Too little
Convenient disappearance
“I hardly know them, really.”
You make distance from the person a way to protect your standing.
Loyalty
Keep a place for your friend when the easy crowd moves on.
Steadfast concern for a particular person’s good despite inconvenience or social pressure.
Loyalty sustains concern for a particular person’s good when inconvenience or social pressure makes withdrawal tempting. It gives a friendship continuity beyond the occasions when company is easy or impressive. Standing by a person can include refusing what would harm them or someone else.
Loyalty gives friendship a steadier place to stand
The chairs have been arranged in a splendid circle. Your friend, newly out of favor, has somehow ended up outside it. You could admire the excellent arrangement. Instead, you pick up your chair and sit beside them. The furniture has survived a change of plan; the conversation can, too.
Finding the balance in Loyalty
An illustrative everyday situation
A group mocks an absent friend after an embarrassing but harmless mistake.
A fitting response
Steadfast regard
“They made a mistake. That is not the whole person I know.”
You resist an unfair dismissal without denying what happened.
Pursued too far
Blind allegiance
“Whatever they did, I will defend it.”
Attachment replaces ethical judgment and can harm the friend as well as others.
You can remain on a person’s side without declaring every action right.
When the situation changes
If the friend has harmed someone, support may mean urging repair or declining to participate. Loyalty does not turn another person’s legitimate complaint into an attack to defeat.
What Loyalty makes possible
A friendship can become less dependent on status, convenience or a perfect performance. Someone can know that a difficult week does not erase a shared history. Loyalty does not guarantee that every relationship should continue unchanged.
Loyalty in ordinary life
Across a quiet year
You contact an old friend you have not spoken to in a year, without first deciding whose turn it was. The small greeting leaves room for the lives you have both been living.
Showing up
A friend’s small exhibition falls on an inconvenient evening. You make the manageable effort to attend, rather than waiting until their success attracts a crowd.
Nearby virtues, different work
Integrity
Integrity keeps your ethical standard whoever is involved; loyalty sustains particular concern when abandoning someone would be easier.
Benevolence
Benevolence wishes others well; loyalty gives a particular attachment continuity through inconvenience or pressure.
Loyalty and its counterfeits
Counterfeit: The protective cover-up
Concealing wrongdoing is a counterfeit of loyalty. A friend’s good may require an honest refusal and repair.
Counterfeit: The permanent debt
Demanding lifelong access because you once stood by someone is a counterfeit of steadfast care. Support does not purchase another person.
How to cultivate Loyalty
Notice when convenience or status is choosing your company for you.
Make a small, sustainable act of support concrete.
Keep concern for the person separate from approval of the act.
Try it today
Think of a friend whose company you value but have neglected through busyness. Send a small greeting or suggest a time to catch up, unless they have asked for distance or no contact.
In friendship
Stand by your friend without standing behind their wrongdoing.
Questions worth returning to
Would I make the same effort if nobody important noticed?
What would support this person’s good rather than merely defend their image?
Keep the practice proportionate
Loyalty does not require covering wrongdoing, hostility to critics, unwanted contact or remaining in a harmful relationship.
About these practices · DisclaimerQuotations and further reading
Seven selections to return to through the week. Follow a source link to read the surrounding passage.
Now the qualities we ought to look out for in making our selection are firmness, stability, constancy.
Laelius turns from an attractive first impression to steadiness known over time. This page applies that question to the concern we sustain for a particular friend, rather than testing people with manufactured ordeals.
For there should be no satiety in friendship, as there is in other things. The older the sweeter, as in wines that keep well.
Laelius explicitly assumes the friends’ worthiness in the preceding sentence. His wine image values a good attachment ripened by shared years, without making age alone a reason to preserve every relationship.
distance has in itself no direct effect upon Friendship, but only prevents the acting it out: yet, if the absence be protracted, it is thought to cause a forgetfulness even of the Friendship:
Aristotle · Nicomachean Ethics · Book VIII, Chapter VI in this edition · excerpt
Aristotle distinguishes a continuing disposition from its exercise. Distance need not end concern; a letter, call or remembered occasion can give that concern a place in life again.
they merely have an inert wish for the good of those toward whom they entertain the feeling, but would not join them in any action, nor put themselves out of the way for them.
Aristotle · Nicomachean Ethics · Book IX, Chapter V · excerpt
The subject here is people who feel goodwill but have not advanced to friendship. The contrast helps distinguish wishing someone well from sustaining a particular attachment through a manageable inconvenience.
If a man should importune me to give a reason why I loved him, I find it could no otherwise be expressed, than by making answer: because it was he, because it was I.
Michel de Montaigne · Essays · Book I, Chapter XXVII, Of Friendship · excerpt
Montaigne recalls Étienne de La Boétie as a particular person, not a replaceable source of benefits. His idealized portrait contains stronger claims of fusion elsewhere; this page retains the two friends’ separate judgment and lives.
why should we banish friendship from our lives, for fear of being involved by it in some amount of distress?
Laelius rejects an ideal of life protected from every emotional cost. Staying concerned during an awkward or sad season differs from accepting mistreatment or covering wrongdoing.
I do not wish to treat friendships daintily, but with roughest courage. When they are real, they are not glass threads or frostwork, but the solidest thing we know.
Ralph Waldo Emerson · Essays, First Series · Friendship; courage and a durable bond · excerpt
Emerson’s vigorous metaphor gives friendship substance beyond delicate appearances. Loyalty can allow an honest disagreement while continuing to care for the person.
Continue exploring
Take these ideas into everyday life
Read freely, follow the seventeen-virtue program, or adapt this collection in My Virtues. Friendship is not measured by a friend count or a perfect record.