Philia joins me

One of my favorite writers of all time has a bunch of different characters that travel with him on his journeys. See, the books that this guy writes are all travel novels. And when I say novel I mean walking that incredibly thin line between non and fiction. The stories are absolutely 100% true, everything in them happened. But maybe they didn't happen exactly as described and definitely not always in the order described. And most certainly not with the same companion(s) over time. Because seriously, besides writers and professional travelers (see hippies and bad salesman) who has time to take months off and travel around the country? No one. So this particular writer's solution was to name a companion that would stay through the whole story but would represent the multiple real people that would travel with him.

I think I have that person (people) for my stories finally: Philia.

A writer, actor, speaker and car salesman (no, really) by the name of Mark Price has this on his website (markprice.com): Phillia, which means friendship in modern Greek, a dispassionate virtuous love, was a concept developed by Aristotle. It includes loyalty to friends, family, and community, and requires virtue, equality and familiarity. In ancient texts, philia denoted a general type of love, used for love between family, between friends, a desire or enjoyment of an activity, as well as between lovers. This is the only other word for "love" used in the ancient text of the New Testament besides agape, but even then it is used substantially less frequently.

C.S. Lewis immediately differentiates Friendship Love from the other Loves. He describes Friendship as, "the least biological, organic, instinctive, gregarious and necessary of our Loves" - our species does not need Friendship in order to reproduce. He uses this point to explain that Friendship is exceedingly profound because it is freely chosen.

This is also where the city of Philadelphia gets its name: the place that loves you back, without expectation of reciprocity.

Hey Philia, welcome aboard and glad to have you with me...without expectation of reciprocity.