[sn0wBuM]

Managing/balancing debt might play a role in friendships, but friendships are not about debt. They are about people who care about each other's lives.

I'd much rather have a friendship rooted in love/care than in manufactured debts. I wouldn't see the latter as much of a friendship.

[Jtsummers]

It's less a: I owe you $20 (or some non-cash equivalent) so you keep me around. It's more: You've done something for me, where we've probably done something together, in the future we're more likely to associate.

There's always the guy that just keeps bumming rides, forgetting his wallet or whatever. That's an extreme and he's probably not well liked (if he has friends they likely pity him because they know how he ended up this way).

The other form is: I didn't have a car in college. I didn't set out to find someone with a car and befriend them, but someone I knew happened to have one. He'd drive the lot of us around, we'd occassionally buy his meal or fuel. We became good friends but the circumstance of our need and his ability to satisfy it certainly enabled or encouraged our social contact. The debt, then, can be a pretext of sorts. You want friends, you're not good at it. You can either provide a resource to others (running the risk of being the guy that gets used all the time) or seek resources from others, and repay them in some fashion. It's not the only way, but looking back on a number of my friendships, many (not deliberately) started off in this manner.

EDIT: Examples of debt-enabled friendships:

The car situation above with a couple friends in college.

The reverse, I was the top student in a few classes and ended up with a circle of friends that came out of people wanting to study with me.

I was in need of a job, someone helped me out and we became good friends. And the reverse again, I turned down a job offer but referred a peripheral friend (friends, but not close) and we became much better friends afterward.

I didn't have cable for a couple years, met a guy first week of grad school who was also a Stargate SG-1 fan and did have cable. Neither of us knew anyone there, we used this as an excuse to hang out with each other. I had extra furniture, so I loaned him a couple chairs. This is probably the best example, it was a minor debt (I loaned him a couple $40 chairs, he let me hang out in his apartment on Friday nights). Neither of us really owed the other anything in return for this, we both just wanted a friend in a place where we were otherwise alone.

[angli]

I could be wrong, but I understood this to be a way of getting yourself in the door. Bonds created by the "indebtedness" are I think starting points to spending time with people and getting to know them, rather than a friendship in and of themselves.

[sn0wBuM]

It might be a starting point but it doesn't provide the fundamentals to get you where you want to go.

This reminds me of what pickup artists teach. They teach tactics for how to get in the door, and forget about the fundamentals of actually building a real relationship.