…It is pursuing a mirage to look for “spiritual” love as if it did not involve the same feelings as any other human love. Said Teresa of Avila about celibates, “Do you think that such souls will love less? No, I tell you they will love their friends more, with more affections, and a greater passion.”

Teresa was in an excellent position to recognize both healthy and unhealthy friendships. She spent the first twenty years of her religious life giving time to frivolous friendships. Even after her conversion experience, it took some time for her to rid herself of these shackles. She admitted, “For more than eighteen years, I suffered this battle and conflict between friendship with God and friendship with the world.”

We might expect that she would have completely renounced friendship, since it had been such an occasion of temptation for her, but the opposite occurred. She soon invested her intense affections in new friendships that she would defend as being almost as powerful as her mystical experiences in drawing her soul to God. Teresa wrote, in her Way of Perfection, “I say once again that spiritual love seems to be imitating that love which the good lover Jesus had for us… [and] a good means to having God is to speak with his friends, for one always gains very much from this. I know from experience.”
–Teresita Scully, “Discernment of Friendships,” Human Development vol 6 no. 1 (Spring 1985)