So,
y’all know about the gift economy, right? (The wiki article can give you
a decent idea, just in case you don’t.) I’d like to talk about it in sort of
casual terms here. Like, how it happens casually whenever we’re just hanging
out with one another, and how that can be fine or escalate badly. Here are some
examples.
In
platonic friendships, we take each other’s feelings into consideration, right?
I mean, unless you’re just a terrible friend or something, you do. You try to
make your friend laugh. You try to make your friend smile. In exchange, they do
the same. This solidifies and strengthens the friendship over time. Doesn’t
that count as a gift exchange? I mean, the most default reason we form
friendships because it’s mutually beneficial for us to do so, even if that
benefit is just a laugh together here and there. But I’m not at all saying that
this should cheapen friendship. I’m not even saying that it’s bad. I’m just
saying that that’s the way it is. Although, it can be bad sometimes. For
example, if your friend were to do something nice for you, and then use that to
push you into a position of helping them with something you don’t feel
comfortable helping with/something that’s much more difficult than what they
did for you, that’s an example of a toxic friendship.
As
you can probably guess, this also applies to romantic relationships. I mean,
all of the exchanges in genuinely platonic friendship can apply here as well,
but there are some extra ones in romantic relationships. Or at the very least,
the platonic ones can be pushed in different directions here. Like, you know,
toxic partners trying to guilt you do things you don’t feel comfortable doing.
Because they did A for you, so shouldn’t you give them B? Yeah, that’s the gift
economy all right, and it’s a super toxic form of it. Again, it’s not always
terrible like that though. A healthy relationship-based gift economy is sincere
mutual enjoyment of one another’s company.
Expanding
on that, you know nice guys?
If not, you may just want to leave here and now. Turn back while you still can,
it’s better the way you have it. They embody the worst parts of both platonic
and romantic gift economies. (And before anyone says it, yes, I know that anyone
of any gender can be a “nice guy.”) They will typically act like a friend, but
then start demanding that, rather than receiving mutual friendship in exchange,
you’re obligated to date them. And of course, if you don’t see this as a
reasonable exchange (as any sane person wouldn’t), they insist that you’ve
abused the gift economy. They gave you their gift and received “nothing” in
exchange.
Can
I stop here for a moment and talk about a personal experience? I think it might
aid the discussion if I can offer a more specific example. I was homeschooled
for basically all of my pre-college education. For my last couple years of high
school, I took math at a (very religious) co-op in a neighboring town. If you,
like most people, were not homeschooled, a co-op is a place where homeschoolers
gather to take select classes together on certain days. My math class, for example,
only met twice a week, and we’d have daily work to do at home. And, as anyone
who knows me at all will tell you, I’m lesbian and femme-aligned nonbinary or a
demigirl or whatever. There’s a point here, I promise. I had trouble making
friends there, and maybe that’s because the other people there were more
“gross, that scientist’s name is pronounced ‘gay,’
ha-ha,” type of students. But as time went on, I did, eventually make a friend.
Let’s call him Derek. He was the only other nerd in our tiny class at the time,
and it was great to find someone who I could discuss my geeky interests with.
Our friendship formed around the exchange of us both wanting to talk about our
interests and having one another to discuss it with. Even when it was an
interest that we didn’t both share, I’d get to talk about mine for a while,
then he’d get to talk about his for a while. The gift exchange was pretty
clear-cut, and we seemed to be getting along really well. But then, we hit the
second in-class day of my senior year. My first in-class day had been kind of
rough, and I was kind of dreading that second one. With my mom assuring me it
would be fine, I went back to class. But let’s pause there for a second.
Remember how I mentioned that anyone who really knows me knows I’m queer as a three-dollar
bill? Well, longish story short, it came up in text-conversation, and I
mentioned that I had a girlfriend. Back to that second in-class day, Derek
confronted me on the way to my classroom. I don’t want to get into the
specifics, because that’s personal, and I don’t feel comfortable talking about
it on the internet. Let it suffice to say that I managed to keep the situation
calm with nauseating amounts of politeness and praise, but he kept saying how
it was unfair to him that I “chose” to be a lesbian, because he wanted to be
with me.
I
wanted to share that particular story because it offers specific real-life
examples of a seemingly healthy platonic friendship exchange, how that morphed
into a more toxic one-sided-romantic relationship, and how one can easily become
the other. I encourage anyone reading this to think about how their own relationship-based
gift exchanges morph over time.
All
in all, I think that gift economics can help us better understand the way that
relationships operate, and the way that we interact with each other. Maybe
think over some instances of this from your own life and ask yourself if it was
an equivalent exchange. You can use it to evaluate which relationships in your
life are healthy or unhealthy, if you look at it right.
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