Already when he was a teenager and a young man at the court of King David I of Scotland, Aelred felt attracted to other youths, enjoyed friendships, and tried to have true friends.

          He said when he was a schoolboy, he liked the pleasure of being with his friends more than anything else. He felt passionate attachments to his friends, and he was always thinking about the ones he loved. Nothing was better for him than to be loved by somebody and to love them in return.

          For him, love and friendship went together. Sometimes, though, it happened that he was disappointed in love. This, of course, made him sad and caused him to begin the search for the "secret" of true friendship.

          While he was living and working in the king's court, he was well-liked and had a lot of friends in the ordinary sense of the word. But he was never satisfied with "ordinary" friends. He really wanted deep and lasting friendship, but at that time he did not know how to choose friends or build the kind of friendship he wanted. He was still young.

          Since there was so much competition for power and prestige in the king's court, people were often fickle and changed their friends when they thought they could get some selfish advantage from a new friend.

          Sometimes he was fooled by these shallow friendships, thinking they were the real thing. He would put his whole heart into a friendship and then find out it was not a true friendship, but one based on selfish desires.

          He was lucky to find in the court a copy of a famous book on friendship that was written by Cicero in Rome almost a hundred years before Christ. He was glad to find some valuable principles for friendships in that book, but at that time in his life he didn't think he would be able to have such a perfect friendship, as it was described in Cicero's book on friendship.

          Aelred always remembered what he read in that book. A few years later he discussed love and friendship with St. Bernard when he was visiting him in his monastery at Clairvaux in France. St. Bernard asked him to write a book on love. By that time Aelred was a Cistercian monk, like St. Bernard. He wrote his first book on the subject while he was still a young monk. He called it, The Mirror of Love.

          During the 33 years that Aelred was a Cistercian monk, he wrote many books on different subjects, but his thoughts on love and friendship were written down for us in several of his books. The two most famous and complete ones were The Mirror of Love, his first book, and Spiritual Friendship, his last book. At least three other books give us some more of his thoughts on love and friendship.

          In this summary of his ideas on love and friendship, we'll take most of the ideas from his book, Spiritual Friendship.

          After he entered the monastery which St. Bernard has established at Rievaulx in northern England, Aelred again tried to find the kind of true friendship he had always wanted at King David's court.

          His first really satisfying friendship was with a fellow monk whose name was Simon. We don't know if Simon was a priest like Aelred or not. They were both monks at Rievaulx, and Aelred was attracted to his goodness and he tried to grow in holiness through his love for Simon and his friendship with him.

          Unfortunately Simon died before Aelred could fully develop the long-lasting friendship he wanted so much. He found peace in his friendship with Simon and he wrote in The Mirror of Love about his love for Simon and deep sadness when Simon died. He had gained not only peace of soul through his friendship with Simon, but experience which taught him there was still more for him to learn about friendship.

          He began to develop a new friendship with a younger monk, whose name was not recorded, whom we shall call Joven. Aelred makes no secret of his attraction to Joven, but this time he decided to allow the friendship to grow slowly. He describes his admiration for Joven's virtues as being what attracted him, and he made no mention of Joven's physical beauty, although he did say that everybody liked Joven.

          They seemed to have a teacher and learner relationship in which Aelred received a lot of great joy from Joven's spiritual progress in the monastic life, and he wrote with "glory and delight" about the young monk's virtues.

          He was gaining more experience in what he thought true friendship should be. "Love increased between us," Aelred wrote. "Our affection grew warmer and our love was strengthened until it got to the point where there was one heart and one mind, agreement in likes and dislikes. And this love was free of fear, did not feel offense, hold suspicions, or give any flattery. Between us there was nothing fake or phony, no immature flirting, no hardness of heart, no beating around the bush, no sneaking; we were open and honest in everything. In a way, I considered my heart to be his and his heart to be mine, and he felt the same way."

          The third special friendship we know about in Aelred's monastic life was with a monk named Walter Daniel who later wrote down for posterity a wonderful contemporary hagiography of Aelred (as seen through a personal admirer's eyes).

          Aelred was already the Abbot of the monastery when he began writing down his thoughts on love and friendship. With his experience in love and his experience as a priest and abbot, it became clear to him how he would describe true spiritual friendship. At last he was discovering the secret of friendship.

          And that's how his book, Spiritual Friendship, got its start. Now many people are interested in Aelred's teachings about friendship.