From Slate's new XX blog, here is Emily Bazelon:
Because of the downturn, friendships between two people whose Saturday night spending and overall class status used to calibrate precisely have now turned into trickier relationships between one person who still has money and one person who doesn’t. The sudden uneven footing isn’t easy to negotiate, as I’ve learned from the responses I got to my question about the effect of the recession on friendships.
Do income classes become more clannish in hard economic times? There is either a very deliberate trade of favors for money, or you stick with those who can spend as you do. An alternative model is that it becomes easier to ask what the other person can afford, and more gains from friendlly trade are opened up across a variety of income classes.
Tyler – The third link is broken.
We are experiencing that situation right now, but it isn’t causing problems. Saturday nights have become stay-in nights, where we go to one person’s house and play games or watch movies and have dinner. We do go out occasionally, and we often pay for our friend, but it’s just one of the many favors exchanged in the friendship. We don’t keep track of who owes who a favor at this point, and really it would be hard to keep track. We helped her move, she helped us put in a vegetable garden, we babysit for each other, we drove her around before she got her car, she drove us around when ours was out of commission. It all evens out in the end, and helping each other out is part of what friendship is about. In fact, it may have made us closer, because we know exactly how much we can rely on each other.
I’m friends with someone living on Social Security and have had to look at that problem even before the recession. And in fact, going through one of my college Great Books – Aristotle’s Ethics – the section on Friendship goes into the problems you mention. Aristotle’s take is that if one friend is rich and the other poor, there is usually some offset, generally the personal qualities of the poor friend. He says nothing about one who suddenly becomes poor, though.
Part of the problem is that friendship involves relaxing, letting down your guard, speaking freely and hanging out with people you can really relate to.
If there’s a money gap, people can often no longer relate to each other’s circumstances. Worse, the newly poor person sometimes has a chip on their shoulder, parsing everything you say for evidence of insensitivity. Making small talk, you want to ask if they’ve taken any trips lately — oh wait, maybe they can’t afford to, better not ask. At some point it can be tiring to walk on eggshells and be careful all the time.
Newfound wariness and lack of common ground is not a recipe for a continuing close relationship. Money changes everything.
This isn’t a particularly new problem; just ask any recent college graduate who has friends both in grad school and in the business world with decent jobs(granted, the latter is a dwindling group).
My husband and I were both pretty lucky after graduation, job-wise, so we’re on the higher end of the income spectrum for people our age. We’ve found it easy to stay friends with our poor grad student friends – mostly, you just need to get out of the “dinner & a movie” mentality – staying in & playing board games & ping pong, going out hiking, etc etc.
If the people who are more eager to keep spending money view a group outing as a shared good, it might make sense to give Lindhal pricing a try and subsidize the friend. Whether that would work socially is a different matter — it probably depends on the friend.
I see a lot of people cutting back who don’t strictly have to, because they’re worth significantly less than they were pre-crisis. How long will that continue?
“There is either a very deliberate trade of favors for money, or you stick with those who can spend as you do”
If that’s the structure of the relationship, I wouldn’t call it friendship.
thank you
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