The Wealth Gap: How Changing Fortunes Tear Close Friends Apart
The Wealth Gap: How Changing Fortunes Tear Close Friends Apart
Sirin Kale
It’s not uncommon for friendships to end because of finances – whether a sudden salary rise or fall. But with care and forethought it is often possible to prevent the rupture
When David Matcham and his wife adopted a baby boy in 2013, their financial situation promptly hit rock bottom. Matcham, 44, from Norfolk, had just completed a PhD, and was looking for work. They were broke; poorer than either of them had been at any point in their lives, even when they were students.
For more than a year, Matcham became a social recluse. In part, this was out of necessity – he had no money for socialising – but it was more than that. His sense of self-worth was in the red. “I felt as if I didn’t matter any more, I had made such a mess of things,” he remembers.
The anxiety around his finances was all-consuming. Matcham didn’t feel he could confide in his friends because he was ashamed. “My main fear was that they would think I was asking them for money,” he says. “I was just too embarrassed.”
Matcham stopped returning his friends’ calls, and stopped being invited to things. When Matcham had to socialise with his wife’s family, he would dread it. “They’re lovely people, but they’re all very successful,” he says. “I would use every possible excuse to avoid going. I wanted to withdraw from the aura of their success, which I wasn’t exuding.” He found a job stacking shelves, and then work as a delivery driver. The family clawed their way out of their financial pit.
Years later, when his family’s financial situation had improved, Matcham started having panic attacks. “At the time, I had to keep going for the sake of my son,” he says. “But when things got better, everything I hadn’t dealt with at the time started to emerge.” As well as the panic attacks, the social implications of Matcham’s period of isolation continue to be felt. Many of his friendships from university or school simply fell away, never to be recovered.
Matcham is not the only person to lose friendships because of his finances. The so-called friendship wealth gap was most memorably depicted in the episode of Friends in which Phoebe, Rachel and Joey order side salads and tap water in an upmarket restaurant, before being asked by the rest of the group to split the bill equally.
The award-winning 2006 film Friends With Money chronicled the efforts of a maid, Olivia (played by Jennifer Aniston), to keep up with her high-rolling friends. More recently, the friendship wealth gap is a plotline in the schlocky Netflix drama You, as an aspiring writer Guinevere Beck amasses credit card debt buying expensive presents and rounds of cocktails in Manhattan bars for her wealthy, dissolute girlfriends.
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