Contribution comes with a side benefit: control.

Pay for dinner and you probably get more say about the restaurant. Provide the vacation house and you get more say about the weekend. Buy the tickets and you probably choose who gets them. Organize the party and people tend to follow your plan.

There is no contract and usually nobody keeps score. We just seem to understand that the person who contributes more gets a little more say.

I call it control credit.

You Earned It

Most control credit is fair. Contribution often comes with cost, work, responsibility, or risk. If I am doing the driving, I get some say about when we leave. If twenty people are coming to my house, I get to make some rules. If I spent three hours organizing something, I don't have to reopen every decision when you arrive.

But control credit accumulates.

If one person repeatedly pays, hosts, plans, organizes, drives and initiates, gradually that person also becomes the one who decides almost everything. The others may like the arrangement, and are unlikely to object. They get good dinners, interesting trips, parties and experiences without doing much work. Everybody may be getting exactly what they want. For a while.

Generosity Can Corrupt

Here is the part I missed when I focused my friendology philosophy on contribution.

Generosity without Balanced Say can corrupt a relationship. More on Balanced Say below.

The generous person keeps creating the experiences and naturally accumulates more control credit. The other person has less reason and less room to originate anything. Why suggest the restaurant when you already picked one? Why plan Saturday when you already have tickets? Why organize something when there is always something good to attend?

Contribution starts flowing mostly one way. So does control.

Eventually one person becomes the producer and the other increasingly becomes a consumer. They may still like each other and may still have a great time, but the shared life increasingly reflects one person's resources, preferences, and initiative.

And something else gets lost: information signal about the health of the relationship.

If I keep supplying the dinners, invitations, parties, introductions, and experiences, the relationship keeps moving. It can look wonderfully active while I am supplying almost all of its energy.

If I stop supplying it, I may discover there wasn't much balance underneath.

Who Likes What?

Resources don't only support relationships, they affect who sticks around.

If I routinely provide desirable things and experiences, I make myself more attractive to people who enjoy consuming desirable things. Most may like me too. Human motives aren't that clean, but now I have an information signal problem.

Do you like having dinner with me or having dinner?

Do you like spending time with me or having somewhere interesting to go?

Would you call me if there were no invitation opportunity attached?

Generosity makes those questions harder to answer because it keeps producing evidence of friendship whether the other person contributes much or not.

Eventually the giver notices.

The dinners that once felt generous start to feel expected. The person who happily opened the wine begins noticing who never brings any. The host notices who arrives early and who brings something good for a potluck. The organizer notices that everybody is available when something fun is already assembled.

Generosity can transform into resentment surprisingly fast.

Balanced Say

Balanced Say isn't equal control. It isn't voting on dinner or turning friendship into a committee. It is leaving enough unoccupied space for the other person to alter what happens.

You choose the restaurant sometimes. Your idea replaces mine. You invite somebody. You plan the afternoon. You talk me into something I wouldn't have chosen myself. And now something important happens. I get to see what you do for us with the space.

Maybe you fill it enthusiastically. You propose things, alter things, bring people, make plans and surprise me. Great. Now I know something about us that my own generosity had been making difficult to see. Maybe you don't, and that's useful too.

I developed a Latin expression of this idea that I prefer but is a bit harder to remember: vox aequalis or equal voice. A good way to develop equal voice is to bring partial plans and iterate quickly with a friend and solidify it. When the idea is half-baked there is investment and less defensiveness about nixing it and finding a new idea and plan.

Leave Some Credit on the Table

The answer isn't to contribute less, nor should every bit of control be surrendered. Responsibility sometimes requires authority. Your house really does have your rules.

But spending all your control credit can slowly turn a peer into a passenger. Worse, it can hide the difference between a friend who has become passive because you occupy all the space and someone who was mostly there to consume what you provided.

Balanced Say gives both of them room and then you can watch what happens.

That's the part I find most interesting. We usually think leaving other people room to contribute is something we do for them. It may be just as important to do it for ourselves.

Leave some space and find out who fills it with what contribution.