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.”
