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Friends Without MoneyHow the recession is wrecking friendships across the land.

By Emily BazelonUpdated Friday, June 12, 2009, at 7:00 AM ET

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"Real friends understand what we are all going through, right?" Anna asks. Then a note of judgment creeps in. She writes about her own savings—canceling the Internet at home and the movie channels from cable—and frames a comparison: "Most of my friends have not done anything to cut back where they can (and there are things they could cut out as well, which I pointed out to them)." Maybe they would say they don't want to hear that from her. In any case, in spite of the years they span, these relationships sound like they're breaking into fragments of mutual resentment.

Layoffs threaten different relationships—the ones a reader named Kelly calls "the accidental friendships of proximity." Kelly lost her job in March. She writes of these severed connections: "I never knew any of these people well enough to be invited to dinner, but I miss them still. They are valuable because of the time invested in their unfolding. They are valuable because of the different perspectives they offered." Kelly brings up a related point from The Big Sort: Workplaces are one of the only places left in most of the country where people do mesh across economic lines. Jefferson Pestronk, a former consultant and current Slate intern, talks about this as "the unconscious support network" that comes from work. The loss of that in the consulting world, he says, is for him the recession's "social toll."

Work puts people from disparate points on the class map into a shared space. The loss of work, then, spins them out into their separate worlds. And then, the recession, by leaving some people broke, or at least fearfully frugal, also alters the friendships that people count on when they go home to their own lives. When it comes to friendship, it seems like money is an important catalyst, the glass of wine that takes the edge off. No wonder it's hard to make do with less of it.

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Next question: What have you given up because of the recession that matters most to you, big or small? Please post your responses below or send them to me at . E-mail may be quoted in Slate unless the writer stipulates otherwise. If you want to be quoted anonymously, please let me know.

This article also appears in Double X.

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Emily Bazelon is a Slate senior editor and an editor of DoubleX.

Illustration by Alex Eben Meyer.

COMMENTS

All this is true even without a recession. Me and my closest friend of several years became more distant once her trust fund kicked in when she turned 25. Some things that made it difficult to communicate: not understanding that I could only "earn" 7 hours of vacation time per month so I couldn't just take off whenever I wanted, I didn't work around middle and working class people just for the anthropological value of gawking at their mores, I was tired after getting off from work and not always peppy and conversant in the evenings , etc. etc. -- but I think the killer for me was her insistence that she had "chosen" to live for "art" while I had "chosen" a dreary work life.

-- palmcanoe
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In a lot of small ways, I am finding that I have much less patience with my high living girlfriends who are now whining about their investments and still spending like there is no tomorrow – I want to scream at them to prepare, save something because this could get worse. One friend who talks as though she were on the very verge of ruin just bought a convertible because it was a good deal, while complaining about what she has to pay her employees. I find it difficult to go out with them, partly because I cannot afford it and partly because I see it as such a waste. I suggest dining in and talking but they want to go out to places that I never even went to when I had the money.

This downturn has been less damaging to me personally because I had several financial and personal upheavals in 2007, with a divorce, job loss, and foreclosure to deal with, so I have learned how to live with less and be happy. I now have a job, making less than before, but it's a job and I am grateful to have had to learn to live on less before all this happened.

I think we are all missing the opportunity to be supportive, share what we know and where we have been and grow from this recession/depression time.

-- SuzinSC
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