Friendship is always a form of love.
The difference between the love of an acquaintance, the love of a
good friend, the love of a best friend, the love of a spouse and the
love of a good god (whichever) is in the amount of one's own
wrongdoing they are willing to endure without taking their love
away.
Endurance means to accept others' wrongdoing as thoughtlessness or
miscomprehension, without blaming it on antipathy or cruelty,
believing that it does not come from the core of their personality but
from its surface. The core cannot be seen. Only the traffic through
the surface can be experienced and accessed. What happens underneath
one can only believe in.
To be friends means to love. To love means to endure. To endure
means to believe in the other.
To be friends also means knowing the threshold of endurance, and to
abandon the other when it is crossed.
To love from the heart means to put the threshold as high as
humanly possible.
No human being can love perfectly. Only a being who cannot take any
damage and who cannot feel any pain can.
This should be a treat for the (live nude?) amateur theologists.