If you’re keeping score in a friendship, you’ve already turned it into a game somebody loses.

A ledger changes what a friendship is for. Once you are tracking who texted first and who paid last time, every generous thing becomes a move and every silence becomes a debt. The counting is usually a symptom rather than the problem, and it tends to start when you already feel like you are putting in more and have not said so.

Say the actual thing instead of keeping the tally: I feel like I am always the one reaching out. Harder sentence, much shorter conversation than a year of quiet arithmetic.