Does a Friendship Based on Usefulness Count as Real Friendship?

In Book VIII of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle distinguishes three kinds of friendship: those based on utility, on pleasure, and on love for another person's good character. The first two are not entirely false relationships; he still calls them friendships. Yet they depend on an incidental benefit, so they readily end when the benefit or pleasure disappears. Complete friendship, by contrast, involves wishing friends well for their own sake, and requires shared life and time to be tested.

This distinction need not mean that colleagues cannot become genuine friends. Two colleagues may first grow close by exchanging information and sharing work. Mutual benefit is plainly the relationship's starting point. If one leaves the workplace and they continue to care about each other's circumstances, rather than asking only what the other can still provide, the relationship is no longer supported entirely by usefulness. Conversely, knowing someone for years does not prove a deep friendship if contact occurs only when a job introduction is needed.

My view is that usefulness does not contaminate friendship. Friends normally help one another; a completely “useless” relationship is not thereby nobler. The better question is whether a person's value has been reduced to what they can supply. When the benefit temporarily disappears, do we still recognise their needs, judgement and independent life? Shared interests can start a friendship and sustain it for years. But only when concern extends beyond the exchange itself are we responding to a person, rather than merely maintaining a convenience.

https://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/nicomachaen.8.viii.html
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/friendship/