I have a friend whose name on my phone has, over the years, come to mean a request is incoming. He is warm, genuinely funny, easy to be around, and I can count on one hand the number of times he has contacted me in five years without something attached. A move that needed hands. A contact he wanted. A long voice message during a hard week that ended the day his week got better. I kept excusing it one instance at a time, until the instances formed a shape I could no longer pretend not to see.

The thing that makes this hard to name is that none of the individual asks are unreasonable. Friends help each other move. Friends lean on each other in bad weeks. If you look at any single interaction, you find a normal friendship doing normal things. The pattern only becomes visible when you step back and notice that the contact is almost perfectly correlated with need, and that the spaces in between, the months where nothing was wanted, were silent. A one sided friendship is rarely obvious up close. It is a statistical fact you can only see from a distance.

What complicates it is that these people are often not users in the cynical sense. Many of them genuinely like you. They just have a particular wiring where connection and need are fused, where reaching out without a reason does not occur to them, because in their internal model contact is something you do when you require something. They are not being calculating. They are being exactly themselves, and exactly themselves happens to cost you more than it costs them.

I will argue the other side, because I have been the absent one too. There are seasons where a person disappears not out of selfishness but because they are underwater, and the only times they surface are the times the water gets too high to bear alone. Judging a friend by a single rough year is its own kind of unfairness. The question is not whether someone has ever only come to you in need. It is whether, across years and across their good times too, the line ever runs in both directions.

The honest test is the boring one. Think back over the last year and try to remember a time this person reached out with nothing to gain, just to sit in your company or ask how you were and mean it. If you can find several, the friendship is real and the asks were just life. If you genuinely cannot find one, you are not in a friendship. You are a resource that occasionally gets visited, and the warmth you feel during the visits is not evidence against that. It is the reason it took you this long to notice.

You do not have to end these relationships, and you often should not. What helps is to stop spending the emotional budget of a close friend on someone who has quietly filed you under contacts. Lower the weight. Answer the asks you want to answer and feel no debt about the ones you do not. And put the energy you were spending hoping they would change into the friends who already reach out for no reason at all. Those are the ones the budget was meant for.