How To Know If You’re Keeping Score In Your Friendships

A little while back, I woke up at 4:07am to bring a couple of friends to the airport. They were headed to Colorado and had booked an early flight to maximize the amount of time they would spend with their family.

*Photo Credit: Andrei Dimofte, Creative Commons

As they got out of the car, they thanked me for the ride as though I had done something extraordinary. Even though I’d went to bed early and gotten plenty of sleep, I could sense they’d felt like my gesture had probably been a burden.

I could sense a feeling of “we owe you.”

I remember wishing they didn’t feel that way. But what I sensed in that interaction wasn’t unfamiliar, by any means.

I love to fly, often to visit family and friends, and every once in awhile I need rides to and from the airport. But whenever one of my friends would go out of their way to do this for me, I would feel the same feeling of “I owe you.”

Sure enough, this feeling didn’t just happen to me in terminals. I would get the same feeling almost any time a friend made a special effort to cater to my needs. I thought about the time my wife and I locked our keys in the car, and a couple of friends brought us lunch while we waited on AAA. Then I thought about the time a friend afforded me a day of golfing because they knew I was paying off debt.

I felt like I owed them.

But when we love our friends, it is natural to serve them.

So as I drove away from my Colorado-bound friends at the airport, hoping they wouldn’t feel like they owed me, I began to think about how I should maybe stop feeling like I owed my friends, too.

I wondered:

What would happen if we sacrificed for our friends, expecting nothing in return?

Friendships aren’t meant for scorecards.

My friendships are at their best when we lose track of the score. Instead, we simply just keep showing up for one another on purpose, without false motives or an expectation of having our cards punched.

To give without expectation is more fulfilling than to give with the hope that we’ll get our backs scratched. And when we learn to receive a friend’s sacrifice with genuine gratefulness rather than indebtedness, we honor the sincerity of it.

I’d throw in my scorecard for that kind of realness in my friendships any day.

What would happen if you and your friends stopped keeping score?

How To Know If You’re Keeping Score In Your Friendships is a post from: Storyline Blog