"It's for the friendship"

The belief that feels most honourable is that the money is for the friendship. Sixty-eight pounds is what it costs to be at the table, and the table is the friendship, and the friendship is worth it.

I'd separate two things. The friendship, and the spend. They've been fused so that the spend feels like the fee, and I'd like to show they come apart.

Erica Boothby and colleagues, in 2018, ran a series of studies on what they called the liking gap. After conversations, people consistently underestimated how much the other person had liked them and enjoyed their company. It held between strangers in a laboratory, between first-year students getting to know their flatmates, and among members of the public at a workshop, and it lasted for months as the students' friendships developed. People are liked more than they think. The reason it matters here is that the fear behind the split is a fear about liking. If I don't pay my share of the far end's cocktails, they'll like me less. The evidence says your estimate of how much they like you is already too low, and that the thing you're paying to protect is larger and more robust than you believe.

There's a related finding that cuts the other way, and I want to be fair to it. Elizabeth Dunn and colleagues, in 2008, found that spending money on other people made people happier than spending it on themselves, in a national survey, in a study of people who'd received a windfall, and in an experiment where people were randomly told which to do. Giving is good for you. I'm not going to argue against buying the round or paying for a friend's dinner when they're skint. That's generosity, and it makes both of you happier, and the evidence supports it.

But the split isn't generosity. Generosity is choosing to give. The split is being charged for what someone else ordered, silently, because declining would be awkward. Matching isn't giving. It's paying a tax to a ranking nobody's keeping. If you want to be generous, be generous, on purpose, to a person, and it'll do what Dunn found it does. If you want to keep the friendship, the friendship is the conversation, and the conversation costs the same at every restaurant.

And notice who the friend is. In most groups, the person who says "shall we go somewhere cheaper?" is quietly thanked afterwards by half the table. That person didn't lose the friendship. They found out how many of their friends were keeping up too.