Is frugality ruining our friendships?

While all healthy relationships require a lot of give and take, they aren’t meant to be about keeping score. But recently I’ve found that both my friends and I have become a lot more frugal: where we used to split dinner bills equally without quibbling over who ordered a large wine and who ordered a small, today we have meticulous Notes app lists detailing every last one of our petty debts.

In recent years, it feels as though friendships are becoming increasingly transactional. Fewer and fewer people appear predisposed to carrying out small favours – like picking up a coffee for your colleague on the way to work or buying your housemate a pint of milk – without expecting anything in return. Of course, this is largely because we’re still fruitlessly battling against a raging cost of living crisis, with young people hit particularly hard by soaring living costs. With this in mind, it’s unsurprising that many of us feel unable to resist the urge to send out a Monzo request for that single, solitary pint you bought your mate last weekend.

But can we really blame the cost of living crisis for our instinctual urge to tighten our pursestrings when it comes to our friends? According to Ellie Kapitao, a 27-year-old who lives in London, frugality is “definitely a cultural thing”. She explains that when she went to visit her family in Congo last year, she noticed that attitudes to relationships were palpably different. “The difference was striking,” she says. “Everyone was part of a community and would come together to help you with food, finances, anything. Even though they have so little, they wanted to give whatever they could to you.”

Kapitao feels that in the UK, people are always making excuses for why they can’t help you. “Everyone is in their own corner,” she says. She adds that her friendships have felt more ‘self-serving’ in recent years. “It’s like an unwritten code. You don’t want to be that friend that’s always relying on others,” she explains. “I’ve had friends call me ‘entitled’ before, when I’ve asked them for help with something. It makes me just want to deal with things myself.”

Kapitao isn’t unjustified in feeling this way; notably, last year, YouTuber Codie Sanchez shared a controversial post on X, suggesting that people shouldn’t ask their friends to pick them up from the airport. “Use Uber, save a friendship,” she wrote. The post prompted thousands of responses, many of which agreed with Sanchez’s view. “What happened to driving yourself to the airport?”, one user commented. “Don’t ask me to help you move either,” another wrote.

This isn’t entirely our fault: modern, Western society is prone to making us feel pulled in a million different directions, especially in light of the rise of social media and hustle culture. “We feel too many demands on our attention,” says ethnographer and author Kristen Ghodsee, who adds that friendships can easily become transactional in times of economic hardship. “If it’s difficult to pay for your rent and your groceries there’s probably a good chance that you’re working a side hustle,” she explains. “You’re driving an Uber, you’re on Deliveroo or you’ve got some kind of gig as an influencer. And so your time and your attention is being taken away.”

As I live a train ride away from most of my social circle, I often find myself sacrificing a lot of time and money just to see my friends. So, when I’m trying to save on spending, or live a more sustainable (and less exhausting) lifestyle, cutting back on trips to visit my mates is usually my first port of call. I’m not alone: one 2023 study found that the cost of living crisis has impacted about a third of people’s ability to spend time with friends. This not only puts an astute strain on my social life, but also makes me question how much more time and money I spend trying to see my friends than they do for me.

Altruism, or doing nice things for others, is “something very deeply ingrained in our psyche,” says Ghodsee. “But the minute you introduce economics into it, you actually diminish the experience of that friendship,” she says. According to her, the expectation of ‘reciprocity’ can do more harm than good. “You do favours so at some future moment when you’re in need, that person will return the favour, right? This is the reason we call friends ‘toxic’, because there are some people who take, take, take, and then never give back,” she explains. While of course it’s fair (and sensible) to take a step back from a relationship if you feel as if it’s draining you, it’s generally a good idea to resist the temptation to ‘keep score’ with your closest friends.

Thankfully, it is still possible to cultivate friendships which are less transactional. “My friends have always supported me when I needed it, and I am supportive to them when I do have the money,” says Olivia Otigbah, a 28-year-old from Newcastle. “I can’t always do it when money’s tight, but I would always pick up a drink or pay for a taxi fare if I could.” In any case, Otigbah says her friendships have been on the incline since she started to “spend quality time with people” instead of forking out money on club nights or expensive meals. She explains that she used to put a lot of “pressure” on herself “to make these big plans” with friends, but now she feels as though it’s more “important to be transparent and understand that friendship is a deeper connection than how much money is in your bank account.”

Luckily, it’s our human disposition to be altruistic; something which many psychologists say we find satisfying on a fundamental level. While researching for his book Predictably Irrational, American academic Dan Areily parked a moving truck containing a large sofa next to a university campus in Massachusetts. To begin with, Areily asked passers by to help him move the sofa out of the truck. Later, he did the same, but this time offered participants $20 to help him. Perhaps surprisingly, what he found was that people in the first scenario – where they weren’t offered any money – were actually more likely to help him.

So, to truly let our friendships flourish in these times of economic hardship, we should try to focus on the beauty of human connection. “Your time is not a commodity,” says Ghodsee. “[In the long term] everything else is irrelevant. The most significant predictor of long term happiness is the quality of our relationships. That’s what we should focus on.”