One consequence of this is that friendships can be quite unbalanced and I won't think it's terribly important. If you're getting a lot more Good Stuff out of our friendship than you're putting in, but I'm only just getting out more than I'm putting in, then I won't really mind; it's only when the imbalance goes beyond the critical point and I actively start feeling drained by the friendship that I'll start to re-evaluate whether it's worthwhile. Apparently not everybody thinks this way; I've occasionally had people act horrified at how unbalanced one of my friendships was, when I really hadn't noticed it at all (if indeed it was unbalanced – of course all of these judgments are subjective in themselves). All I'd noticed was that I was happier being friends with that person than I would have been not being, and beyond that I really didn't mind.
With regard to this, I agree with you up to a point, but consider the situation where you have a limited amount of time / effort / motivation / niceness etc. available to distribute amongst other people. If one of your friends is absorbing an enormous amount of your effort in support or favours, but giving almost nothing back, you may be slightly happier on balance than you would be if they weren't your friend, but you may be prevented (by lack of time or tuits) from forging / developing a relationship with someone else or several other people who would make you even happier / more emotionally-sorted for the same amount of effort on your part, and thus increase the total of Good Stuff going around for all the people concerned. This is only relevant if a} there are actually other people available that you could in principle be helpful to in preference to your original friend b) you believe that relationship-effort is finite (I do, but apparently some people feel they can share themselves effectively amongst an infinite number of friends) c) your religious beliefs or lack of sense of self-worth or similar don't lead you to rate others' happiness vastly above your own.
I feel moderately guilty for performing this sort of explicit cost-benefit analysis of interpersonal relationships, but I suspect that's mainly due to subconscious Christian-influenced notions about self-sacrifice ("to give, and not to count the cost").
Indeed, I think "not to count the cost" fits rather well into the way I stated it originally - I don't count the cost unless and until I actually find it's costing too much and I'm actually starting to become unable to keep giving.
I can see your point; I think what would happen in practice is that I wouldn't really notice unless someone pointed out to me how I could be doing much better, and after they'd done that everything would be changed by the fact that it had been made explicit. For a start I'd probably feel guilty about whatever decision I made; the element of "my time/effort" would become a conserved quantity which someone had to lose some of whenever someone else won some; and I suspect the whole thing would be generally unpleasant for most of the people involved...
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With regard to this, I agree with you up to a point, but consider the situation where you have a limited amount of time / effort / motivation / niceness etc. available to distribute amongst other people. If one of your friends is absorbing an enormous amount of your effort in support or favours, but giving almost nothing back, you may be slightly happier on balance than you would be if they weren't your friend, but you may be prevented (by lack of time or tuits) from forging / developing a relationship with someone else or several other people who would make you even happier / more emotionally-sorted for the same amount of effort on your part, and thus increase the total of Good Stuff going around for all the people concerned. This is only relevant if a} there are actually other people available that you could in principle be helpful to in preference to your original friend b) you believe that relationship-effort is finite (I do, but apparently some people feel they can share themselves effectively amongst an infinite number of friends) c) your religious beliefs or lack of sense of self-worth or similar don't lead you to rate others' happiness vastly above your own.
I feel moderately guilty for performing this sort of explicit cost-benefit analysis of interpersonal relationships, but I suspect that's mainly due to subconscious Christian-influenced notions about self-sacrifice ("to give, and not to count the cost").
I can see your point; I think what would happen in practice is that I wouldn't really notice unless someone pointed out to me how I could be doing much better, and after they'd done that everything would be changed by the fact that it had been made explicit. For a start I'd probably feel guilty about whatever decision I made; the element of "my time/effort" would become a conserved quantity which someone had to lose some of whenever someone else won some; and I suspect the whole thing would be generally unpleasant for most of the people involved...