Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another, 'What! You too? I thought I was the only one.'

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C. S. Lewis wrote this in The Four Loves (1960), his study distinguishing affection, friendship, romantic love and charity. He argued that friendship is the least instinctive and most easily overlooked of the four.

His account is unusually specific. Friendship does not begin with mutual interest in each other, but with the discovery of a shared third thing — a conviction, a question, an obsession. Friends stand side by side looking outward, which is why the founding moment is one of recognition rather than attraction.