and just, stronger and more alive. “Greater love has no one than this,” says Jesus, “than to lay down one’s life for his friends” (John 15:13).

Complete friendships possess something that many best friendships—even best Christian friendships—do not. They are marked by a virtue-seeking dimension. They are directed toward the mutual pursuit of good character and excellent living. Complete friends love us not just for the people we currently are but for who we could or should be. Just as doubles partners on a tennis team challenge each other to be the best players they can be, regularly offering suggestions about how to hone and improve their performance, so too virtue-seeking friends regularly offer ideas and insights about how to hone and improve their moral and spiritual lives. Best friendships, on the other hand, are often confined to what we might call a comfort-seeking dimension: to a mutual care and camaraderie that creates togetherness but not necessarily goodness. Turning to our doubles partners, it’s as if, for fear of wounding each other’s egos, they withhold their suggestions for improvement and thereby undermine each other’s best chances of success. Of course, our best friends can, and frequently do, make us better. But typically that is not the primary goal of the friendship—it is often just a happy accident. Inasmuch as best friendships intentionally and consistently do make us better people, they show themselves to be what they really are: complete friendships.

But that is putting things optimistically. Best friendships might also, because of their special status in the pantheon of modern values, become impervious to moral evaluation, in effect sheltering us from growth.

Prior to becoming a Christian, I (Mark) had intimate friendships. Because I was raised by parents who were transparent about their lives, my early friendships were marked by an extreme closeness. I shared my worries, struggles, hopes, and ambitions with my friends without fear of judgment and enjoyed what I took to be one of the greatest of social goods: camaraderie, support, seen-ness. In fact, my friends and I prided ourselves on how close we were, on how much we shared.

The problem was that, like Douglas’s situation, this sharing was done for its own sake. We never considered whether the thoughts and emotions we shared were good or the right ones to have.

It wasn’t until I met people committed to virtue-seeking friendship, again in Christian circles, that things began to change. I came to see how sharing in friendships can be redeemed when goodness is our goal. I decided, perhaps radically, to make every significant decision in my life with these friends who, like me, were committed to the good. It may sound extreme, but I asked my friends whether I should take a new job. I asked them about all manner of marital and child-rearing decisions. I even asked them about what shoes I should buy, or whether I should buy new shoes at all. The list goes on and on. Now I talk with my handful of complete friends usually dozens of times a week to discuss little and big things. And to my surprise I have seen my friendships based on sharing for its own sake slowly diminish, while those based on sharing to seek the good have become the most permanent relationships in my life.

The notion that goodness begets permanency in friendship is controversial, even among those sympathetic to Aristotle’s understanding of friendship. To Aristotle, it was clear that founding friendships on virtue would make them durable because virtue itself is durable: it arises out of hard-earned, practiced habits of mind and spirit that he calls hexis (which even sounds durable). And yet Kristján Kristjánsson, one of the most prominent neo-Aristotelian scholars of our day, questions Aristotle’s claim. In Friendship for Virtue, Kristjánsson uses real and imagined examples to argue that even virtue-seeking friendships dissolve, that Aristotle was not far-sighted enough to appreciate how the exigencies, uncertainties, and spontaneities of a complex life can lead two close friends committed to virtue to nonetheless part ways. On first glance, Kristjánsson’s skepticism about the permanence of complete friends seems correct, because it is not uncommon for our friendships to change over time. But this is to misunderstand the special character of complete friendships.

Kristjánsson conflates close friendships in the modern sense (i.e., best friendships) with complete friendships in the Aristotelian sense (i.e., virtue-seeking friendships). The reason close friendships tend to dissolve is that they lack what we might call a mature commitment to virtue that complete friendship requires. In practice, this mature commitment to virtue means the radical intermixing of our lives with our friends, inviting them into our day-to-day decision-making as much as we can. Durability, permanency, and lifelong commitment naturally arise out of the common realization that we need our friends in an especially deep way. We need them to be our partners in the difficult moral and spiritual reflection that life decisions require. And once we take the chance and start reflecting with our friends like this, we see very quickly that we would never want to live without them. Aristotle claims that complete friends become “second selves.” This claim makes sense: our friends are faculties of good living that we cannot house in our minds but must ever keep in our lives.

Of course, one might still wonder what would happen if two complete friends did not see eye to eye on an important decision. In this case, they would immediately recognize that one or the other must be mistaken. But since they are each other’s “second self,” neither would categorically assume that it was the other who was mistaken. They would humbly approach the difficulty, trusting each other’s character, and make a plan for adjudicating between the differing views. Typically, they would have one or two other complete friends to whom they would appeal for support. These friends would weigh in on the decision and together as a group decide what action should be taken. This might seem hard to imagine because disagreements in friendship often lead to disappointment and sometimes even to feelings of mistrust or betrayal.

What does complete friendship mean for rethinking and reforming friendship today? It may seem like this kind of virtue-seeking friendship makes overly stringent demands on our social lives. Friendships involve a complex coming together of souls shaped by unique family backgrounds, educational experiences, romantic relationships, and career choices. How can we ever say what is “right” for our friends? Moreover, no one wants to be the friend who is seen as passing judgment. Doesn’t Aristotle’s insistence on virtue-seeking friendship undercut the open-hearted listening and acceptance that our closest friends so uniquely offer us?

This may be our fear, but it is not the truth. Seeking goodness in friendships means neither judging our friends nor assuming we know what is best for them. It means cultivating a special kind of relationship with them—one in which both sides joyfully seek to grow together toward virtue. This commitment to growth might make us uneasy because it seems to demand that we confront our friends about their shortcomings. However, in complete friendships both friends are in constant conversation about the moral quality of their actions and relish the prospect of discovering new ways to flourish, grow, and do good in the world.

The first step toward developing complete friendships is thinking honestly about our own moral trajectories. The uncomfortable fact is that for complete friendship to develop we have to want to become better people. If we want merely to keep living our lives as we currently are, then we will lack the essential ingredient for cultivating these special kinds of friendships.

Unfortunately, even if we want to become better people and pursue such friendships, it has never been harder to do so. The omnipresence of social media, endless scrolling on our mobile devices, hectic social schedules, and exhaustion from work all leave us with less interest in and time for our friends. In all these areas, we experience a kind of human connection. But that experience is deceptive. It offers us a semblance of intimacy but denies us the joy and happiness that morally committed friendships provide.

Another challenge to developing complete friendships—in Christian circles at least—is the implicit belief that moral and spiritual growth with others is best found in Bible studies, home groups, or other modes of formal fellowship. We often think that if we share our struggles and doubts with our brothers and sisters at church, then we have experienced deep fellowship and don’t need to seek the same support among friends. But this is mistaken. Friends have a special connection to our hearts. Their example and their wisdom have the greatest chance of shaping our moral course.

Despite these challenges, complete friendships are still possible today if we are willing to make a few important changes. The first change is to radically commit to the ideal of friendship—that is, to the notion that friendships can be more or less complete. Changing our perspective on the kinds of friendships we seek allows us to reimagine what’s possible with the friends we have, or it inspires us to find new friends if necessary.

Second, we need to invite our friends to participate in our moral and spiritual lives as much as possible. We are often afraid of sharing what’s really going on with us internally and avoid asking our friends how best to move forward. We must learn to trust that the more we share life with our friends, the more satisfying their and our lives will become. Of course, this assumes that our friends are sufficiently committed to virtue. If they are not, then we must find some that are.

Third, we need to spend much more time with our friends than we do now. Our busy lives may seem to make this time investment impossible. But when we recognize that our happiness depends on the quality of our friendships, a change will come over us. We will discover that there are many more opportunities to weave together our lives with friends than we initially thought possible.

Complete friendship sets a high bar. And yet it’s worth striving for. The aspiration to complete friendship helps us envision our lives unfolding in genuine community and enduring fellowship. Best friends may provide us comfort, but they can never grant us this compelling vision of life—of how we can, in our own unique way, make the world a better place. We need to retrieve complete friendship as a vital human practice, a lifelong activity in which our souls join with others to pursue the best kind of life.