Every friendship travels at sometime through the black valley of despair. This tests every aspect of your affection. You lose the attraction and the magic. Your sense of each other darkens and your presence is sore. If you can come through this time, it can purify with your love, and falsity and need will fall away. It will bring you onto new ground where affection can grow again.

O’Donohue frames friendship as a living relationship with seasons, not a constant state of warmth. The “black valley of despair” names the inevitable period when familiarity, disappointment, or hurt strips away the early “magic” and exposes neediness, projection, or falsity. In that bleak interval, affection is tested not by intensity but by endurance and honesty: can the friends remain present without the old rewards? If they do, the relationship can be “purified,” meaning it becomes less dependent on charm, reassurance, or idealization and more grounded in mature recognition of the other’s reality. The quote suggests that crisis can deepen friendship, returning it to “new ground” where genuine affection can grow again.