Modern Friendship Is Becoming Transactional, and We’re Pretending It’s Healthy

Grab your popcorn and sit down, my fellow online friends. Let’s talk about an elephant in the room that we have all noticed, and I'm suspecting that we've all agreed not to mention for long.

Friendship used to be one of those things you could enter without submitting a five-year financial projection, a networking strategy, and three professional references.

Today, however, you can meet someone and, before you even learn their favourite food, your brain has already asked: Who do they know? What can they offer you? Or what do you stand to gain by knowing them?

Growing up, Ebuka was a product of the goodwill of his parents’ friends, colleagues and acquaintances. These adults built communities around themselves, and those communities quietly became safety nets for the children growing up inside them.

Someone could recommend you for a job, help with school fees, call your mother when you were stranded, send food to your house, or simply open their door because they knew your parents.

All of this was done with nobody calculating friendship in spreadsheets; neither were they asking whether the favour had a reasonable return on investment.

It was not perfect, yes, not entirely. But there was something so peaceful and beautiful about the assumption that people could belong to one another without constantly proving their usefulness.

You were not valuable because of your contacts. You were valuable because you were somebody’s person.

Somewhere Along the Line, We Started Keeping Score

Now, look at us, and I'd bet you would have noticed it too, because why not? It's so glaring. We have somehow turned friendship into a soft version of corporate networking.

We notice who called last, who replied late, who posted our birthday, who attended our event, who did not contribute to the group gift, and who suddenly became unavailable after we helped them. We have become auditors with WhatsApp accounts and a smartphone.

Of course, there are relationships that genuinely deserve to end. A friend who repeatedly disrespects you, manipulates you, lies to you, or only appears when they need something is not demonstrating a tragic misunderstanding of friendship.

They are demonstrating a pattern. Giving people grace does not mean becoming a permanent customer-service representative for somebody else’s bad behaviour.

But somewhere between protecting our peace and protecting our egos, we have forgotten that people have lives outside the friendship we are monitoring.

The friend who did not answer your call may have been stranded in traffic, overwhelmed, asleep, dealing with something they could not explain, or having one of those days when even looking at a phone feels like work.

We do not have to excuse everything. We should, however, leave room for the possibility that not every disappointment is betrayal.

Because if every delayed reply becomes disrespect, every missed invitation becomes evidence, and every forgotten favour becomes a debt, what exactly are we building? A friendship or a bookkeeping department?

And Then We Started Choosing People for What They Could Unlock

Sometimes, we intentionally or unintentionally befriend people because of who they are. Other times, we befriend people because of who they are close to. And this is not about judging; we are human, and we all tend to tilt towards the direction of perceived value.

Maybe someone is connected to an influential person. Maybe they move in rooms we would like access to. Maybe being close to them increases our chances of meeting someone important.

But what happens when the person stops being a person and becomes a road?

You may genuinely enjoy their company. Yet somewhere underneath the friendship is an intention: if I stay close to them, I may become close to that other person too.

That is where friendship quietly becomes transactional.

And the irony is almost impressive. We complain that people are fake while sometimes approaching relationships with an invisible agenda of our own.

We want genuine friendships, but we also want strategic friendships. We want people to love us for who we are, while quietly evaluating what proximity to them could produce.

If you think about it long enough, you'll realise that this is true.

The problem begins when the benefit becomes the reason the relationship exists.

Once people begin to sense that they are being used as bridges, doors, ladders or access cards, trust starts disappearing. And trust, unlike LinkedIn connections, does not usually survive being treated like a tool.

Maybe We Are Losing More Than Friendship

The saddest part is not that modern friendship has changed. We may be losing the communities that once made life easier because we measure what everybody brings to the table.

Our parents’ friendships were not always efficient. They were messy, inconvenient, and sometimes built on nothing more impressive than proximity, shared history, and the willingness to show up.

Some of us even judged their relationships while we were young back then, while we were growing up. Yet those imperfect relationships created networks of care that extended beyond the individual.

Today, many of us have hundreds of followers, lots of contacts, and very few people we can call without rehearsing the reason first.

We know how to network, but do we still know how to belong and build genuine connection?

We seem to be misplacing the ability to see people as people before seeing them as opportunities, status markers, emotional services, or useful connections.

Friendship needs boundaries, reciprocity, honesty, and respect. But it also needs grace. Sometimes you give without keeping score. Sometimes your friend is simply tired. Sometimes you are.

And sometimes the person you thought had nothing useful to offer becomes the person who stands beside you when usefulness has left the room.

Maybe that is the real test of friendship: not what someone can unlock for you, but whether you would still choose them if there were nothing to unlock.

Because if every relationship must produce something, then we may have built excellent networks.

We just forgot to build a community.