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It’s payback time: how you spend with friends

The true test of friendship is not whether you’ve memorized each other’s coffee orders, but how you pay each other back after one of you bought the coffee. 

While it may not always be obvious, there’s an unspoken development of a friendship that can be distinguished through how friends pay each other back. An easy way to understand them is to split them into different levels of friendship.   

Level one — separate checks, please. 

At the beginning of a friendship, there is no such thing as paying each other back. You try to keep it as neutral as possible to avoid the awkward interaction of deciding who pays and then figuring out how much you owe that person. It’s all overwhelming, so it’s best, in the beginning, to split everything and pay separately.

Haley Alvarez-Lauto | Graphic Artist

Level two — pay back to the cent.

It happened. You were in a restaurant and the waitress didn’t split the check, so one of you offered to pay the whole thing. You’ve now reached the stage of friendship where you exchange Venmo accounts. 

Congratulations! But you’re still stingy about it. You don’t want to create any awkward tensions in the friendship, so you calculate how much you owe the other person down to the cent. You even take a picture of the receipt to show you’re diligent about paying people back — even though you plan on immediately paying them back. 

Level three — the Venmo request. 

You’ve now entered the stage of friendship where it doesn’t feel petty to send a Venmo request to someone. You also trust each other enough to know you’ll both fulfill the request so you don’t have to sit and calculate it out in the restaurant. So you send the request with a cute little message and then it’s gone from your mind. Piece of cake!

Level four — I’ll buy the next one!

At this point in the friendship, you’re both going back and forth paying for each other regularly. You eventually decide you’ll alternate payments without the expectation of paying it back. This is when you start to fall into routines. 

Maybe you guys get coffee often enough that you just switch off who buys. Or maybe it’s lunch or drinks. Whatever it is, it’s minor enough that you don’t mind paying for two people and not getting the money back until the next time you go out. 

Level five — what’s mine is yours.

You’ve reached the point in the friendship where you’re now sharing everything with this person. At this point, there’s complete trust in each other that you barely pay each other back. Your friend pays for the uber and you ask how much and they say, “Oh it was, like, $10, it doesn’t matter.”

Like the last one, you alternate payments. Whether it’s food or Uber rides, it doesn’t matter. You’ve spent so much money on each other in gifts or paying for each other’s coffee, that you’re always even — and you know you always will be — so you never really feel in debt to each other.

There you have it, these are the levels of friendships told through how you pay your friend back. I haven’t had a friendship that goes past level five because, quite honestly, I don’t know if you can get any closer than that. If you’ve managed to transcend level five, I applaud you. 

 




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