Friendship or favors?

While reading through Jane English's piece, I was struck by her clarification of a relationship of favors versus friendship. While it is in some ways a simple distinction, I still felt like it provided me with a new way to reflect on some parts of my past relationships. To expand on her point about the difference between a relationship of voluntary sacrifice, or friendship, and one that is based on favors, I'll use an example from my own life.

Several years ago, I met and subsequently became friends with a kid who was, in some ways, not dissimilar to me. I say friends, but something in the relationship never felt fully comfortable, and I believe Jane English's piece helped me to understand at least one of the reasons behind that: favors were never freely given in the time that we spent together, at least without the expectation of restoration of parity sometime in the future. What this meant for our interactions was that there was a permanent distance between us, and deals over a card game with monetary value that we both played often became strained or tense. Over time, the relationship got still less warm, and eventually dissolved entirely, with a period of months passing by between the last time we had talked and our final piece of communication, where a debt that I supposedly still owed was brought up before the end of the final message I received from him.

I think this example shows that treating friendship as a series of favors rather than a free exchange of resources to the capacity of each party's ability to give can breed jealousy between parties or destroy the friend relationship entirely. That could, of course, happen for a variety of reasons, but keeping  track of favors and things owed over the course of a relationship can bring the focus of both parties away from the interpersonal aspect of their interactions and more toward the favors themselves or debts owed, often damaging what could have been a friendship beyond repair.