It used to be a simple question: where shall we go on Saturday? You would settle on a pub, a restaurant or an evening round at a friend's. Now one of you suggests a place where a main course costs what the whole weekend used to. He means well. The other wonders whether to turn the invitation down because his share of the bill will not fit his budget. And both of them try hard not to make a thing of it.
In another case, it is the wealthier friend who feels odd. Should he pay for dinner? Would it be rude to insist? Would a perfectly ordinary invitation now look like proof that he thinks he is a cut above? In the end, he may deliberately choose a cheaper restaurant, even though he would have preferred the other option. Both people are making an effort to protect the friendship, and yet suddenly it takes more thought than it used to.
These situations are hypothetical. But they show what this subject is about for me. When someone moves up significantly in financial terms, the feelings of their old friends do not automatically change. What may change are possibilities, habits and the unspoken rules by which people have treated each other until now. The friction often arises precisely where everyone involved would actually like to keep the same familiar relationship.
When the old ease disappears
Friendships thrive on small routines. You know each other's preferences, you know what makes the other person laugh, and you do not have to negotiate every time how you would like to spend the afternoon. Many of these routines also have an economic side. Which restaurants you go to, how far you travel for a weekend away and whether you can go to a gig on the spur of the moment often depend on money and time.
After a sudden rise in wealth, the financial calculation may change for only one of you. What used to be a special expense for both of you has now become a trivial one for one of you. For the other, it is still a decision that has to fit alongside everything else they need to pay for.
It would be too easy to put this down to envy. Sometimes a friend is simply surprised because the things you can do together have shifted. Sometimes a friend does not want to keep laying bare their own financial situation. And perhaps the wealthier one is surprised that an invitation is no longer understood as a friendly gesture.
The question of who owns more is often easy to answer. The harder question is who decides, from now on, what counts as normal in this friendship.
Whoever pays sometimes sets the rules without meaning to
Let us imagine a trip. Two old friends have always wanted to go to the seaside together. One of them can now easily afford a nice hotel, a hire car and expensive restaurants. He offers to cover the difference. That can be generous, uncomplicated and wonderful for both of them.
But it can also create new roles. Whoever pays may automatically choose the hotel. Whoever is invited may feel obliged to go along with the plans. Even if the friend who is paying says explicitly that every wish is welcome, it can feel uncomfortable to insist on your own ideas during an expensive stay.
In her 2005 book The Purchase of Intimacy, the sociologist Viviana Zelizer worked out how people use economic transactions to shape personal relationships and to negotiate their boundaries. Her approach helps us take gifts and invitations seriously. The same payment can be experienced as generosity or as an uncomfortable obligation.
Zelizer's work is not a survey of millionaires about shared holidays. It offers a sociological framework for understanding situations like these. I find it more useful than the claim that money inevitably spoils every friendship. A loving offer can still touch on a question of power.
Equality is hard to measure in pounds and euros
Many friendships rest on an idea of reciprocity. Both look out for each other. Both get in touch when the other is having a hard time. Both bring something to the relationship. Rarely does anyone keep an exact tally of who has paid, organised or helped how much over the years.
After a rise in financial fortunes, it is easy to confuse this reciprocity with equality. If one person can easily pick up a restaurant bill and the other cannot, splitting it exactly down the middle may well be unfair. If, on the other hand, the wealthier person always pays for everything, the friend may eventually feel like a permanent guest in their own social life.
Perhaps one friend organises the get-togethers, listens or helps with a house move. Contributions like these have no neat market price, and a relationship should not need one. Even so, a lasting financial imbalance can stir up feelings that need to be talked about if the people involved find them a burden.
A good relationship can cope with differences. For that, those differences sometimes need to be allowed to show. A sentence like “I'd like to pay for myself today” may have more to do with independence than with turning down a kind invitation. And “Let me get this” is not automatically an attempt to buy influence. The meaning lies in how you treat each other, not just in the amount of money.
What research shows about social boundaries
In researching this article, I did not find a large experimental study looking specifically at how long-standing friendships develop after one of the friends suddenly becomes wealthy. There is, however, research on how social class, economic differences and upward mobility relate to personal networks. It helps put things in context, even if it does not fully answer our specific question.
In a longitudinal analysis published in August 2026, Gabriel Otero, Alejandro Plaza and Ignacio Zavala-Aránguiz examined data from four survey waves in Chile between 2016 and 2023. Their work looks at the class structure of personal networks. People whose social position changed had, on average, more varied contacts across class boundaries than people whose position remained stable. In these data, then, moving up did not necessarily mean that all earlier connections disappeared.
What they measured matters. The study captured social contacts across occupational positions and class situations, not the emotional quality of individual old friendships or the ownership of very large fortunes. The findings do not allow us to calculate how likely it is that a friend will drift away after a company sale.
Raj Chetty and colleagues offer a different perspective in their study published in 2022 on social networks in the United States. They analysed the connections of more than 70 million Facebook users aged between 25 and 44. Opportunities to meet and the tendency to form friendships across economic lines each explained a considerable share of social separation. The researchers used online connections as a proxy for real-world friendships. The study therefore shows network structures, not the quality of any specific personal bond.
What I like about both studies is that they shift attention away from the supposed character of the people involved. Someone who gets to know new circles and sees old ones less often has not automatically forgotten where they come from. People meet where they live, work and spend their free time. When those places change, so do the opportunities to meet. That is often far more mundane than the accusation that someone now thinks they are too good for their old friends.
The invisible weight of different worlds
A study published in 2022 by María José Álvarez-Rivadulla and colleagues combined network data with 61 in-depth interviews and ethnographic observation at an elite university in Colombia. Students from financially disadvantaged backgrounds were not, on the whole, more isolated than their more privileged fellow students. At the same time, building relationships across large social differences could take additional effort.
In a further analysis from the same research setting in 2023, Álvarez-Rivadulla and other authors described specific social and cultural hurdles. Some less privileged students tried to hide differences, while others addressed them openly. Experiences of discrimination and insecurity played a part. The findings come from a particularly unequal Colombian university setting. They are not direct evidence about friendships in Europe between adults with different levels of wealth.
Even so, the underlying observation is worth considering: even people who like each other sometimes have to adapt to different degrees. Someone who cannot afford a trip may not want to keep explaining why. Someone who has picked up different social conventions in a new environment may not even notice how strange those conventions seem to an old friend.
You can also laugh about differences like these. The difficulty tends to begin when the laughter only comes from one side.
Sometimes it is mainly the wealthier one who changes
The title of this article draws attention to friends who suddenly treat you differently. But of course the person who has moved up financially can change too. Perhaps they become more spontaneous because cost is no longer an obstacle. Perhaps their company keeps them so busy that they barely have time. Perhaps they listen less and do not notice, because their everyday life now revolves around other things.
People change their interests and priorities without any money being involved. But a marked financial rise can make those changes especially visible. The old crowd still talks about the working life they once shared, which for one of them is now in the past. The other has new worries and new possibilities. Both can be talked about, but they cannot always be experienced from the same vantage point.
In 2016, Emily Bianchi and Kathleen Vohs used large American surveys to examine how household income relates to time spent socialising. Higher incomes went hand in hand with less social time overall, but at the same time with more time among friends and less with neighbours or family. So prosperity does not necessarily cause friendships to wither. However, this concerns income and the use of time, not how particular friendships change after someone moves up.
If you are asking yourself what remains of the person you used to be, there is a separate piece on that question in Am I still the same person since becoming wealthy?. Here, I am mainly interested in what other people notice about the change, and what they may simply be reading into it.
Some friendships simply adapt
Not every economic imbalance has to end in a long heart-to-heart. Some friends find new routines without any fuss. One of them occasionally treats the other to dinner, the other organises the day out. Sometimes they meet somewhere expensive, sometimes they go for a walk where nobody has to spend much. Perhaps money is rarely the focus because it has long been clear that neither of them measures the other's worth by it.
In a qualitative study published in Sociological Research Online in 2022, the sociologist Louise Folkes argues that life plans and ideas of social mobility can be closely bound up with background, place and belonging. The study was based on 13 interviews with members of nine families from a working-class community. It does not look at millionaires, nor does it measure how stable individual friendships are. But it is a reminder that people do not always judge their own path through life by the same status yardsticks.
For an old friendship, that can make all the difference. Perhaps a friend thinks the financial success is fantastic but wants to lead a completely different life himself. That is not resentment. Likewise, the wealthier one can enjoy their wealth without expecting everyone around them to join in with every habit.
This is where it becomes clear why a friendship needs more than the observation that you have known each other for ages. Over the years, it occasionally needs a new understanding of what you both enjoy doing together.
Openness helps, but not every figure has to be on the table
Some tensions are easier to avoid if you talk about practical limits. A friend can say that a particular holiday is too expensive for them. The other can offer to cover part of it, and accept it if the offer is not wanted. Whoever issues an invitation can ask beforehand whether the place and the expense suit both of you.
None of this requires anyone to disclose their entire wealth. An exact figure may even raise new questions, while the actual decision is much smaller: where shall we spend the weekend, and who will feel comfortable there? Whether and when someone wants to disclose their wealth in general therefore deserves an article of its own: Should I tell people how much money I have?.
Things are different when a long-standing friendship is increasingly shaped by requests for money, or when one person is constantly wondering about the other's motives. Then it is more a matter of trust than of shared activities. The article Can I trust you, or my money? looks at this uncertainty in more detail.
An open conversation does not guarantee harmony. It can bring uncomfortable truths to light. Perhaps someone feels left out. Perhaps the conflict also has to do with time or attention. Finding that out is usually more helpful than trying to guess everyone's supposed motives from a distance.
What a friendship can keep
There are people who still laugh at the same bad jokes after twenty years. One of them now lives very differently from before; the other has largely kept his familiar life. Nobody has to turn this difference into a tragedy. What matters is whether both still have room for each other.
Of course, a financial rise can change a friendship. Sometimes it breaks down as a result. Sometimes new forms of closeness emerge, because both learn to deal openly with their differences. And occasionally it takes an embarrassing restaurant bill to show you how much you had assumed that the other person sees the world exactly as you do.
On Tired of Wealth and in the idea behind the project, money is talked about unusually openly. In private life, though, it need not become a constant topic. Friends should occasionally be able to talk about things where the bank balance is completely irrelevant. Otherwise even the most expensive dinner together would end up being, above all, rather exhausting.
Perhaps the most important change lies in accepting that old friendships do not stay frozen in their original form. They are relationships between people who keep developing. Money can influence the pace and the direction. Whether you want to keep travelling together is, in the end, a decision for both of you.
Sources
Zelizer, Viviana A. (2005). The Purchase of Intimacy. Princeton University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400826759
Otero, Gabriel, Alejandro Plaza and Ignacio Zavala-Aránguiz (2026). “Social mobility and class segregation in personal networks over time: evidence from longitudinal data”. Frontiers in Sociology, 11. https://doi.org/10.3389/fsoc.2026.1782127
Chetty, Raj, and colleagues (2022). “Social capital II: determinants of economic connectedness”. Nature. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-04997-3
Álvarez-Rivadulla, María José, Ana María Jaramillo, Felipe Fajardo, Laura Cely, Andrés Molano and Felipe Montes (2022). “College integration and social class”. Higher Education, 84, pp. 647 to 669. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-021-00793-6
Álvarez-Rivadulla, María José, Paola Camelo, Mariana Vargas-Serani and Diana Viáfara (2023). “The relational costs of crossing class lines”. The British Journal of Sociology, 74(2), pp. 113 to 130. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.12999
Bianchi, Emily C., and Kathleen D. Vohs (2016). “Social Class and Social Worlds: Income Predicts the Frequency and Nature of Social Contact”. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 7(5), pp. 479 to 486. https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550616641472
Folkes, Louise (2022). “Re-Imagining Social Mobility: The Role of Relationality, Social Class and Place in Qualitative Constructions of Mobility”. Sociological Research Online, 27(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/1360780420985127