buy food for your friends

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Here is a scene that occurs often in my social circles:

You go out to a meal with a close friend. Then, you pore over the itemized receipt and carefully calculate how much each of you should pay, including tax and (if you're in America) tip. Each of you pays for exactly what you ate.

What are we, having a business transaction? Are we *blergh* networking? For goodness' sake, buy food for your friends.

When I say "buy food for your friends," I don't mean "go into debt financing every social outing." I mean that you should take turns buying food, instead of agonizing over calculating what is owed every time you hang out. Doing this calculation every time is drawing a line between you and your friend; you're literally setting the balance sheet even so that both of you can walk away without having given anything to each other.

You don't want to orient towards your friends like that. Having closer relationships necessitates taking risks and hoping that the other person will respond prosocially—that's what trust is. Taking turns to buy food is perfect for this, because it sets you up to take small trust falls on a regular basis.

As a bonus, it gives you an excuse to see your friend again. You and your friend now have a small, playful debt to settle. If you were the one to pay last, you're incentivized to reach out again because you're a tiny bit in the hole. If you were the one who was paid for, you're incentivized to reach out to return the favor.

Look, I hear you, I hear you. What if my friend takes advantage of this? We might end up going to expensive places only when I'm paying, and not when they're paying! Or they might ghost me after I pay once!

I can't help but feel like you have bigger problems if you think your friend will take financial advantage of you, but if it helps, I can tell you what my own experience has been. I implemented "I buy this time, you buy next time" with a couple of my close friends, and nobody has taken advantage of it. We simply see each other more often, with the notion of paying off the "debt" serving as an easy invitation opener.

Buy food for your friends.

There is a bit of an elephant in the room here, which is that if you buy food for a friend, especially an opposite-gender friend, it can be misread as romantic interest. I personally have huge beef with the idea that buying food for someone implies romantic interest — like, come on, we can just care about our friends and want to see them again — but I can't deny that the failure mode exists.

Changing the social script in one blog post is outside of the scope of my powers, so instead, I offer you this band-aid solution (assuming you aren't romantically interested in your friend):

(If you are romantically interested in your friend, well, there are infinitely many resources on the internet to help you in that department. You got that, I believe in you.)

Now you can send this post your friend, warning included, and start buying food for each other! I promise it's worth it.