I think I would have gotten the idea immediately if you had said "Friendship", "Companionship", or something similar.

That would be misleading. For the purposes of this kind of investigation it seems more useful to carve reality at 'affiliation'. The associted negative emotions just seem to be more directly associated with maintaining affiliation than companionship. This is one of those things where we may say that we want companionship but act like we want affiliation.