You had an argument with your friend last week, and since then you both haven’t talked. You are waiting for her to reach out to you and apologise. And maybe your friend is thinking the same. In other situations as well, we somehow expect others to approach first, to always be there when we need them, to help us out. But if they are not able to do so, due to any reason, we begin to hold resentments in our hearts.
But there is one thing to give a thought to: is it right to evaluate relationships based on how much someone has done for us?
Is it ethical to keep score in relationships?
Nearly everyone has a secret account that they don’t admit to. It keeps track of who called first, who apologised first after the argument, who remembered the birthday. We don’t read the book together very often, and it quietly influences our level of warmth or protection. But the thing to ponder is: is it a fair thing to do?
To Aristotle, there was no better definition of friendship than some bookkeeping. He talks about friendships of utility, pleasure, and virtue in the Nicomachean Ethics and recognises that even friendships of virtue have some sort of proportional return. Anyone who does not return your favour is not a friend at all and becomes a patron or exploiter. It is not just an observation meant to notice the balance in relationships. It’s a moral sense, an indicator that something due has not been paid. A man or woman who never registers is a man or a lady who has a lack of respect, as much as he or she has a lack of generosity.
But this is a tradition that is also contested. Kant made a distinction between duties of justice (which can be claimed) and duties of love and beneficence (which cannot be claimed). If I do something for you because you do something for me, it is not a gift; it’s a contract. But Simone Weil went further and proposed that one needs to give up asking what one is owed if one is to pay attention to another person. When one starts to quantify the care and affection he receives from others, it becomes something to be compared and strategised. Sociologists have noted that the same division occurs in market relationships — where I expect exact exchange — and in communal ones — where strict accounting is an indicator of distrust. It is not a favour to tally a friend’s favours; it is only to tell him he is no longer a friend.
But the reality is that there are different types of scorekeeping. If someone is tracked and then demanded to pay, it will eat away at them and make them feel as if their affection is owed to someone. But relationships work on mutual grounds, where both sides have to give their input. If one is always giving, always forgiving, and always adapting, it’s not generous on that side. It’s one-sided and it gives you a respectable excuse for being stealthily used.
Time is a factor, too. Healthy relationships are long-term relationships, and wavering patterns in such relationships tend to be balanced out. A good partner doesn’t count it as a loss when a friend in grief gives more than he receives for a time. What philosophers sometimes call “generalized reciprocity” means that some time in the future, someone will give you something in return, in some fashion, where the fashion is not specified.
The best approach might be to recognise that scorekeeping is not a crime; it’s a symptom. There is a need that isn’t voiced, an effort that isn’t seen, when we start counting. The ethical thing to do is not to ignore the count, but to talk things out and discuss where it goes wrong. Care is transactional when we notice what we’re giving, but not when we conceal our displeasure and allow it to stew.