Friendship is supposed to be free.
There is no subscription fee for having somebody to call after a bad date, no invoice for sitting in somebody’s kitchen until two in the morning, no annual charge for knowing exactly which ex cannot be mentioned without ruining the evening.
Maintaining the friendship, however, can become surprisingly expensive.
There is the obvious stuff. Birthdays require presents and usually drinks. Weddings come with outfits, hotels, taxis and a card containing an amount of money that has somehow become the social standard. Someone suggests a weekend away. Someone else gets Glastonbury tickets. There are hen parties, festivals, bottomless brunches, Christmas dinners and the increasingly dangerous phrase, “We should all go somewhere this summer.”
Then there are the smaller expenses that barely register as expenses at all.
A coffee here, or a pint there. Splitting a taxi because it is raining. Putting €20 into a birthday collection. Getting dinner because nobody's flat is big enough to comfortably host six people. Buying the next round despite only having wanted one drink. None of these is particularly financially ruinous on its own.
Friendship gets expensive through accumulation.
That matters because socialising is one of the easier things to cut when money gets tight. Rent still has to be paid. Groceries still have to be bought. A friend's birthday dinner can, technically, be missed.
But the Central Statistics Office treats some forms of social participation as measures of deprivation for a reason. In 2025, 10% of people in Ireland said they could not afford to get together with family or friends for a drink or meal once a month. Among people living in rented or rent-free accommodation, that rose to 20.9%. Another 23.4% of renters could not afford a morning, afternoon or evening out in the previous fortnight.
The numbers make visible something that can otherwise look like a personal scheduling problem. Sometimes somebody is not at dinner because they are busy. Sometimes they are not there because dinner costs €35.
Money remains one of the more uncomfortable reasons to decline an invitation. ‘I'm working’ requires little further explanation. ‘I can't afford it’ can feel considerably more exposing, particularly when everybody else appears to have accepted the cost without thinking about it.
So financial refusals are often translated into something else. Maybe next time. I'm wrecked. I have an early start. I'm trying not to drink. The excuse protects against having to say that the €50 everyone else considers a reasonable amount for a night out is currently not a reasonable amount at all.
And there are a lot of nights out.
Research from Ipsos B&A in 2025 found that 56% of Irish adults sometimes missed social experiences or gatherings because they were too expensive. Among 16 to 34-year-olds, the figure was 63%.
This creates a strange problem. Spending less money can mean seeing less of the people someone is trying to remain close to.
Adult friendship is already heavily dependent on logistics. People move away, work different schedules and acquire partners, commutes and responsibilities. Time together becomes something that has to be arranged rather than something that simply happens. When it is finally arranged, it often takes place somewhere requiring a card machine.
Restaurants are convenient because nobody has to host. Pubs stay open late. A weekend away guarantees more than three hurried hours together. Festivals provide the increasingly rare possibility of spending several consecutive days with friends.
Money buys access to the infrastructure around friendship.
This doesn't mean affection itself has acquired a price. The problem is that many of the rituals through which affection is expressed have one.
Birthdays make this particularly obvious. The birthday itself is free. Attending it might involve a present, dinner, drinks and two taxis. If the friend lives elsewhere, add a train or flight and perhaps somewhere to sleep. What began as celebrating somebody can quietly become a €100 weekend.
And generosity has a habit of establishing precedent.
If a friend spends generously on somebody's birthday, there can be an unspoken pressure to reciprocate. If somebody travelled for one hen party, declining theirs feels different. One person begins buying rounds and suddenly everyone is participating in a miniature economy where keeping track too closely feels stingy, but not keeping track at all can become expensive.
Good friendship is not supposed to be transactional, which can make talking about any of this particularly awkward.
Nobody wants to be the person calculating whether they have received enough birthday presents to justify what they have spent. Most people would probably recoil from the idea of assigning a monetary value to a friendship at all.
Yet money is constantly moving around inside them.
It is lent, split, forgotten, reciprocated and occasionally resented. Some friendships operate on an easy assumption that it will all roughly even out eventually. Others contain enormous differences in what each person considers an insignificant expense.
Those differences become more noticeable when friends begin earning different amounts.
One person's casual suggestion of dinner can be another person's carefully budgeted treat for the month. A €70 concert ticket can feel spontaneous to somebody and impossible to somebody else. Even choosing where to meet can reveal a financial gap nobody particularly wants to discuss.
The awkwardness isn't necessarily caused by wealthier friends deliberately excluding anyone. Often, nobody has thought about the cost because they don't need to.
That can be enough.
There is also a cumulative consequence to repeatedly saying no. Missing one dinner will probably change nothing. Missing six means missing six evenings of stories, jokes, introductions and small developments in other people's lives. The group acquires memories that do not include the person who could not afford to be there.
Eventually, financial exclusion can begin to resemble social withdrawal from the outside.
This is particularly uncomfortable because friendship matters enormously at precisely the ages when money can be unstable. CSO research into 25-year-olds in Ireland found that most reported having close friendships, with friends among the people they were most likely to confide in about personal issues. Friendship is not an optional little luxury sitting beside takeaway coffees and streaming subscriptions. It is part of how people are supported.
None of this requires the abolition of birthday presents or a moral objection to going for dinner.
There is pleasure in spending money on friends. Buying somebody a drink because they have had a terrible week can be one of the nicest possible uses of €7. Travelling for a birthday can be worth considerably more than it costs. Friendship would become fairly bleak if every social interaction was evaluated according to maximum financial efficiency.
The issue is whether spending becomes the admission price.
A cheap friendship does not have to be an inferior one. Sitting in a kitchen, going for a walk, cooking together, bringing supermarket wine to somebody's flat or simply being allowed to say ‘I can't afford that this week’, without the entire plan collapsing, are not consolation prizes for people who cannot afford restaurants.
They are friendship too.
Perhaps the most financially generous thing a friend can sometimes do is not pay for somebody else, but make sure money does not become something they have to explain.
Suggest the expensive dinner, but suggest the cheap one sometimes too. Go away for the weekend, but don't make every reunion a weekend away. Buy the ridiculous birthday present if it will make them laugh, without quietly establishing the amount they are expected to spend in return.
Friendship should be able to survive somebody saying no to the plan without appearing to say no to the friendship.
Because being a good friend may cost money sometimes.
Being allowed to have friends shouldn't.
Written By: Holly Warren
Edited By: Hazel Hunter
