All bonds without friendship were shackles

Pythagoras taught that friendship was the truest and nearest perfect of all relationships.

He declared that in Nature there was a friendship of all for all; of gods for men; of doctrines one for another; of the soul for the body; of the rational part for the irrational part; of philosophy for its theory; of men for one another; of countrymen for one another; that friendship also existed between strangers, between a man and his wife, his children, and his servants.

All bonds without friendship were shackles, and there was no virtue in their maintenance.

Pythagoras believed that relationships were essentially mental rather than physical, and that a stranger of sympathetic intellect was closer to him than a blood relation whose viewpoint was at variance with his own,” – Manly P. Hall